A Very Brief Biography of Joseph Pilates

Joseph Pilates was born in Germany in the late 1800s. He moved to Britain as a young man to train as a boxer. When World War 1 broke out, Pilates was imprisoned in an internment camp. It was while he was interned in the camp that Joseph Pilates began to experiment with using hospital bed springs as a means of creating strengthening exercises for injured and ill people housed in the camp with him. This was the foundation for many of the apparatus types Joseph Pilates would go on to design throughout his life.

After Pilates moved to the United States, he continued to refine his method of exercise. (He did not refer to his method as “Pilates;” he called it Contrology.) Although a popular image of Pilates shows it as a discipline for dancers, Joseph Pilates worked with a wide variety of people in his Contrology gym. The dance world embraced Pilates’ method and was certainly instrumental in bringing awareness to his method (many of the early teachers Pilates trained were indeed dancers). Today, the Pilates method of exercise is practiced by people of many different backgrounds and walks of life: Athletes, dancers, office workers, healthcare professionals, or anyone who wants to have a deeper connection to their health, their body, and their mind. And that is exactly as Joseph Pilates would have wanted it.