History

Joseph Pilates was born in Germany in 1880. A sickly child, he sought ways to improve his health and strengthen his body, and by the age of 14, he was modelling for anatomy charts.

In England at the start of World War 1, he was placed in a camp for German nationals. While there, he began teaching some of his fellow internees the methods and exercises he had developed over the years, honing them into a system that he would later call 'contrology', and which is now known as the Pilates mat exercises. After being transferred to another camp, he began working with the ill and injured internees held there, rigging up beds and springs and designing apparatus that would allow even the bedridden to perform the exercises (the forerunner of modern Pilates equipment the Cadillac and the Reformer).

Joseph Pilates eventually emigrated to the United States. In 1926 with his wife Clara, he opened a gym in New York. Because the gym shared a building with dance studios, dancers quickly became his top clientele, although he still worked with the medically challenged, including victims of polio. And so the Pilates method spread – from the medically infirm to dancers and eventually to the general exercise population.