Who was Joseph Pilates?

Joseph Pilates was born in 1880 in Germany. In the first years of his life, he suffered from various diseases, including asthma and rickets. Rickets is a disease involving a metabolic disorder of bone mineralization. These conditions led him to look for alternative training methods that could help him achieve physical balance. Thanks to his persistence in performing exercises based on bodybuilding, ballet and gymnastics, at the age of 14 he became a model for anatomical drawings.

He drew his inspiration from many areas, including studying yoga, Zen and ancient Greek and Roman exercise regimens. It was then that the initial outlines of exercises were created, which today we know as "matwork", i.e. exercises performed on the floor. Placing the body on the floor was intended to avoid excessive load on the joints and to relieve stress on the patient's heart. Despite this, performing the exercises correctly is a big challenge because they are all in an open chain and require the student's maximum control.

Work make genius.

Pilates was not limited to just three or four sports, as it was an active:

- skier,

- diver,

- boxer,

-circus artists and also,

-worked in a police facility as a self-defense instructor.

The political situation forced him to go to the Isle of Man (an island in the British archipelago), where he worked as a paramedic and nurse. During the outbreak of World War I, he came into contact with people with physical disabilities for whom he began to construct special equipment based on springs attached to hospital beds, developed an exercise program and observed how rehabilitation was carried out. During the outbreak of the flu epidemic, patients who practiced Joseph Pilates methods did not get sick. Pilates claimed that blood circulation was important, which his exercises stimulated by developing red blood cells in the body.

After the war, Joseph Pilates returned to his native country and began to spread a system of exercises developed on disabled patients and himself. In 1926, Joseph Pilates came to the USA, where he married nurse Clara Zeuner. He and his wife founded their first Pilates studio in the building that housed the New York City Ballet. From the beginning, the studio attracted actors, boxers, athletes and dancers from all over the world, such as Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine.