The girl before you never fully wipes down

There’s this phrase that gets said after every pilates class:

“Wipe it down everything you touched.”

I still say it after I teach a class. It’s not wrong. It’s just… incomplete.

What started to feel off for me wasn’t the wiping itself. It was how final the phrase sounds, like that one action solves everything and we’re done thinking about it.

But when you actually pay attention to how a Pilates class works, it starts to feel more complicated than that.

Your hands are on the reformer the entire time. Straps, handles, loops, the carriage. Then your hands are on you. Hair, face, sweat, clothes. Then back to the equipment again. It’s constant movement back and forth.

And some parts of the reformer are really easy to wipe down. Hard surfaces. Flat areas. You can see them, reach them, clean them quickly.

Other parts are just not like that. Fabric straps. Handles with seams. Anything soft or absorbent. Not because anyone is being careless, but because those things are harder to deal with in the two minutes between classes.

That’s where “just wipe it down” started to feel like a half answer to a full situation.

I don’t think wipes are useless. They’re important. They’re necessary. They’re the baseline. But they’re not magic. They don’t penetrate fabric. They evaporate quickly. They don’t fully address the parts of the equipment that get handled the most.

And this isn’t about needing everything to be perfect. That’s not realistic and it’s not the goal.

For me, it was more about acknowledging the gap. If wiping is one layer, what else supports it? What makes it work better in real life, not in theory?

That’s when I stopped thinking about hygiene as one action and started thinking about it as layers. Cleaning plus awareness plus small buffers that make shared spaces feel more comfortable to move through.

That framing feels a lot more honest to how studios actually run and how people actually behave.

And once I started seeing it that way, “just wipe it down” stopped feeling like the end of the conversation and more like the starting point.