Joseph H. Pilates History

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Joseph Hubertus Pilates was born near Dusseldorf, Germany in 1880.  As a child, he had various debilitating medical conditions ranging from asthma, rickets and rheumatic fever.  Using these illnesses as a catalyst, he sought out ways to strengthen both his physicality as well as his mental body by studying various forms of exercise techniques including yoga, Zen meditation and ancient Grecian & Roman exercises.  As a teenager, he disciplined himself in weight training, diving & gymnastics and developed such a sculpted body that he began to pose as an anatomy model. 

Living in England and working as a circus performer and boxer, World War I began.  As a German, Joseph Pilates was incarcerated for a year in Lancaster and worked in a war camp hospital.  He began to teach his daily workout routines and it was here that his ideas of health took greater form.  Seeing himself in the sickly and the disabled, he began to experiment with the design of the hospital bed - the mattress springs and the overhead canopy – to create spinal mobility, abdominal strength and back strength for bedridden soldiers and prisoners.  Securing the springs on the overhead canopy, he now had support to aid in the movement or exercises he gave the soldiers and prisoners to perform. 

Returning to Germany after WW I, with Germany in a Revolutionary War, he trained the Hamburg City Police, continued teaching his exercise routines and experimented with spring supported movement equipment.  In a climate where political and social parties were fighting in the streets of Germany, and the Nazi’s ascension to power, Joseph Pilates was asked to train the German Army. 

Leaving Germany in 1926 for the United States of America, he established a movement training studio with his wife Clara, a nurse.   It was in New York that many injured dancers, actors and athletes came to them for rehabilitation.  Noted dancers such as George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis and Jerome Robbins were clients of the method he called “Contrology.”

His belief was multiple:  to activate the mind within the performance of an exercise, reduce the number of repetitions to help stimulate the mind & not fatigue the body and devise a series of exercises that would change the functioning and thereby, the structure of the body.  The overall technique, i nvolving some 500 exercises, emphasizes proper alignment, centering, concentration, control, precision, breathing, and flowing movement

He died in 1967 at the age of 87.  In his lifetime Joseph Pilates invented over 10 devices used in his technique; only 5 of which are considered standard today.  He wrote two books:  Your Health: A Corrective System of Exercising That Revolutionizes the Entire Field of Physical Education in 1934 and Return to Life Through Contrology in 1945. 

“The attainment and maintenance of a uniformly developed body with a sound mind fully capable of naturally, easily and satisfactorily performing our many and varied daily tasks with spontaneous zest and pleasure.”

Joseph H. Pilates

1945