The Origins of Pilates

How it all began
Joseph Hubertus Pilates was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany in 1883. As a child, Joe suffered from asthma and other ailments. He turned to exercise and athletics, studying various physical regimens to broaden his understanding. He became inspired by the classical Greek ideal of a person balanced in body, mind, and spirit, and began developing his own exercise system based on this concept. As he matured, Joe became an avid skier, diver, gymnast and accomplished boxer. In 1912, Joe moved to England, where he worked as a self-defence instructor for detectives at Scotland Yard. With the outbreak of the First World War, Joe was interned as a German ‘enemy alien’. During his internment, he refined his ideas and trained fellow internees in his exercise system. He rigged springs to hospital beds to allow bedridden patients to exercise against resistance—an innovation that later informed the design of his equipment. An influenza epidemic struck England in 1918, claiming thousands of lives, but none of Joe’s trainees died. This, he asserted, demonstrated the effectiveness of his method. After his release, Joe returned to Germany. His exercise method gained traction in the dance community, largely due to Rudolf von Laban, the choreographer who developed the dance notation still widely used today. Hanya Holm incorporated many of Joe’s exercises into her modern dance curriculum, where they continue to form part of the ‘Holm Technique’. When German officials asked Joe to train their army in his fitness system, he chose instead to leave Germany permanently.

Pilates comes to the U.S.
In 1926, Joe emigrated to the United States with Clara Zeuner, whom he later married (many people don’t know Clara was Joe’s third wife). Together they opened a fitness studio in New York, in the same building as the New York City Ballet. By the early 1960s, Joe and Clara had trained many of New York’s dancers. George Balanchine referred to training “at Joe’s”, and even invited him to work with young ballerinas at the New York City Ballet. Pilates was also beginning to gain attention outside New York. As The New York Herald Tribune reported in 1964: “In dance classes around the United States, hundreds of young students limber up daily with an exercise they know as ‘a pilates’, without knowing that the word has a capital P, and a living, right-breathing namesake.”

Joe’s students begin to teach
While Joe was still alive, two of his students, Carola Trier and Bob Seed, opened their own studios. Trier, a dancer, came to the United States as a performing contortionist after fleeing a Nazi holding camp. She discovered Joseph Pilates in 1940, following an injury that ended her performance career. Joe helped Trier to open her own studio in the late 1950s, and they remained close until their deaths. Bob Seed had a different story. A former hockey player who became a Pilates enthusiast, Seed opened a studio across town from Joe and attempted to poach his clients. According to John Steel, Joe and Clara’s business manager, Joe once visited Seed with a gun and warned him to leave town. Seed complied. Joe continued teaching clients at his studio until his death in 1967 at the age of 87. He died without a will and had not named a successor to carry on his work. Nevertheless, the Pilates method survived and flourished, thanks in large part to his protégés, often referred to as “the elders”.

The Elders
Clara continued to operate the Pilates Studio on Eighth Avenue in New York. Romana Kryzanowska, a student of Joe’s since the 1940s, became the director around 1970. Alongside Carola Trier, several other students of Joe and Clara went on to open their own studios. Ron Fletcher, a Martha Graham dancer, began studying with Joe in the 1940s due to a chronic knee condition. He opened his own studio in Los Angeles in 1970, attracting many Hollywood stars. Clara, particularly fond of Ron, gave him her blessing to continue the Pilates legacy under his own name. Fletcher introduced some innovations and adaptations to the work, inspired both by his time as a Martha Graham dancer and by his mentor, Yeichi Imura. Kathy Grant and Lolita San Miguel, also students of Joe and Clara, became instructors in their own right. Grant took over the directorship of the Bendel’s studio in 1972, while San Miguel went on to teach Pilates at Ballet Concierto de Puerto Rico in San Juan. In 1967, shortly before Joe’s death, both Grant and San Miguel received formal certification from the State University of New York to teach Pilates—believed to be the only such certifications ever authorised by Joe himself. Other students who opened studios included Eve Gentry, Bruce King, Mary Bowen, and Robert Fitzgerald. Eve Gentry, a dancer, taught at the New York studio from 1938 to 1968 and later taught at New York University’s Theatre Department in the early 1960s. After leaving New York, she opened a studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bruce King trained extensively with Joe and Clara and danced with the Merce Cunningham Company, Alwyn Nikolais Company, and his own Bruce King Dance Company. In the mid-1970s, he opened a studio at 160 West 73rd Street in New York City. Mary Bowen, a Jungian analyst who studied with Joe in the mid-1960s, began teaching in 1975 and later founded “Your Own Gym” in Northampton, Massachusetts. Robert Fitzgerald opened his own studio on West 56th Street in the 1960s, serving a substantial clientele from the dance community.

Hollywood takes notice
In the 1970s, Hollywood celebrities discovered Pilates through Ron Fletcher’s Beverly Hills studio. Where the stars went, the media followed. By the late 1980s, the press began covering Pilates more widely. The public took notice, and the business experienced a boom. “I’m fifty years ahead of my time,” Joe once claimed. He was right.