Where does Pilates come from?

The Pilates Method

Imagine you could get a great body, grow taller, improve your strength and flexibility, enhance your posture, relieve aches and pains, improve your sex life, decrease stress, boost your energy and confidence all through one kind of exercise. Better still, imagine you actually enjoy doing it!

What Pilates can do for you

• Give you the flexibility gained from yoga
• Give you the muscle work of weight training without bulking up your body
• Give you a strong, toned body, with a flatter stomach, longer, leaner muscles and a more streamlined shape
• Improve your posture
• Relieve many aches and pains
• Give you an extraordinary feeling of wellbeing
• Decompress your spine so that you may even regain lost height

If your usual approach to fitness begins by looking at your body in disgust, then hurling yourself into a wild cardio-vascular frenzy in order to lose the extra weight, or spending hours in the gym to tone up those flabby areas, then help is at hand. Even if your method has the potential to work in the long term, you never find out, because you’re never able to keep it up long enough.

It is too exhausting and too boring. Your routine becomes yet another arduous task to be ticked off the list at the end of the day. You aren’t enjoying the process so you give it up and go back to your old couch-potato ways.

Pilates offers a very different approach. Instead of being a mindless exercise, Pilates is one in which you have to engage your mind as well as your body, which means you don’t get bored. Every time you do a Pilates session, it feels fresh and new. Better still, it is extremely relaxing and you come out of a session feeling great! How many times have you walked out of the gym feeling exhausted or come in from a run and collapsed in a heap on the sofa? After a Pilates session, you don’t feel wiped out. Quite the opposite. You feel rested, revitalized, years younger.

Joseph Pilates

Joseph Pilates is the man behind the Pilates method, of which he made the following claim:

‘In 10 sessions, you will feel the difference, in 20 you will see the difference, and in 30 you’ll have a whole new body.’

Born near Dusseldorf, Germany in 1880, Joseph Pilates was a sickly child and suffered from asthma, rickets and rheumatic fever. However, he refused to be limited by his illnesses and, even though he was only a young boy, determined to improve his physical condition. He threw himself into a programme of body conditioning and achieved such good results that by the age of 14 he was posing as a model for anatomical drawings.

He went on to become a gymnast, boxer and a circus performer. He also became a devotee of yoga and martial arts. It was his continued determination to cure his own body and improve the health of those around him that led to his researching and developing an entirely new exercise regime in the early 1900’s which he termed ‘Contrology”.  Contrology combined Eastern and Western approaches and was specifically designed to control the muscles by using the mind.

In 1912, Joseph Pilates moved to England where he taught self-defence to detectives at Scotland Yard, but when the First World War broke out, he was interned as a German national. He used his time to refine his exercise method and began teaching his programme of mat-based exercises to fellow internees.

During the latter part of the war, Joseph Pilates worked on the Isle of Man as an orderly in a hospital where he began working with patients who were unable to walk. He devised exercise equipment for his patients by attaching springs to hospital beds to provide resistance, and found his patients recovered more speedily than those not under his care. These spring-based pieces of equipment became the prototypes for the machines that he would later design for his equipment-based studios in New York.

After the war, Joseph Pilates returned briefly to Germany where he worked as  a trainer to the Hamburg Police force. In 1926, he emigrated to the United States. On the voyage over, he met his future wife, a nurse called Clara, and by the end of the trip, they had decided to open the first official Pilates studio in New York City. The Pilates studio was an immediate success as it became the secret of New York’s finest ballet dancers and athletes.

Articles generated from 'The Pilates Plan' - Jennifer Dufton