Full Circle: What Joe's 100-Year-Old Studio Can Teach Us Today

Could You Run a Studio Like Joe Pilates Did? Lesley Logan Weighs In

Lesley Logan, NCPT, fell in love with Pilates after her first 100! She has taught Joseph Pilates' Classical Method since 2005. She's the author of Profitable Pilates: Everything but the Exercises, which grew into her business coaching program, Agency. A Master's-certified instructor through The Pilates Center in Boulder, she was Lead Teacher Trainer for Equinox Pilates from 2012–2016 and was voted Best Pilates in Los Angeles by Los Angeles Magazine in 2013. Lesley’s current home base is in Las Vegas, and she travels and leads workshops and retreats around the world.

This year marks 100 years since Joseph Pilates opened his original studio in New York. It's a milestone we believe matters as much to the future of this work as it does to its past. To mark it, Lesley Logan is releasing a new workshop on Pilates Anytime diving into “Joe's Gym.” The open, self-directed way Joe actually ran his studio, where clients of all levels worked independently in the same room while Joe and Clara Pilates moved between them, observing, correcting, and guiding.

We sat down with Lesley ahead of the workshop's launch to talk about what Joe’s Gym actually looked like, what it can teach studios and teachers today, and why, a century later, it's more relevant than ever.

What Is a Joe's Gym

Before diving into why this history matters now, it helps to start with the basics. Think of a regular commercial gym today, Lesley says: people walk in, and they just work themselves out- leg day, arm day, whatever it is for them. "A Joe's Gym is very much like that. It's Joe Pilates' gym. There's Pilates equipment, and you go and do your own Pilates workout."

New clients typically started with a handful of private sessions, often at a slower time of day when Joe could give them his full attention. From there, they'd come in without an appointment whenever they liked, put their money down, and get to work. And they'd repeat that same workout for a long stretch of time before ever being given something new. "You kind of had to earn that new exercise, be ready for it," Lesley says. Jay Grimes, her teacher and mentor, went months before receiving his first correction, which was “use your gut.”

Walk into the studio itself, and of course you would have felt like walking into another era; it was 1926 after all. Lesley semi-jokingly wonders whether it was musty in there, though everyone had to shower before they left. What you really would have noticed is people from all over the city coming in at all hours to do their own workout. If it was your first or third time, you might not have known what half the moves were called. But you'd have noticed how quiet it was, quiet except for the sound of people moving. No music. "You wouldn't dare talk to somebody on the Reformer next to you," Lesley recalls Jay telling her. Maybe a whispered question, but never small talk.

And Lesley’s favorite shared story about what Joe’s studio looked like was that Joe had books everywhere. Not workout books, but books about people and places from around the world. "It tells you a little bit about the person, what's on your bookshelf," she says. She admits it’s a small detail, but one that tells you something about the man himself.

Why Joe's Gym — and Why Now?

Teaching as long as she has, she says, it starts to feel like a full-circle moment: there was a real risk that this work wouldn't have made it a hundred years at all, and it survived because a small handful of teachers kept it alive. "For those of us who do see this impact, it's important that we celebrate it so that people can be part of that and be invited in," she says. "I don't think it's ever too late to learn who Joe was or what his work was, because we get to do this."

Asked to narrow the entire workshop down to a single goal, she doesn't hesitate: accessibility. "Group classes have always been the way of creating accessibility to people on an affordability level, but that doesn't mean they're accessible to everybody. Some bodies need more personalization."

"Right now it feels like if you don't open a big studio with a lot of Reformers, you can't participate in the game. There's a place for everybody, and that's what I hope this workshop really allows people to see."

What might surprise people most isn't a hidden exercise or a secret cue. It's the sheer efficiency of the model. "How much you can do, how much impact you can have in a small space," she says, reflecting on her own years running studios of every size, from one to nine at once. Done well, a Joe's Gym lets a teacher "design your business around your life and the impact you want to make around the life you want to live."

Photo credit to ©Mary Kelly, for the benefit of The Pilates Transparency Project.

Inside Joe's Gym

So what was Joe actually doing while a room full of people worked at their own pace? Lesley credits the oral history passed down through teachers like Jay for what we know. Joe and Clara moved through the room doing what's now called "Joe's pushes and pulls," hands-on adjustments that helped a client go deeper into a stretch or find a shape they couldn't quite reach alone. Clara, who had limited eyesight, worked partly by sound, listening for sounds like the clasps of the foot strap during the Short Box series to tell whether someone was moving from their center. "If they could hear the clasps, they would know that you were not moving from your center," Lesley says.

Their role, more than anything, was to observe and guide, deciding when someone needed a new exercise, a correction, or simply more time. "Their role was really to go in and help you get more out of an exercise," she says, adding that it's a reminder for teachers today: our job as a guide is to help people go deeper, not just keep them moving. Sometimes that meant sending someone off with more work: "go do your exercises on the Chair." So they were guiding you, she says, but also kind of holding you a little hostage. You didn't have to stay. But people did.

As for independence, there was a private room for clients who needed more one-on-one time, something we know from stories about early students like Eve Gentry. For the most part, though, the average client had to rise into it, earning their way toward working on their own.

One of Lesley's favorite stories about the studio comes secondhand, from Jay. He remembered watching a well-dressed, wealthy young client, John Steele, walk in wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, radiating New York success, while Jay himself had come from a farm in Illinois trying to make it in the city. Years later, reading Steele's own memoir, Jay learned the man had hated those suits." We're all looking for community, and we're all looking to be around people," Lesley reflects. "What was happening in Joe's studio was people from all walks of life just working out together."

Teaching the Individual Within a System

One of the more nuanced parts of Joe's Gym is how it balanced structure with personalization. There was a real system, an order, a progression, a shared foundation every client moved through, but Joe and Clara were constantly reading the person in front of them within it: deciding who had earned something new, who needed to repeat what they already knew, who needed one specific exercise pulled aside just for them that day. It wasn't a script. It was a method applied with real attention.

That balance, consistency of the method paired with real-time attention to the individual, is part of what Lesley hopes teachers take away. Learning to read what a client's body needs on any given day isn't something that happens overnight, she says; it takes time, real experience, and genuine dedication to the work.

What Modern Studios Can Learn

Even for studios with no plans to run an open, self-directed floor, Lesley sees real value in understanding how Joe worked, and she sees the industry trending back in that direction. When she started teaching, Pilates was almost entirely private and semi-private sessions, with the occasional hard-to-find Mat class. Today the pendulum has swung hard toward group formats, which she sees as a genuine win, since it's exposed far more people to the method than ever before. But exposure creates its own demand. "There are always those people who go, 'Oh, I really like this, what else is there?'" And now that a much larger population has discovered Pilates, that curious percentage adds up to a lot of people looking for more depth than a group class alone can offer.

"Everything is so personalized today, so of course our Pilates is going to need to be," she says. "That's hard to do in a typical group class setting.”

It isn't without challenges, and Lesley names two upfront.

• First, client education: Most people have never heard the term "Joe's Gym," and many don't even know Joseph Pilates was a real person. She recommends leaning on plain, familiar language over clever branding, and using the concept as a talking point in discovery calls rather than expecting people to search for it on their own.
• Second, teacher training: Reading a room and deciding in real time who needs a correction versus who needs an entirely different exercise isn't something most training programs cover, so studio owners taking this on need to build a real, safe process for their teachers to learn it.

Split the room into a few micro-groups based on where people actually are: your regulars doing something a bit more advanced, a group working on a specific sticking point, newer clients drilling exactly what they need for the next class. "The people who are regulars feel really special... the people who need a specific connection are going to get it, and the newbies have a space where they actually don't feel like they're behind." The key, she says, is telling clients why it matters to them specifically, not just that it's how Joe did it.

• On pricing, Lesley is direct: private sessions are expensive, and says, "This might ruffle some feathers, but they should be expensive. Look at what your personal trainers are charging," she says. Still, she understands some clients can't afford that level of attention, and that's exactly where this model comes in. In the workshop, she walks through how to bring even brand-new clients into a Joe's Gym format, so pricing lands closer to a class rate while the client still gets that built-for-them, one-on-one feeling, without teachers needing to discount their privates to stay competitive.

The payoff goes beyond the price tag. Clients who get that kind of ownership over their practice become better long-term clients, she argues: stronger retention, more referrals, and clients who can actually talk about what they worked on instead of just saying they "did a Reformer class." "They have awareness of what they're getting better at because they are taking ownership of their practice too," she says. That same personalization, she adds, is what lets a studio grow without losing the relationships that make it worth growing in the first place.

From Joe's Gym to the Next 100 Years

For Lesley, none of this works without understanding where it came from. "To truly understand what it is that we do here, we do need to understand the person who built it, the time in history when it started, and what was going on in the world." Her hope is simple: whether or not a studio ever adopts anything resembling Joe's Gym, the history itself is worth knowing. "You don't have to teach strictly classical, in Joe's exact order, to benefit from this," she says. "Knowing that history gives you a much richer well to draw from, and it's what gives you real longevity as a teacher."

Lesley hopes studios hold onto the full picture of the method, even the parts they don't personally offer. That might mean an occasional community Mat class in a Reformer-only studio, or making sure teachers understand the broader system well enough to bring more depth to whatever apparatus they're teaching on.

Looking ahead, she points out something worth sitting with: Pilates has a hundred-year track record that very few fitness trends can claim. "We keep hearing Pilates is popular; we're in our trend. We've been trending every year that I've been an instructor." But, staying relevant for the next hundred, she believes, depends on continuing to dig into that depth and helping clients understand why Pilates is the thing that supports them in everything else they do, rather than just another option on a crowded fitness menu.

As for her own plans, Lesley is opening a studio built around this exact concept. "It's happening, it's happening later than I want and hopefully sooner than I anticipate. 2027 is the goal." She hopes it becomes one of several such studios, calling it a way to "be a support system for this industry in this unique way. There's room for every single one of us with all of our styles and all of our offerings."

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A Note on Safety

No conversation about giving clients more independence is complete without addressing the question: is this safe?

Lesley's answer borrows a phrase from her own teacher, Jay Grimes: "Ugly Pilates, get used to it. Dangerous Pilates, never."

Her point is that teachers should feel empowered to let a client's movement be imperfect, and that this is actually a sign of real growth. "Every amazing mover will have an ugly rep. An unbalanced rep." The real skill is recognizing the difference between a rep that's unrefined and one that's genuinely unsafe.

"The body teaches itself," she says, and trusting that, within a well-guided system, is exactly what makes Joe's Gym work so well. A teacher's role in that room isn't to hover over every rep correcting form in real time. It's to be fully present for the moments that matter most: a hand on the push-through bar, making sure the headrest is where it needs to be, stepping in when something crosses from "still learning" into "actually risky." Everything else is part of the process.

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