Quitting your job to pursue a Pilates certification full-time takes guts.
Doing it in early 2020, though? That takes either incredible faith or terrible timing. Well for Camai Brandenberg, it was actually both. She had just made the leap when… you know what happened next. March 2020 (aka COVID) happened.
“This is leading right up into the pandemic and then everything shuts down. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I quit my job and now what?’ This was the worst timing.”
She laughs about it now, but you can still hear the disbelief (I mean, all of us are still traumatized from that time period). Four years later, Brandenberg not only runs, but founded Embody Pilates in West Hollywood – one studio with two spaces, an apparatus room with reformers and a mat studio that fits 18 people. Her clients range from regulars who’ve been training with her since 2016 to people who just discovered her by searching “Black Pilates” on TikTok.
So how exactly did she get here? Brandenberg was always an athlete. She ran track at Ohio State, competing in the heptathlon. But becoming a fitness instructor? That wasn’t part of the plan growing up. “I grew up in a very traditional household and from the Midwest, so I never thought being a trainer or anything like that never really crossed my mind.”
What she did have was experience with intense training and what it does to your body. “I was a track and field runner. I did the heptathlon. Seven events, really hard on the body. The type of training, Olympic style, clean and jerks, all of that. And I was getting injured.”
Those injuries piled up actually. So she wanted to stay strong but needed something that wouldn’t destroy her body in the process. That’s how she found Pilates in her early twenties, except there was a catch. “It was so expensive. It was not accessible. It was all those things, but I was like, ‘Wow, if I could do this more, this would be life changing.’”
After moving to LA, Brandenberg started teaching yoga on the side while working full-time. She went through every certification Hot Eight Yoga offered, building up a client base over the years. She knew entrepreneurship was in her future somewhere. “I always wanted to be in business for myself,” she says. But at that point, she was still figuring out what that would actually look like.
When she finally started pursuing her Pilates certification, something became very clear very quickly. The education itself was good, she makes that clear. But the environment? That was different.
“When I was going through my cert, I never really saw people that looked like me. And I’m aware of my own privileges because I’m athletic and I have this able body and all these things. And I kept thinking if I feel like this, it’s probably 10 times worse for other people, with microaggressions, just all the things.”
She was paying good money to learn in spaces where she felt uncomfortable. And the numbers tell the story Brandenberg experienced firsthand. According to Zippia’s analysis of Pilates instructor demographics, 71.3% of Pilates instructors in the U.S. are white, while only 7.1% are Black or African American and 10.6% are Hispanic or Latino. The gap isn’t just among instructors, it also extends to who has access to the practice itself. With private Pilates sessions averaging $75 per hour nationally, and some studios charging upwards of $100 per class, the financial barrier alone keeps many people out.
That exclusivity is exactly what Brandenberg experienced during her certification and what she’s been working to change with Embody, where her mat classes are priced with accessibility in mind and the faces at the front desk reflect the diversity she wants to see in the space.
So when the pandemic shut everything down right as she was getting started, she pivoted. Embody Pilates launched online first with mat workouts via Zoom, with accessible equipment you could use at home.
The physical studio opened in February 2024, starting small with just the apparatus room and her existing clients. Some had been following her for years. The mat space came later, and that’s when she really saw things grow. Eighteen spots versus three reformers made a difference in who could access the work. “Mat shouldn’t be $100 a class,” she says plainly. The reformer classes justify a higher price point because of the equipment and attention involved, but having both options mattered to her vision of accessibility.
What’s remarkable about Embody is that Brandenberg built it entirely on her own, without any investors backing her. She’s also not operating off some predetermined business plan. She’s letting her clients tell her what they actually need. “I let my first year also let my clients tell me what they need, right? If I’m so gung ho on like, ‘Oh, it has to be like this.’ I listen. I ask them what times they want classes. Is that too early? Should we add another of this? I’m doing real market research in real time because that’s the community that I’m serving.”
It helps that she came from a luxury hospitality background (she worked at The Beverly Hills Hotel before going full-time with fitness), which helped her to understand client service. “It’s the experience that they’re looking for. It’s not just the workout because everyone can do this.”
She also doesn’t get caught up in comparison, which is probably necessary when you’re operating in LA, a city that apparently now has more Pilates studios than anywhere else in the world (there are four studios just on her street). But Brandenberg’s not concerned with keeping up.
“This is just me doing this. I don’t know what everybody else has going on. So staying focused on what my vision is has really brought Embody into each chapter because my head isn’t spinning to keep up with what’s happening.”
What does matter to her is the bigger picture. The fact that “Black Pilates” is now a searchable term and that her studio comes up when people look for it still blows her mind. “I will never get over that.”
But visibility isn’t the same as sustainability. “We can’t just be loud when they open. We have to also consistently support throughout.” It’s a reminder she’s taking to heart as she continues building Embody.
