Who was Joseph
Pilates and How Pilates Came to be.
Pilates takes its name from
Joseph Pilates, the German-born emigré to Britain and then
America, who devised it as a new approach to exercise and
body-conditioning in the early decades of the last century.
Joseph Pilates was born near Dusseldorf in 1880. He was a
sickly child who determined to make himself strong and
healthy. He took up body-building, to the point where by
his teens he was getting work as a model for anatomical
drawings.
He was perhaps the first influential figure to combine
Western and Eastern ideas about health and physical
fitness.
He researched and practiced every kind of exercise he
could, ranging from classical Roman and Greek exercise
regimes to body-building and gymnastics, alongside the the
Eastern disciplines of yoga, tai chi, martial arts and Zen
meditation.
He studied anatomy and animal movements. He sampled every
kind of exercise that he could and carefully recorded the
results.
In 1912, aged 32, he left Germany for this country, where
he became a professional boxer, an expert skier and diver,
taught self-defense to Scotland Yard detectives and found
work as a circus acrobat.
On the outbreak of World War I, the British interned him as
a German enemy alien. He used his time as an internee to
start developing a new approach to exercise and
body-conditioning - the start of what is known today as
Pilates.
During
his internment, he also got the chance to work as a nurse.
This, in turn, gave him the chance to experiment by
attaching springs to hospital beds, so that patients could
start toning their muscles even while they were still
bed-bound. Such were the origins of the first Pilates
machines, which were shaped like a sliding bed and used
springs as resistance.
Returning to Germany after World War I, Pilates worked with
pioneers of movement technique such as Rudolph Laban, who
created the basic system of dance notation still used today
In 1923, Pilates moved to America, where he opened his
first studio in New York, along with Clara, his wife and
assistant, whom he had met on the Atlantic crossing.
His new method was an instant hit, particularly among
dancers such as Martha Graham and George Balanchine. Other
dancers, who found the Pilates method the best way both to
recover from injuries and to prevent their recurrence, also
became devotees. Gradually, a wider audience got to hear of
it.
Pilates called his technique 'Controlology' - only later
did it become known by his own surname. He conceived it as
a mental as well as a physical conditioning in which
individuals could work their bodies to their full
potential.
In explaining Controlology's guiding principle, he liked to
quote Schiller: 'lt is the mind itself which builds the
body'.
The Pilates method did not return to Britain until 1970,
when it was brought back to this country by Alan Herdman,
after the latter had been asked by the London School of
Contemporary Dance to visit New York and investigate the
methods of Joseph Pilates. Herdman established Britain's
first Pilates studio at The Place in London that year.
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email: michelle@pilatesparkcity.com