About Pilates

Pilates develops the body uniformly, corrects wrong postures, restores physical vitality, invigorates the mind and elevates the spirit" Joseph Pilates

Joseph Huberus Pilates was born in 1880 near Dusseldorf in Germany. He was considered to be a frail child as he was prone to tuberculosis. As he grew up he was determined to improve his physical condition and spent time body-building until at the age of 14, he posed as a model for anatomical drawings. He became a keen sportsman, becoming a gymnast, a skier, a diver and a boxer and even became a circus performer! In 1912, he left Germany and lived in England where he became a professional boxer and taught self-defence to detectives at Scotland Yard.

When the First World War broke out, the British authorities interned him as a German national in the Isle of Man. He worked as a nurse for some of the time he was interned and put his time to good use. Pilates experimented with springs attached to hospital beds so that patients could begin to work on toning their muscles even before they could get up. He also used his ideas about health and fitness to help his fellow internees keep healthy and claimed that it was for this reason that not one of them died in the influenza epidemic in 1918. After the war, Joseph Pilates returned to Germany. He worked with most of the pioneers of movement technique including Rudolf von Laban, the creator of the form of dance notation most widely used today.

In 1923 he left Germany for New York and set up his first studio with his wife, Clara. His method became very successful particularly amongst dancers. Dancers are prone to injury and soon discovered that rehabilitation using Pilates exercises led to a swifter recovery. Clients to the studio could rehabilitate using the exercised devised by Pilates along with the machines he had created using bed springs. He called this machine the 'Universal Reformer', a sliding horizontal bed which can be used with up to 4 springs according to the strength of the individual.

Today, the descendant of the universal reformer is still central to the Pilates studio. Other machines were developed and the method continues to be developed.