Joseph Hubertus Pilates
The author of the method, Joseph Hubertus Pilates, was born around 1880 in Germany. He had rheumatic fever, asthma and rickets as a child, and was plagued by a weak respiratory system. In order to improve his own health he began exploring ways to strengthen his body and mind. Early on, Joe became intrigued by the classical notion of the ideal man who combined a well trained body with an equally well trained intellect. In pursuit of this goal he participated in, boxing, fencing, wrestling and gymnastics, as well as exploring yoga and zen meditation. Germany was a fertile ground for these explorations at the turn of the 20th century, with many ground breaking leaders in movement science, dance and psychology working there.
Joe was in England touring with a boxer when World War I broke out. He was held as a resident alien in an internment camp near Lancaster for the duration of the war. While in the camp he took it upon himself to lead his fellow detainees in a daily exercise program. According to Joe, when the influenza epidemic of 1918 -1919 broke out, none of the inmates who followed his regimen got sick.
Joe´s success with his group inmates brought him to the attention of the camp leaders and he was given the job of an orderly at a hospital on the Isle of Man. He was put in charge of 30 patients and worked with them every day to exercise whatever they could move. This was in the days when western medicine was in its infancy and there were few treatments to offer patients other than surgery and morphine. Nursing during this time usually meant extended bed rest which lead to muscular atrophy, loss of aerobic capacity and a weakened immune system. Joe´s exercises helped his patients to get better faster and helped them to fend off the secondary infections that killed so many people in similar circumstances.
Working as an orderly also led to the development of Joe´s first piece of exercise equipment. Manually working out 30 patients every day was exhausting so Joe came up with the idea of attaching springs to the patient´s bed frames and thus the first Cadillac was born! Now the patients could exercise themselves under Joe´s supervision.
After Joe was released from the camps and returned to Germany, he was approached by the “brown shirts” (who were to become the Nazi party) to train their police force. Joe didn´t want to have anything to do with them, so he left Germany on a boat to America and met his soon-to-be wife Clara on the passage over. Clara was a nurse who became a true partner for Joe, working beside him in the studio everyday and taking care of any clients Joe didn´t want to work with.
When Joe and Clara arrived in New York in 1926, they rented a small studio in the same building as the New York City Ballet on 8th Ave. and started teaching what Joe named “Contrology.” Joe worked with clients from all walks of life but he made an especially strong impression on the dance community, working with Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, George Balanchine and many others who sent their injured dancers to Joe´s for rehabilitation following injuries.
Joe was an inventor who was always working on developing new exercise equipment. He designed the Universal Reformer, the Wunda Chair, the Cadillac, the Ladder Barrel, the Spine Corrector and many other wonderful inventions during his lifetime. He made many of the machines himself and often designed them to fit a particular client. Many of Joe´s original machines are still working today.
Joe had a dream of introducing his vision of mind-body fitness into every aspect of life, from elementary schools to military training, and had he not been so far ahead of his time, it might have happened. Instead he taught a small group of devoted teachers and students, a few of whom went on to continue the work and keep it alive until the rest of the world caught up with his revolutionary thinking. Joe spent many years talking to anyone who would listen about his work, but did not receive much recognition during his lifetime.
Joe´s studio was destroyed by fire in 1967 and he died soon after that from complications of smoke inhalation. His wife Clara carried on the work until her death in 1977.
Postscript:
Pilates was so far ahead of its time that it did not begin to achieve popular recognition until the first few years of the 21st century. Over 10 million people are now practicing Pilates in the United States alone, and the numbers are growing every year.
-- Excerpted from Balanced Body University