[00:00:00] Welcome to Pilates Students' Manual, everything you want to know about Pilates in one place. I'm Olivia, and I'll be your host. Jump in the conversation on Instagram @pilatesstudentsmanual. And be sure to subscribe for updates on new episodes. Let's learn something new together.

Hello, hello everybody. Welcome back. I've got some fun adventures for you today. I do want to warn you that in the podcast description where it says that you will be going down to the Pilates rabbit hole, this is definitely a Pilates rabbit hole episode. I'm calling it really broadly, what is the [00:01:00] history of Pilates, but we are going to be talking all things the man, the myth, Joseph Pilates, a little bit about the history of Pilates in the United States and why it matters. 

I did see in PilatesStyle magazine, which is a pretty cool Pilates publication that talks about good stuff, choreography stuff, movement stuff, Pilates adventure stuff. I'm enjoying my subscription to it. But they have asked a question of a Pilates teacher and they asked, do I need to know Pilates history? And the answer was, you can definitely enjoy Pilates without knowing the history. You should know that Pilates was a person who created the system. And if you love learning about it, then there's a lot to learn. And if you just want to do the movements, there's a lot of movements to do. So you're in good hands. 

I'm going to say, let's learn a little bit about what we're doing. I think that it's important to know where things come from. Definitely as a teacher, you want to know why you're doing what you're doing. [00:02:00] And as a student, if you're curious, I think that it can really deepen your connection to what you're doing and make what you're doing means something on another level. 

So that's what I'm going to be sharing with you a little bit. I have done my best to research it. I will include some links to things that informed this podcast, whether it's the obituary in the New York times like Clara Pilates obituary was in the New York times in 1977 interviews on Pilates any time I've got some really cool Sports Illustrated articles from the sixties where a photographer and one of the Sports Illustrated writers went to Joe's gymnasium in New York City.

So I'll include links to all of those things. And also Joe's books. Like Joe wrote a couple books and really those have informed me as well. So I'll include links to all of that stuff. 

There is a lot of mystery and myth around Joseph Pilates because, again, he was born in [00:03:00] 1883. So a lot of the research that has been done, like Ken Endelman, who is the president of Balanced Body, which is a Pilates equipment company, he talked about in the seventies when he was doing research on Joseph  and the patents that Joseph Pilates held and he had to go to a physical patent office, which I can't even imagine. Like in high school, when I did a research paper on Sylvia Plath, I had to go to a physical library and like check out physical books and now you can do all of that stuff online. 

So there is some misinformation that's out there or just information that's really difficult to verify given the fact that this stuff was happening at the turn of the 20th century. There are like some records, but not all records. A lot of it is just Joe's stories and we do know if you ever read Joe's books, which are kind of like a hoot and a half and like really cool, but also a hoot and a half, he has a very big personality. He's very bombastic in the way that he writes. You can just really tell that he's very passionate about his system, but he's also a storyteller and he might have [00:04:00] inflated some things. 

Like his age. There are things that he said he was born in 1880, which would have made him older than his wife, Clara. And why would you lie about that? But he did sometimes, but we think he was actually born in 1883 in Germany. 

The story goes that he was a sick kid, that he had rickets and rheumatism and asthma, and he was sick and frail, but he got introduced to exercise and that really healed all of his stuff. He became a bodybuilder, he became a boxer. There are press clippings of him being in fights. So we can say that he was a boxer, he was a gymnast and like a circus performer, like a tumbler. And we know that because he was traveling through England during world war one, when England rounded up all German citizens and put them in an internment camp.

And the story goes that that's where he developed the mat exercise system. So he's in England, he's in this internment camp. It's lame, like there's not a lot to do in an internment camp. And he says, one of the articles [00:05:00] published in 1960 in Sports Illustrated that he would watch the cats chasing mice and that even lazy cats were very athletic and very fit.

Joseph Pilates was really interested in the way animals move, and cats especially. And so he wanted to develop an exercise system that emulated the way animals move naturally, that they move their entire body, that they stretch, that they lengthen, that they stabilize. And that's where his mat exercises came from. And then he was able to teach those exercises to other interned people. 

There's a myth that he taught soldiers, but he wasn't actually interacting with soldiers. He was in an internment camp, so he would have taught other people, other German citizens who were interned at the time, which is good because you know, he's speaks German. English is definitely a second language. 

And even when he was teaching, when he did immigrate to the United States, a lot of his teaching was done by touch. So I'm kind of jumping all over the place. So that's, Isle  of Man, that's world war one. After world war one, when he was released from the internment camp, [00:06:00] he did immigrate to the United States. He met his wife, Clara on the boat. 

Fun fact. He did already have a wife, and a child from a previous wife. So Clara would have been his third wife. And like, I don't know how I feel about that. Seems kind of weird that you would just like leave your wife and child and go to America, but cool, cool, cool. But he did meet Clara on the boat and there isn't actually a marriage license for him and Clara. So it would have been a common law marriage. 

And that's coming from Ken Endelman cause I did not know that. And I was like, all right, I see you, Joe. 

He moves to New York City and he opens a gym in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. From the sixties, it said that a 45 minute class with Joe was $5 and like that's pretty righteous. He used equipment, he had spring resistance and he was a really big fan of practicing in like the shorts, the short shorts, or like a Speedo pretty much, he has like little training shorts. 

He wrote the book, Your Health in 1934, which [00:07:00] is like pretty awesome as a read, actually, it's really fast read. It's a really simple read. The cover has men with boxes on their head. And like one man is looking like really crumbled and his spine is really rounded. And then one man is like standing up really tall. And that was the idea is that you would get rid of all these aches and pains by training your body in a really balanced way. Which I think is not wrong. I think he was right about that. 

His teaching was very hands on. And any of the quoted things, either from those articles in the sixties or from elders, kind of talking about Joe's teaching is that his cues were very nonverbal or if they were verbal, they were very short and to the point. He would say things like, "In d air, out d air," like that. Instead of flowery language, that it was very specific and then they did a lot of hands on cuing, which you see a lot in Pilates classes. I mean, pre coronavirus, that hands on is a tradition in the Pilates system. And that's something that [00:08:00] Pilates teachers continue to do now. 

They do say that Clara did more teaching than Joe, that Joe was kind of the face and let Clara actually did a little bit more of the teaching stuff. And we're really lucky as teachers to have worked with people who also studied with Clara because her teaching was a little bit better. 

Joseph  wrote letters to President Kennedy, which, like, baller good on you. He wanted Pilates to be taught in schools. He thought that he could cure pretty much all the ails of Americans, posture, like bad breathing techniques, bad movement techniques, that Pilates would fix all of that. And so he wrote some like really strongly worded letters to Kennedy, which is kind of awesome. 

He did file for several patents for his equipment. He wanted his students to act like animals because animals are healthy animals. They don't need to diet, they don't need to exercise. They are just doing their animal thing.

Joe taught [00:09:00] in his gym until his eighties, like through his eighties. Those articles that are written in Sports Illustrated, like Joseph Pilates passed away in 1967. So that was like five, six years before his death that he was still teaching in his gym. 

He passed the director position of the studio to one of his students, one of the elders, her name is Romana. She was a ballerina and she continued teaching what is now like the classical Pilates method, which is just the exercises that Joe taught and the way that he taught them. Other elders, which are those first generation students went on and taught in their worlds.

They went to California. That's where Ron Fletcher went. They stayed in New York or they went to Florida or they went, you know, across the country pretty much, and took what they remembered from Pilates and then open their own studios. Clara also continued to teach Pilates. She passed away in 1977, 10 years after Joe. Her obituary, it was in the [00:10:00] New York Times, which I thought was kind of cool when I was researching.

 Pilates' gym moved a couple of times as the neighborhood changed, they did change the location of the gym. Students bought the gym. There was like a lot of transition of ownership through the seventies, through the eighties, through the nineties, lots of changes of hands.

In 2000, there was a landmark case where Pilates was trademarked by Romana's Pilates, the sort of classical Pilates. There were cease and desist letters going out saying, you know, you can't call what you're doing Pilates, like only I'm doing Pilates, but a judge rolled in 2000 that you can't trademark Pilates.

You could trademark Club Pilates, is a trademark. Romana's Pilates is trademarked, but the word "Pilates "itself cannot be trademarked the same way running can't be trademarked ,or yoga can't be trademarked. So that allowed more studios to be able to say that they were doing Pilates, even if it wasn't the traditional or classical form [00:11:00] of Pilates. 

Coming up after the break, I want to tell you a little bit about why that's important because you're like, wow, that's a lot. And also some of the things that I think Joe got right in his system and some things that I think he got wrong.

Hey there. Enjoying the episode? Me too. You should definitely subscribe so you get notifications about new episodes. And if you love it, maybe leave me a review. That would be awesome. Thanks for sharing the Pilates love. Now back to the show.

Joseph  was a man and he had some really great ideas and he had some really great experience to share with his students, but he was also just a man. [00:12:00] As someone who is living in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, he was able to get some things really spot on. 

I don't think that I would have liked to learn from him as a teacher. It doesn't sound like his teaching style would have resonated with me as a student. I mean, in terms of, would you want to take a class from the creator of the system? Of course you would, but I don't think that his teaching style really vibes with my personal learning style. 

But he got some stuff right. Breathing is very important. And the majority of people, I don't even want to say Americans, just like the majority of people do not breathe well or completely. So by shifting this focus to the breath, by saying right up front, the way we breathe is important, you're going to do things on the inhale, you're going to exhale on the exertion. I think that that's something that hadn't really made it into mainstream exercise at the time. 

The work that he does with spring resistance is incredibly innovative [00:13:00] and important because what the reformer does, what the springboard does, what any of those springs do is they force you to elongate through compression. Like the Springs are compressing you and you have to elongate against them. And it allows you to really cue into stabilizer muscles when you're resisting that compressive force of the springs. I think that's really fantastic. And there isn't anything really like that in the land. 

The fact that he focused on whole body development, that this wasn't an isolated exercise. This was supposed to make your life better in all ways that is more important than going to the gym and doing a bunch of hamstring curls. Being able to use your hamstrings when you're walking around, draw that connection, that body awareness, those are all things that I think are making the world a better place for you in it.

A lot of thought his work was informed by other [00:14:00] styles of movement. And I don't know if it's documented necessarily, but you can see lots of yoga in his system, specifically, Ashtanga yoga, which is a style of yoga that I personally practice. And I am going to do an episode about this Venn diagram of Pilates and, Ashtanga yoga cause I think that's super interesting. But you see those yoga movements that mind, body connection, that body awareness that's all very much in yoga and yoga has been around forever. So there's that. 

A lot of these exercises in the classical repertoire has rowing origins. There are several rowing exercises and rowing was very popular in Pilates' time. Also lots of swimming exercises. Some of his equipment has that circus feel like the ladder barrel in particular. So you can see that. 

He worked with a lot of dancers and there is like a lot of dance stuff. I don't think that Pilates is specifically just for dancers or like only a dance system, but there is a lot of dance elements [00:15:00] into it. This choreography is definitely there. And you see in the different schools of Pilates, as the elders went out and founded their own schools and their own kind of interpretations of his movement systems, you really do see a lot of dance because the elders, a lot of those first generation students were dancers.

But he didn't get everything right. And I don't want to put him up on this pedestal, like this godlike being, because he was really just a guy. He drank a lot, which is not a character flaw. He also smoked a lot. He smoked a lot of cigars. In one of the articles from the sixties, he says, you know, I smoked 15 cigars a day, which seems excessive.

His belief was that doing Pilates would wipe the slate clean and like counteract the damage of smoking and drinking. And that's not the case. He died, I believe, of emphysema. So like that smoking is going to catch up with you. Doing Pilates is fantastic for you, but it doesn't negate other behaviors or other things that you're putting into your body.

But he also believed [00:16:00] that since human beings are born with a straight spine, it doesn't have any curves that what we should try to do is go back to having a straight spine. And we know now that that is not ideal. The reason we're born with a straight spine is there's no gravity. We're not trying to go against gravity when we're in utero. The curves of our spine are necessary. There are shock absorbers, and they are what allow us to be upright. We don't want to eliminate the curves of the spine. We want to eliminate like excessive curves in the spine. You don't want to be hunched over and rounded, but having a totally straight spine is not the goal.

You can say that he was a man of his time. Like some of the ways that he interacts with people are not, I think, great. He seemed kind of sharp in like the footage and like the interviews that I've seen or stories that they've told. He seems, I don't know. I don't know if I'd be friends with him, but I do like his system.

I do think that he had good [00:17:00] ideas about movement. And I don't think that his shortcomings as a person negate his system. I dunno, maybe that's a slippery slope. There's a story that I don't know if it is substantiated. There's like a lot of myth around Joe. But that he was asked to train the German army after world war one, but prior to world war two. And he saw that the army was pretty much preparing to go to war again. And he didn't like that. And that's one of the reasons why he immigrated. I don't know if that story is true. If it is, like more power to him. I think that he did the right thing by not doing that. 

He was a very passionate man and he really believed so strongly that his exercise system would save people's lives and would help people and [00:18:00] heal people. He said that no one in his internment camp got influenza in 1918 at that influence outbreak because they did his system. Again, whether or not that is true is we're not sure, but we do know that exercise is super duper important. 

So I really do recommend that you check out those links to the articles that I mentioned. If you want to learn more, if you have more questions, definitely hit me up. I'm also going to be posting on Pilates Teachers' Manual a little bit more about his teaching style and why his history is important to Pilates teachers. So if you're interested in learning more, definitely go check out that podcast as well.

So, is it important that you know this? I hope that it made your day a little brighter and maybe made you smile a little bit. I think it's important to know where the things you care about come from, and I hope that this mini history lesson did that for you. 

Be sure to subscribe and I'll see you soon.

[00:19:00] Thanks for stopping by for today's episode of Pilates Students' Manual. Subscribe to follow the podcast and join the community of Pilates lovers on Instagram @pilatesstudentsmanual. You can reach out to me there with questions, comments, or feedback, or send me an email at [email protected].

If you learned something new today, share this episode and the Pilates love. The adventure continues. Until next time. [00:20:00]