by Lynda Lippin

Created on: June 01, 2008

While millions of people do Pilates exercises everyday, most do not even know that Pilates was a person, let alone an extremely interesting and colorful personality who was at the leading edge of exercise science.

Joseph Pilates was born in 1880 in Moenchengladbach, a town near Dusseldorf, Germany. He was a frail and sickly child who suffered from rickets, rheumatic fever, and asthma. Other children constantly made fun of him, and Joe was too weak and skinny to ever fight back. He resolved to get stronger so that he could defend himself.

While attending school and studying history, philosophy, and engineering, Pilates also studied Eastern and Western forms of exercise. He tried yoga, Buddhist meditation, and ancient Greek and Roman gymnastic exercises, and kept meticulous notes of what the exercises did for him and how he progressed. By the time he turned 14 he was an accomplished skin diver, gymnast, boxer, and skier, who also modeled for anatomy charts.

Pilates was in England in 1914 when WWI broke out and was interned by the British as an enemy alien. He first went to a small camp near Lancaster, where he began teaching self defense and wrestling to the other Germans, claiming that they would be stronger when they left than when they entered. Then he was transferred to Knockaloe camp on the Isle of Man, where he began to really experiment with his exercises and theories to maintain his own strength and conditioning and to work with the sick and injured soldiers and internees.

He taught them to breathe and attached hospital cot springs with straps to the walls by their hospital beds so they could begin to stretch and exercise by pushing or pulling on the springs before they could even get out of bed. Outside of the hospital he took large groups of internees through his exercise regimen every day believing wholeheartedly that the more everyone breathed and moved the better off they would be. "Out with the bad germs and in with the fresh new oxygen," he would counsel. England lost tens of thousands and while the camps were hit extremely hard by the influenza epidemic, only 200 men died at Knockaloe, thus proving to Joe that he was right.

After WWI Joseph Pilates was deported back to Germany, where he continued to develop, practice, and teach his exercises until 1925. He trained the Hamburg Military Police and began developing spring based exercise equipment. "I thought, why use my strength [to exercise rheumatic patients]? So I made a machine to do it for me. Look,

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