About Joseph Pilates
Pilates is a form of exercise, developed by Joseph Pilates, with a goal in mind: to give people a way to achieve “true health”. He defined true health as “the attainment and maintenance of a uniformly developed body” with a well balanced “holy trinity” of body, mind, and spirit.
Joseph H. Pilates was born in 1883 in Monchengladbach, Germany a small town near Dusseldorf, Germany. He was a small and sickly child who suffered from asthma, rickets and rheumatic fever, and was often bullied by older children.
His father was a prizewinning gymnast and his mother a naturopath. A family physician gave him a discarded anatomy book and as he put it "I learned every page, every part of the body; I would move each part as I memorized it. As a child, I would lie in the woods for hours, hiding and watching the animals move, how the mother taught the young." He studied both Eastern and Western forms of exercise including yoga, Zen, and ancient Greek and Roman regimens. By the time he was 14 he had worked so hard he had developed his body to the point that he was modeling for anatomy charts.
Growing up in Germany, he achieved some success as a boxer and a gymnast - in addition to being a skilled skier and diver. Eventually, he traveled to England. In 1914, after WWI broke out, he was interned in a "camp" for enemy aliens in Lancaster. There he taught wrestling and self-defence, boasting that his students would emerge stronger than they were before being interned. It was here that he began devising his system of original exercises that later became "Contrology". He was transferred to another camp on The Isle of Man where he became something of a nurse and worked with many internees who suffered from wartime diseases and incarceration. He began devising equipment to rehabilitate them. In 1918, a terrible epidemic of influenza swept the world, killing millions of people, tens of thousands in England. None of Joe's followers succumbed even though the camps were the hardest hit!
After the war Joe returned to Germany and began training the Hamburg Military Police in self defence and physical training as well as taking on personal clients. He believed that slow, smooth movement was the best way to concentrate on movement, using muscle resistance to its best advantage. In 1925, he moved to the USA. Upon arriving in New York City he ans his wife Clara opened a gym, in the same building as several dance studios and rehearsal spaces.
It was this proximity that made "Contrology" such an intrinsic part of many dancers' training and rehab work and many were sent to Joe to be "fixed". George Balanchine, the famous choreographer, studied with Joe and sent many of his dancers to Pilates for strengthening and "balancing" as well as rehabilitation, as did another famous dancer/choreographer, Martha Graham. He was a friend and teacher to such renowned dancer/choreographers as Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham and Jerome Robbins and many required their dancers to go to Joe. Hanya Holm even incorporated Joe's exercises into her students' lessons.
Although Joe Pilates was a health guru, he believed in fitness supporting your life's rich goals. Joe felt his work was "50 years ahead of (his) time". Joe believed in "natural movements" with the emphasis on doing and being. He has stated, “Everything should be smooth, like a cat. The exercises are done lying, sitting, kneeling, etc.
Joseph Pilates at age 57
“Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness.” –Joseph H. Pilates