Joseph Pilates-the Man Behind the Method
By Lynda Lippin
Who was Joseph Hubertus Pilates? While millions of people do Pilates exercises everyday, most do not even know that Pilates was a person, let alone an extremely interesting and colorful personality who was at the leading edge of exercise science. It is interesting not only to hear about his life story, but also to explore his story in the context of the important social and political events of his time, as they all impacted his life and work. Of course, most of what we know came from Joseph Pilates himself, so the veracity of some of his claims is questionable.
Joe Pilates was born in 1880 in Moenchengladbach, a town near Dusseldorf, Germany to a gymnast father and a naturopathic physician mother. Moenchengladbach, located in West-Central Germany, was a center of industry and production, specifically cotton textiles. Pilates was a frail and sickly child who suffered from rickets, rheumatic fever, and asthma. Other children constantly made fun of both his name (they called him "Christ killer") and his frailty, and Joe was too weak and skinny to ever fight back. He resolved to get stronger in his breathing and his movements so that he could defend himself.
One day Joe's doctor gave him an anatomy book, and the seeds of Contrology were sewn. Of this book Pilates said, "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." While attending school and studying history, philosophy, and engineering, Pilates also studied Eastern and Western forms of exercise. The young Joe sent for more books and haunted the University libraries in Dusseldorf. The more he learned the more questions he had. He tried yoga, Buddhist meditation, and ancient Greek and Roman gymnastic exercises, and kept meticulous written records of what the exercises did for him and how he progressed. Pilates held fast to the ancient Roman credo "Mens sana in corpore sano (A sound mind in a sound body)." By the time he turned 14 he was not only strong enough to be considered an accomplished skin diver, gymnast, boxer, and skier, he also modeled for anatomy charts.
We know that Pilates traveled to England when he was in his 30s, but there are at least two different equally plausible stories about how and why he went. The first story tells us that he went there to box, having exhausted most of the prizefighting venues at home. The second claims that Joe had begun successfully performing in the circus with his brother, and they had a Greek statue act that was so popular they took it to England. Whichever is true, Pilates was in England in 1914 when WW I broke out and was interned by the British as an enemy alien. He first went to a small camp near Lancaster, where he began teaching self defense and wrestling to the other Germans, claiming that they would be stronger when they left than when they entered. It was here that Joe began to develop his system of Contrology. Then he was transferred.
During both World Wars, the British set up their Alien Civilian Internment Camps on the Isle of Man. Interestingly, they only interned males women were not interned. For WW1 (1914-1918) a very large camp was established on the west coast of the island at Knockaloe. The Knockaloe camp, intended to house 5000 men, ended up expanding to hold about 24,000. It was 22 acres large, divided into 23 compounds split into 4 separate camps. Each camp had its own hospital, theater, cafeteria, printing presses, etc. and the hospitals were used to treat soldiers injured on the front lines of battle. The Knockaloe camps were built from wooden huts, and became extremely depressing after several years. To make things worse, the camps did not close right at the end of the war, since there was a long period of postwar hostilities. The camps finally closed in late 1919, and most of the internees were deported back to Germany.
It was while interned at Knockaloe camp that Joe Pilates began to really experiment with his exercises and theories. It was obviously his priority to maintain his own strength and conditioning, which was not easy given the basic lack of hygienic conditions and the presence of injured and sick internees and soldiers, but Pilates also had to deal with the great influenza epidemic of 1918. In a time when there was no physical or exercise therapy and medicine was relatively archaic, Joe began to work with the sick and injured men. He taught them to breathe and attached bedsprings with straps to the walls by their hospital beds so they could begin to stretch and exercise by pushing or pulling on the springs before they could even get out of bed. His patients got out of bed much faster, and Joe's experiments were encouraged. Outside of the hospital he took large groups of internees through his exercise regimen every day believing wholeheartedly that the more everyone breathed and moved the better off they would be. "Out with the bad germs and in with the fresh new oxygen," he would counsel. England lost tens of thousands and while the camps were hit extremely hard by the flu, only 200 men died at Knockaloe, thus proving to Joe that he was right.
After the war Pilates was deported back to Germany, where he continued to develop, practice, and teach his exercises until 1925. He trained the Hamburg Military Police, took on some private clients, and worked as an early Physical Therapist, exercising patients who suffered from the same illnesses he had, including rheumatic fever. Joe met and collaborated with movement analyst Rudolf van Laban and famous German dancer Mary Wigman, and began developing spring based exercise equipment. "I thought, why use my strength [to exercise rheumatic patients]? So I made a machine to do it for me. Look, you see it resists your movements in just the right way so those inner muscles really have to work against it. That way you can concentrate on movement. You must always do it slowly and smoothly. Then your whole body is in it."
Post war Germany was not doing well either politically or economically. The Weimar Republic was not accepted by many Germans, inflation was up due to wartime debts, and unemployment was at an all time high. By 1923 French and Belgium troops had moved in to Germany as she defaulted on war reparations payments. The government began printing so much money that the mark became worthless in 1914 the US dollar was equivalent to 4 marks, in 1920 40 marks, in 1922 200 marks, in 1923 18,000 marks, and by 1924 4.2 trillion marks. Things had literally gotten to the point where you needed a wheelbarrow full of paper money just to buy groceries.
In 1925 Pilates was invited to train the New German Army. However, given the situation in Germany, he had already decided to leave. Boxing expert Nat Fleischer and Olympic boxer Max Schmelling convinced Joe to come to the US, specifically to New York City. Here he could train boxers and continue to work on his equipment, inventing and patenting his new machines. He met his future wife Clara, a kindergarten teacher, on the boat to Ellis Island. The story goes that Clara suffered from arthritis and Joe worked with her to increase her mobility and relieve her pain. Once in New York they opened their gym at 939 Eighth Avenue, in the same building that housed rehearsal studios for George Ballanchine's New York City Ballet.
Joseph Pilates never received the level of recognition that his brilliant work clearly deserved, and even today it is difficult to wade through the myth and find the true story. This is partially true because most of what we know about his life has come from students of students of his students.
While many facts about Joe's life are verifiable, sources still disagree on the basics. In fact, I just reviewed several sites and each gave a different year of death (1966, 1967, 1968) as well as a different cause of death (he died in a fire as a result of a fire as a result of smoke inhalation from a fire etc.). According to his New York Times obituary Joseph Pilates died in 1967 at Lenox Hill Hospital, but the Times never mentions cause of death. And there was indeed a fire on the same floor as his studio in 1965 where Joe suffered a bad leg scrape while inspecting the studio. But, according to Pilates Elder Mary Bowen, "To set the record straight - no, Joe did not die in a fire. He died two years later...of advanced emphysema from smoking cigars for too many years...." Apparently all the good breathing in the world could not keep his scarred lungs (recall that he was rheumatic and asthmatic as a child) from feeling the effects of smoking. As Joe left no will, Clara took over and ran the studio until she retired in the mid-70s. This is where the story gets interesting...
The Question of Lineage
Most Pilates teachers out there today can trace his or her lineage back to Joe and Clara, and this includes such heavyweights as Winsor and Stott. I, for example, originally was a client at SUNY Purchase where I learned under Steve Giordano who studied with Joe's student Romana Kryzanowska. Then I worked with Karen Carlson in Philadelphia who studied with Mary Bowen and Kathy Grant who both studied with Joe. And I received my certification from both Michelle Larson and her teacher Eve Gentry who studied with Joe. Since then I have worked directly with Romana, with Eve before she died, and with Kathy. So even though my studio training affiliation is with the PhysicalMind Institute I trace my lineage as a student and teacher back to Pilates himself and when people ask me what style of Pilates I teach I can honestly say that it is my own, but informed by all of my teachers.
Of the 10 students of Joe's who taught Pilates either at his studio or opened their own (yes, there were other New York Pilates studios open in the 50s!), only 6 are still alive and 5 are still actively teaching in their 70s and 80s! Each individual took what he or she learned from Joe and Clara and expanded the work with their own knowledge and expertise. Additionally, many of the Elders worked with one another. Hence, the different styles of Pilates, all of which can ultimately be traced back to Joseph Pilates himself.
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