HISTORY PILATES
OF
So who was this Pilates, and what makes his approach to exercise so popular?
A native of Germany, Joseph Hubertus Pilates suffered from asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever as a child. Determined to overcome his ailments, he began to study anatomy as well as Eastern and Western forms of exercise, including Yoga, weight training, wrestling, and acrobatics. He was particularly enamored of the ancient Classic Greek "ideal man" who was equally schooled in cognitive thinking, philosophy, and history, but also maintained a finely tuned, athletic body.
Pilates developed a series of floor routines that require balance, flexibility, strength, power, agility, and acute mental focus in order to execute them correctly. He then took things one step further by combining his engineering skills with his knowledge of health and anatomy to design specialized exercise apparatus using springs. pulleys. and movable platforms to create variable-resistance workout routines.
Between the two World Wars, Mr. Pilates moved to New York, where his unique approach to fitness quickly caught on as an "underground phenomenon" with the city's professional dance community.
As often happens with true genius, Pilates' body/mind approach to working out was about 50 years ahead of its time, and it has only begun to achieve widespread popularity in the past twenty years. Fitness in the New Millennium is first and foremost a search for the more balanced approach Pilates originally taught back in the 1940s.
Today, people everywhere are discovering the benefits of the
exercises and innovative apparatus designed by Joe.
Who Was Joseph Pilates?
Joseph Hubertus Pilates was born in 1880 near Düsseldorf,Germany. His father, a native of Greece, had been a prizewinning gymnast, while his German-born mother was a naturopath who believed in the principle of stimulating the body to heal itself without artificial drugs. No doubt his mother's healing philosophy and father's physical achievements greatly influenced Pilates' later ideas on therapeutic exercise.
Small and sickly as a child, he was afflicted with asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever, and was continually taunted by the bigger children. He quickly became determined to overcome his physical disadvantages. Thereupon young Joseph began to self-educate himself in anatomy, bodybuilding, wrestling, yoga, gymnastics, and martial arts. He soon achieved an almost Adonis-like "anatomical ideal." to the extent that at the age of 14 he was posing as a model for anatomy charts. He was also an accomplished boxer, skier, and diver.
His physique was so developed that Pilates, in his public career as a circus entertainer, used to perform a "living Greek statue" act. He was enamored of the classical Greek ideal of a man who is balanced equally in body, mind, and spirit, and he came to believe that our modern lifestyle, bad posture, and inefficient breathing were the roots of poor health.
Origins of the Pilates Method
Joe's answer to the dilemma of the modern lifestyle was to design a unique series of vigorous physical exercises that help to correct muscular imbalances and improve posture, coordination, balance, strength, and flexibility, as well as to increase breathing capacity and organ function.
At the outbreak of WW1 being a German national Joseph Pilates was living in England and was interned in Lancaster, then in the second year of the war was transferred to another camp on the Isle of Man. He practised and taught inmates self-defence and wrestling. And on the Isle of Man he volunteered to be a hospital attendant at the camp. It was here that what we know as the modern day reformer and affiliate pilates equipment was spawned; as a method to rehabilitate inmates, he used bed springs to provide resistance to enable bed bound patients the ability to exercise.
After the war, Joseph Pilates returned to Hamburg, Germany. Here he not only trained personal clients but the Hamburg Military police.
Around the year 1925, Joseph Pilates migrated to New York where he set up his own Pilates studio with wife Clara whom he met on the boat over. It is cited he left due to the social and political climate in Germany. It was in New York that he refined his pilates methods and concepts centered around “contrology” related to encouraging the use of the mind to control muscles. He focused his attention on core postural muscles that help keep the body balanced and provide support for the spine. In particular, Pilates focused exercises teach awareness of breath and of alignment of the spine and strengthen the deep torso and abdominal muscles.
The modern-day Pilates approach has been adopted by physiotherapists and exercise physiologists to create a research-based, logical and useful rehabilitation and fitness regime. Physiotherapists have adopted the Pilates method with open arms, due to the benefits this form of mindful exercise offers with regards to pain relief, rehabilitation, mobilization, stabilization and strengthening.