Pilates Monterey

Who is Joseph Pilates

History of Joseph Pilates Joseph Pilates was born in 1880 in Germany.  As a child, he suffered from many ailments including asthma, rickets and rheumatic fever. As a teenager, he moved to England where he joined a circus and learned the art of boxing. It was then that he began to understand the importance of stability and balance, and began to explore new ways of exercising to strengthen the body from the inside out.

Later, when he was interred in a prisoner of war camp during WWI, he began to help rehabilitate German POWs in their beds, using the knowledge he had gained from his past experience as an athlete. Using the metal springs from their beds, Pilates designed his own form of “physical therapy”, and that was to be the beginning of the Pilates method and the birth of the Universal Reformer.

In the mid 1920s, he sailed to America.  On that trip he met his future wife Clara, who was a nurse.  They pooled their collective experiences together and opened a fitness studio, which happened to be in the same building as George Ballanchine’s ballet studio.  The Pilates method of core strengthening became well known in the dance world, and has become even more popular as a mainstream form of strength training and core stability.

Joseph Pilates called his method of exercise “Contrology”, but we simply call it “Pilates”.