Pilates Returns to Life | Episode 1

In life magazine, 08/11/1947, there's an article on Jacobs Pillow, a once abandoned farm turned into the summer dance capital of America located in Massachusetts. The story is about the students and dancers with pictures of them posing, with one photo that stands out among the rest, featuring a topless old man in a frog squad next to a couple young dancers wearing middle head presses. The opening caption reads, quote, body conditioning is in charge of 67 year old Joseph Pilates, who claims to be a direct descendant of Punch's Pilates, end quote. Four years later in life magazine, 10/08/1951, there's a story on singer, Roberta Peters. There's only one mention of Joseph Pilates in the first photo caption, but not once in this writing, did the author ever question? Why is this old man standing on Roberta Peter's stomach? What are these strange pieces of equipment? Why is there a painting of a naked man with a spear on the wall.

And who is Joseph Pilates? Dance Magazine, Volume II, Year 1956. And they all go to Joe's. Doris Herring recounts Joe's origin story on how he invented his method. She says, quote, In 1912, he went to England to become a boxer, but while he was preparing for his career, he also began teaching the art of self defense to Blackpool detectives.

When World War one broke out, Joe was interned for a year. He taught his fellow internees wrestling and self defense, and helped organize a police force for the camp. Later, he was transferred to the Isle Of Man for the duration of the war. There he encountered people who were disabled as a result of wartime diseases and incarceration. He began devising machines to help in their rehabilitation. In 1925, Joe's teaching suddenly became important to the German government. When he was invited to train the new German army, he decided that it was time to leave for America.

On the way over, he met a modest lady who was captivated by Joe's missionary zeal and by his considerable personal charm. She married him and helped him to found his studio. They have worked together ever since. At 76 and 74, respectively, Jo and Clara Pilates have big plans for the future. In sports illustrated, 02/12/1962, Joseph Pilates origin is told again.

From the writer of the article, Robert Wernick, quote, don't ask me what Controlology is. Don't ask Joe either, for orderly exposition is not his specialty. It comes from a profound knowledge of bodily kinetics learned in no class with Joe figured out the principles. He says, three quarters of a century ago in Germany by watching children at play and animals in the forest. Later, when he was a boxer and surplus tumbler, he found his exercises relaxed him after an exhausting day. Later still, turned with his circus and hundreds of other Germans on the Isle Of Man during world war one, he took charge of physical training and no man he says who exercised by his principles came down with influenza in the great epidemic. But what are the principles?

It's all up here. Joe says, pointing to his head. You won't get them out of the book. You have to show up in person in the temple of Contrology end quote. Robert Wernick includes more direct words from Joe himself, quote, by exercising your stomach muscles you ring out the body.

You don't catch colds. You don't get cancer. You don't get hernias. Do animals get hernias? Do animals go on Pilates? Eat what you want.

Drink what you want. I drink a quart of liquor a day Pilates some beers and smoke maybe 15 cigars. End quote. Every myth starts with a kernel of truth. Then the details get simplified.

The facts get exaggerated and the gaps get filled in with imagination. Once the story gets repeated enough, repetition starts to look like evidence. Less documentation that survives, the more room there is for mythology. And within two generations, something shifts. The person becomes a symbol, an idea, a brand, a philosophy, embodied in a name.

It's called Pilates invented in 1920 and just now making its way into the 90s. The guy moves to The United Pilates, and his work has been in office for sixty years. So what what happened in the last sixty years? And how come nobody knows about it? And I started to realize how much of his previous life he hid He hid just a monumental amount of it. He never did explain very much. He didn't do a lot of explaining. He also knew it couldn't be found out. There was no record of it in It's not pronounced like it's spelled, but it's called Pilates.

I know it sounds like a little, like, a passover dish, but it's not. Finally, we can find out what Pilates, these are are. Yes. Well, Pilates is actually the name of the person who founded the method. Half the people don't even know that there was a man named Pilatus. Nobody talked about him here. He was not a celebrity of any kind or someone from our history, we would know. People in his hometown didn't know who Joseph Pilates this was.

The plotting's wit was not known at all. He was a very disappointed first. He knew his work was good, but no one else did. Singwood wasn't great. No educational background, no credentials, no money. He made this to be so important. It became him. And he did even write his book.

Some of the myths around your supporties and what other people have created. Now Pilates has enjoyed a rebirth of sorts and thanks to Hollywood celebrities. His family had come from Greece and moved to Germany and then that he had been working for a circus, and he went to The United States and became famous. So he was... That kind of character, like, from a movie. Some of these stories came from Romana, and then Eventry has some stories. Well, it's rer, has some stories. Some of those stories might have come from somebody else too, and that's that's the problem with some of the stories.

I think they've been told and retold so many times that you don't, we don't really know whether the origins are. Get me to the Pilates place. He was a great promoter. He was a show This guy had a tendency to bullshit when it was hurting. It's it's kinda funny how I got interested in all this stuff because it had a water based store in Hollywood. And this lady comes into my my store, and she says, you know, I'm looking for somebody that will build this apparatus thing for me. And then I looked at this thing, and it was like the size of a twin size bed.

It had this carriage that slid up and down, and it was connected with springs. Once I looked at this thing, if I was gonna build this, I need know that I wasn't gonna get sued because nobody likes getting sued. I mean, you may not think that by knowing me, but but nobody likes getting sued. And so that... That's when I had to start doing the research.

The first thing I had to do was find if there was any patents in order to order to do that, I had to go to a patent library in Los Angeles with my wife who's a librarian. They had this one room that had just thousands and thousands and thousands of patents. And we had to look through all the patents for the time that we knew that Joe's applies was alive. And it kinda was this investigation that got me really excited because my wife was with me who's a librarian, and I kinda had this, like, librarian thing in me anyway because my father was a librarian, and my and my wife's mother was librarian. You know, I kinda liked doing the research stuff, and then it was really hard define.

And so kind of the harder it was to find, the more fun it was to find stuff. When I first started looking into Pilates, there was a book, and it was called the Pilates method of physical fitness. It was by Gail, Eisenhower. And we didn't even know about return to life. That was out of print, your health that was forgotten.

Then it was just a matter of trying to find out who was this guy, Joe, because the other thing that was really important to understand is back in those days, the people that I was working at with were more about themselves than about Pilates. They were more about using Pilates methodology to create an atmosphere where they could teach exercise to people and they could feel better and look better. But to find out more about the guy, it was really hard. Two things changed in the nineties that were really big. First of all, the internet. Welcome. And then later on ancestry.com came along, and there was so much information you can get through that. And then the other thing is there was that lawsuit on the paid mark.

When that happened, we were looking for information kinda showing how widespread or how un widespread Pollies was at that time, and we were So listening and asking for information and documentation about Pilates. Until the nineties, I'd never even knew John still existed. You know, I never knew that there was some guy that was still alive that actually talked with Joe and talked with Clara and talked with him about other stuff besides fitness. Didn't know about that. Didn't know they existed. Right? If you're ready, in 1963, I was 28. I was in very good shape, but I suffered from this chronic stiff neck. And it was around that time that my mother and father had started with Joseph Pilates. He kept saying, Oh, you just gotta go Joseph Pilates.

And that starts this whole chapter of my life. So I went again on the 2nd Floor, and I said, yeah, I'm a landing. There in front of me is this old man, almost naked. And you could see immediately that he had some problem with one of his eyes that didn't go where the other one went was behind kind of dirty ish glasses. His posh year was notable. Right away, we shook hands, and his hand didn't lock with mine the way thumbs normally lock when you shake hands.

His thumb seemed to be weighed back further on his hand. So his fingers, instead of just going around my wrist, were really on my pulse. He asked me if I had, shorts and a towel. And I said, yes. He said, in there, change. They handed me a pair of those canvas shoes.

Put these on. That was it. That was the first the verbal encounter. The main room was a very large apartment living room at one time. It was all very neatly spaced and no one else was in the room, had an oil and leather and wood smell. It was rather comforting.

The little room I went into was clearly a makeshift room, and at the end was a one of these plastic showers you see in motels to hung stuff up. I changed to put on the shorts and out I came, and he said, over here, I went over to the reformer, which he said, this is the reformer. From the first time I sat on that machine, Joseph Pilates had complete control of me. How that happened? Why that happened? It's mysterious to some extent to this day. So I did everything he told me to do.

I have no particular close memory of what the routine was at that time or how many repetitions. What I do remember is he kept me moving constantly. There was no stopping, and then he started to talk to me about breathing, a breathing, a breezy air in, breezy air out. So his instructions were all extremely simple and precise. I kept up at it. And then finally, says, okay. You're done. Go shower.

And I rushed into the shower, and I was nauseous. From the exertion, and I threw up in the shower. And I I just... It was like, I couldn't believe what I'd just been through. God. Well, horrible. It's experience.

I've been in, you know, basic cranny in the army. I walk out, he looks at me, and, let's say this was a Tuesday. He says, to me, of $5. I see you at, Thursday at 07:00. Same time. Walk down the stairs.

I hit the street. I went to work and thought, and start that dawned on me. What... Why did you nod your head? What did it do for you? What about your neck? And then I thought, well, what about my neck? I didn't have a stiff neck when I walked in.

But there was something about my whole body that felt different. I couldn't explain it, but there it was. There was... Some change had occurred. Something had happened. But I went back.

And, really, that's what saved me. And in many ways, saved Pilates. Yosef Humbertus Pilates was born into a working class German family, the second of 10 children, His father, Heinrich Pilates, known as Fritz, worked a number of jobs over the years, locksmith, mechanic, factory foreman. His mother, Helena Han, worked in a factory before becoming a housewife and raising their chill. But the Pilates family would know its share of tragedy.

Four of Joe's nine siblings would die in childhood. Of those who survived, two would eventually emigrate to America before Joe, his younger sister, Anna, and his younger brother, Fred. Both would remain part Joe's life for years to come. Much about Joe's early life comes from biographers who have researched and written books on his life. One author is a German historian, Efarinke.

Those Pilates told many stories about his passed, which were not exactly accurate. Like, for instance, he said that he was born in 1880, and he also printed that on his business card, but actually he was born in 1883. I don't think this was because he wanted to erase his past or was some kind of psychological problem he had. The reason for him that that he made these statements about his life story was that he was using stories, in fact, about his life for marketing. My method makes you look younger. So this is really good for your health and you will look younger if you're doing controllogy exercises. He called them. In order to reconstruct his his life and and the places where he lived and what what happened during his childhood and the early years in in Germany, the city archives of Montein Gladbach were just a great starting point.

For my research. I thought that, Joseph Pilates had Greek ancestors. When I went to the city archives in Mety Plattbach, I was asking, oh, could we find out something about his Greek ancestors? And then the archive was. He showed me the records of his family and his ancestors going back for decades and decades and centuries and centuries. So, like, for three hundred years, he was able to, follow the family tree. These people were all living in the region of Martien Gladbach, so we couldn't find any Greek ancestors. This is a city map from 1879.

Just four years before Joseph Pilatus was born. The city of Manient Gladbach was growing. And this was because of the factories that were being built in the city and people moving to the city from the villages to work in the factories. You see how many factories already existed in 879. And these are all textile factories.

Textiles are really dirty. They're filthy because there's all these chemicals that takes to process all the dyes and the fabrics and stuff to turn them into something that's usable. There would have been not just the smoke from burning coal to keep the Pilates warm, but there would have been the fumes from the chemicals that they were using to make all this stuff. This document is so helpful if you do research about your phonetic biography because, it's the registration card of the ATis family, giving all the names and birth Pilates of the parents and the children. Now we're looking at the backside of the registration card of the Pilatus family.

You just get an idea of how many times they moved. The reasons why he could have moved to one that, as he... As his father got different jobs, then, the... His employers were offering him free houses. But the the story... And this actually has changed a little bit for me because I I thought this was more of a joke than a real story, but I just got back from Germany story that I heard was that it was really kind of a known thing that when people built houses on a masonry.

While the cement was drying, they would put families in there that would keep the houses warm and basically drying them out from the inside out. And then once that happened, that could be for six months to a year. Then the families that actually built the houses would now move in now that the houses were dry and cured. Meanwhile, you've got these other people living and they're just, you know, in the in the humidity and probably when it was unhealthy. And this this kinda leads to the story about how maybe John Joe had had asthma, you know, because he could have been growing up these, these, moist and probably dirty conditions. This is a picture of Valthausen Nastfase, the street, where Jose Fillebs was born the the house.

He was born is on this picture. This picture was taken more than fifty years after Joseph Pilatus had been born, but the street was still looking similar to what it probably looked like in the eighteen eighties. Joe Pilates was born in this house in a town originally called Gladbach, later renamed Munching Gladbach, and now spelled Munching Gladbach. The bricks, you see, are historical. In the nineteenth century, people would live in in small rooms, and and you would try to get as many people as possible into one room, look at the materials and to imagine how they used what they had, like, the straw and clay, and just put it together.

And the wooden parts, are probably historical just the stones have been changed. This was the typical way for building houses back then, it was called Fachberg. There was a small river, the the Gladberg. There was also a small lake. And at that time, this was where people were getting their drinking water.

So water was really not safe. And this is why even children were drinking beer. It had had only low alcohol level, so called light beer, light light beer. Although his family moved every few years, more than a century later, a group of Pilates teachers led by Lolita San Miguel, he turned to his birthplace. Working with the city, a plaque was installed honoring Joe, with hopes of one day turning the property into a historic site preserving his legacy.

Joseph Pilates in this town was born, and in this site, was born and grew up, and I was shocked to find out that they didn't know Jopie at this. They didn't know he was born here. They didn't know who he was, and that made me very sad. And I said, I am definitely going to do something to change that. First time we met, I was deeply impressed by the high commitment and, of course, by the, atmosphere of the meeting. And I learned so many things about Joseph Pilates, not only about his technique, but about his, philosophical ideas about his way of living. And, yeah, for me, it was really impressive, and I'm really looking forward to work together in the future, to build a kind of museum maybe, and yeah, to together around a worldwide community for us. Joseph Pilates is part of our cultural heritage.

And I think it's important even to show to, the newborn generations that there is always an opportunity to live your dreams. Here you see, your mind in Neuever. This is where Yosip Pilates moved when he first left his home and started to work as an apprentice at a brewer. This is kind of log of the city of Neuever, but he was a Pilates. July. In the year of 1900, where did he live? And there's a name.

He lived with someone, cotton, and this man had a brewery. So he was probably the man he worked for as an apprentice, and he also lived at his home. There are no photographs of Joe during his career as a brewer's assistant nor has any of Joe's family, students, or friends ever mentioned his former profession. So to get a context of the beer culture during this time, here's doctor William Blakemore Lion, a food and labor historian in Freiburg in Brayskau, Germany, who knows an unreasonable amount about German beer. So the eighteen seventies is when Germany first became a country at that time an empire. It was industrializing faster than almost any country in the world, essentially neck and neck with The United Pilates. With a lot of people, a lot of workers, especially a lot of young men, there was a growing and thriving drinking scene.

And so that meant that breweries were also expanding very quickly and making a lot of money. A little speculative, but at the same time, really interesting of what potentially could have in some ways influenced the eventual Pilates equipment, at least the very beginnings of it coming from the brewing industry itself. The brewing industry at that time, the late 1800s, was using a lot of the best technologies. And Germany, before the first World War, I would argue, and I think a lot of historians agree, was the epicenter of science, which globally. They had kind of the in... Invented the modern university.

So kind of the medieval universities went back to places like Britain and Spain, but the modern university that focuses a lot on science, engineering, that was founded and that spread in Germany. Bruing was a pretty scientific industry. There's a lot of chemistry that that's going on. There's a lot of science, especially for brewing on really large scale consistently. You have some technologies that are older, but very connected to woodwork.

For example, the barrels that beer is stored in, but then also the the very large equipment that was used for the early stages of taking the barley, taking the hops, you know, you had these basically large, cauldrons, a lot of equipment made out of copper, a lot of different steel technology. You're dealing with a lot of, pressure measuring of pressure, measuring of temperatures, highly accurately. And so if you were studying or training to become a brewmaster, you're probably using a lot of high-tech material, especially if you were in Germany. And if your brewery had the assets, you know, you were probably getting the newest technologies when you could. Your brewing all comes down to not only quality beer, but really consistent beer, and making really consistently good beer is almost completely reliant on, a, having really good brewmaster and good, you know, workers at that brewery, and then, b, having fantastic technology, super accurate technology.

So having technology that's highly connected to a goal, you know, whether that's being in shape and exercising your body in ways that are healthy and positive, or trying to make kind of, the perfect beer and do it a thousand times over, you know, maybe there there are some connections there. And I think that a lot of these German industries at the time, few spent years and years working in them, you probably became pretty skilled at making stuff. That wouldn't surprise me that someone working in an industry like that went on to be a great inventor. In nineteen o one, Joe's mother Helena died at just 41 years old. No cause of death survives in the record.

Her death came shortly after two of her infant sons had died only months apart. Joe's father, Fritz, remarried a year later and moved to Gales in Keisian, which happens to be where your narrator is from. I was trying to figure out why Joe got the information that he did to me. How he got to be so smart? You see people that really understand the body, but they don't really understand mechanical things. To find somebody that understands both worlds and can traverse both worlds really well, and as entrepreneurial, there's a whole another thing on top of that.

There was no popular mechanics at that point. And, you know, he opened this book and it tells you how to make things he had to figure it out. But his father was kind of a middle manager, and this is an industrial town. And so he would have probably had access to different materials like wood and metal to work with and different machinery to work with to, to work with these stuff. One of the things that was really cool when we went to the Munch And Gladbuck City Hall is that they had this picture, which I had never seen before until that point, it was a meeting of the Turnbine Association in front of the Munch And Gladbuck City Holland, and it had Joe's father and his brother in there. Then I realized it was the Turnbine Movement which was a really big deal back in those days.

I don't wanna go too far in history, but the term brine movement goes back to the Franco Prussian War in, like, 1812. Jeremy decided that the... There were basically in a weak condition physically and and mentally And so they decided to create this culture around physicality. In Germany, pretty much everywhere, and especially at, I'd say within company cultures, there was training of the body. They would have these organizations called, training your your body and your mind, Germany had a very sport culture that had developed in the nineteenth century and the 1800s. I mean, even today, Germans are one of the few groups of people who just walk for fun.

I mean, it sounds kind of silly, but they they have like a verb for it, like, spatsyevan gin, which just means to, to walk, but it... I mean, I think there's something meditative about it as well, especially in nature. Germans really like nature as well. I I think this may be kind of combining of the technology of an industry like brewing, and then, worker culture, German culture at that time, which also spread to The United States, basically Anytime in the world that you could find German migrants. These Tungferein, basically, these gymnastic clubs They were incredibly popular. And, one thing regardless of what club you were in, Germans would always drink beer as well. So it's kind of like the one, the one thing that would follow the Germans regardless of what they were doing was the brewery and the beer that they were brewing.

Pritrich Pilatus. He was a gymnast and one of the first bodybuilders in Europe. He was among the people who started bodybuilding. This was the greatest gift. He also Pilates received from his father that his father passed on his passion to him, like his passion for gymnastics and bodybuilding. After he moved out and lived on his own and started to build a family himself, there were very many archives in the area. Manie Latbeth because he moved to many different towns.

If you move around a lot, he got exposed to lots of different ideas. He listened and he just used that information to build on what he knew. Probably woke him up. Travel does that. Us Pilates was part of the German Freikopecultur movement, the nudism movement, and it was huge in Germany from the beginning of the century and especially in the 1920. In order to understand his passion for that, we have to go back to the year 1900 in Germany to society, which was really hierarchical.

It was stratified. So each one had his place and he had to stay there. You were not supposed to have a better life than your parents, and you were also not supposed to move in a literal way. The clothes people were wearing, they were really like a prison. So imagine going to a place face, or you could just take off your clothes and live, and you could feel the sun on your skin.

You were able to feel your body and actually enjoy it. This liberating experience really influenced, it was the Pilates lot, and he he would never stop doing that. At 21, Joe married Maria Tutman. Maria already had a young son, Wilhem. And when she married Joe, she was already pregnant with their first child, Laney.

The family lived with Maria's mother in Ge education. Joe primarily worked as a brewer's assistant, but took on other odd jobs. Three years later, Joe and Maria had a son, Hans Heinrich, However, Hans died before his first birthday. In 1913, Joe's life takes a turning point. His wife, Maria, dies suddenly, leaving Joe with his adopted nine year old son, Bill Hill. And his eight year old daughter Laney. For the past twelve years, Joe had worked as a brewer's assistant.

He was a husband, a father, a working class man living an otherwise ordinary life in Germany. Then, by the end of 1913, Joe makes a decision that changes everything. He leaves Germany for England alone. His children stay behind with their grandmother. It's not exactly the hero's journey we wanted to hear.

And even today, we can't know exactly what drove him to leave like that. Was it grief from the tragic loss of his wife, dissatisfaction with his career as a brewer, or ambitions for more in life? Maybe all of it. What we do know is that around the end of 1913, he left Germany behind, going to England to start o her. Then history intervened.

Europe went to war, and Joe would be interned. Years later, Joe would tell an extraordinary story about what happened next, that he trained his fellow prisoners, that he rehabilitated the sick and injured, that he devised machines from bed springs to restore their bodies. And that when the great influenza epidemic arrived, not one man who followed exercises became sick. It's one of the foundational stories of Pilati's history. There's just one problem.

Was any of it true?