Welcome to the June edition of Pilates Central News.

In this edition:

• No Ordinary Joe
• No Doubting Thomas
• Muscle Bound
• Clothes Encounter

No ordinary Joe

Many people start Pilates without knowing too much about Joseph Pilates the man. So we thought you might like to know a few facts about his eventful life.

Joseph Pilates was born in Germany in 1883. He was apparently quite a sickly child with asthma but then became a keen gymnast and boxer. At the start of world war one in 1914 he was touring England with a circus where he performed as a strongman and “Greek statue”. While staying in Blackpool he was interned as an “enemy alien” at the Knockaloe camp on the Isle of Man. Here he read books on health, anatomy and sport, observed the ease of movement of Manx cats and developed his ‘contrology’ system of exercises to keep the inmates fit, turning bunks into early versions of the Reformer.

In Pilates’ famous 1962 interview with Sports Illustrated, journalist Robert Wernick summarised how Pilates’ ideas were formed on the Isle of Man. He wrote of Joseph asking: “Why were the cats in such good shape, so bright-eyed, while the humans were growing every day paler, weaker, apathetic creatures ready to give up if they caught a cold or fell down and sprained an ankle?…He began demonstrating these exercises to the dejected figures around him, and since they had nothing else to do, they began to do the exercises too. Awkwardly and timorously at first, but under his firm supervision they became more and more confident, more and more bouncy, like cats.”

Pilates returned to Germany after world war one, but emigrated to the US in 1925. He With his wife Clara he founded his body-conditioning gym in New York. Joe was granted US citizenship in 1935 and Clara got hers two years later in 1937. Pilates published two books, Your Health in 1934 and Return to Life Through Contrology in 1945.

His methods achieved great results and he attracted many celebrity clients, including dancers Martha Graham, Hanya Holm and Ruth St Denis, ballerina Romana Kryzanowska, choreographer George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins the co-director of the film West Side Story and actors Katharine Hepburn and Sir Laurence Olivier. Christopher Isherwood, author of Goodbye to Berlin, noted in his diary of May 5 1947, “Started at Pilates’ gym.” Modern dancer Ruth St Denis had a career-threatening knee injury but after a year on Joe’s massage table her knee pain had gone and she “had ankles like a young girl”.

The studio was a functional place. On the BBC radio’s Sporting Witness show Pilates Elder (a Pilates Elder is someone who was trained by Pilates) Mary Bowen, an actress and comedian who trained with Pilates in 1959 remembered, “an old building in New York where everything creaked. There was a large room with apparatus, completely masculine, not a single thing of beauty, a flower or anything.” Clara would be at the gym in her white nurse’s uniform running the business side, while Joseph taught the clients. He was not one for small talk. “They wouldn’t talk, they would sculpt you,” said Bowen.

When Pilates was interviewed by Robert Wernick for Sports Illustrated in 1962 the photographer I. C. ‘Chuck’ Rapoport took a set of iconic photos of Joe at work in his studio. Pilates asked Chuck to touch his toes. He couldn’t, but the septuagenarian Pilates could. Joe was smoking a cigar and challenged the 24-year-old photographer to an arm-wrestling contest, which he duly won. Among the shots Chuck took were journalist Robert Wernick standing on Joe’s taut stomach and Pilates coaching clients on his Reformer machines.

Pilates was not averse to a good PR stunt. On a Pilatesology interview on YouTube his barber and friend Tony Carlino recalled Joe, wearing just his shorts, using the power of his mind to roll in the New York snow in front of a group of reporters. Carlino added: “He was like a movie star walking down the street in his shorts with his cigar…He was so straight, so chiselled with beautiful white hair and as tanned as tan can be.”

Pilates also helped Carlino overcome his PTSD from his time in the US Navy: “He taught me that with your mind you can overcome fear. I had battle fatigue and his exercises helped calm me down. I found I could sleep better.”

By 1965 Joe was sure his methods had been proved correct, saying: “I must be right. Never an aspirin. Never injured a day in my life. The whole country, the whole world, should be doing my exercises. They’d be happier.”

Sadly there was a fire in a storeroom at the studio in 1966, which Joe helped to fight. He died a year later aged 83, suffering from the lung condition emphysema. Mary Bowen attributed his death to smoking cigars, though there were also reports he had inhaled smoke during the fire.

His obituary in the New York Times read: “A white-maned lion of a man, with steel-blue eyes and mahogany skin, Mr Pilates kept as limber in his 80s as a teenager.” After his death, Joseph’s techniques of ‘contrology’ became known throughout the world as simply Pilates. This “lion of a man” would be gratified to know that the world has caught up, and now he is a household name.

No doubting Thomas

“Gareth Southgate brought in the Marines, Thomas Tuchel prefers Pilates,” reads the headline in the Times. The article refers to the England football team’s visit to the La Camiral Golf & Wellness Resort in Girona, Spain, before the side’s World Cup Qualifier victory against Andorra.

On their recovery day the players were photographed lying on blue Pilates mats doing, “gentle exercising in the garden of their hotel with Pilates poles.” This was all part of Tuchel’s plan to enjoy life in the Pyrenean foothills and “to establish the relationships and behaviours he thinks necessary for success at a tournament.”

The headline on the piece wasn’t entirely accurate however, as Tuchel’s predecessor Gareth Southgate had in addition to his Marine assault course training also used Pilates with England. Southgate took Pilates instructor Suzanne Scott, a founder member of the Pilates Foundation, to the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The England squad posted a video of Scott’s warm-down session after beating Sweden in the quarter final, while skipper Harry Kane was pictured preparing for the World Cup semi-final against Croatia with Pilates stretches. Scott’s work with England even encouraged Raheem Sterling to take up meditation. Now successive England managers have utilised it, Pilates might well be said to be coming home.

Muscle bound

Pilates is more normally associated with mobility and flexibility, but the Independent recently published the “Top five Pilates exercises for building muscle.” The paper writes: “Think Pilates and gains are incompatible? Think again.”

Writer Emilie Lavinia says, “The idea that you can’t build strength from Pilates is a myth” and that videos of gym bros struggling on reformer machines prove how much strength is required for Pilates. It’s easier strengthening muscles on a Reformer machine, loaded with springs to create tension, but mat Pilates can help too.

The piece interviews Helen O’Leary of Complete Pilates who says “on the mat, lying on your back, the weight of the arms and legs provide resistance for the abdominals. Other exercises use body weight resistance – such as when you are on all fours or in the plank position. If you’re just starting your strength-training journey, simple mat Pilates moves can be a great way to start. If you’re an intermediate, you can add heavier hand weights and more resistance with firmer bands or adapt your exercises to make them harder.”

It’s good to see Pilates muscling in to areas people don’t expect. O’Leary lists her top five exercisers for strengthening muscle, knee hovers, dead bugs, bridges, side lifts and leg pulls. She also advocates plenty of recovery time: “When you strength train, the adaptations occurring in your nervous system and muscle tissues are occurring in the rest periods, not during the exercise. So you need to factor in the rest days with the resistance training days to see results.”

Clothes encounter

“Skintight leggings or baggy joggers? What your gymwear says about you — and the world,” read the Guardian feature delving into the complicated subject of women’s athleisure clothing. Writer Ellie Violet Bramley prefers to perform Pilates in a paint-spattered t-shirt, but all around her are gymsets and unitards.

Bramley writes that millennials go for skin-tight gym sets, though Gen Z might see this as “Jurassic fitness” and go for something more baggy. Younger clients are going for “matching activewear sets” and even the “workout bikini,” which some men say they find intimidating. Some brands now do “scrunch designs at the bum” to accentuate curves, though cinched designs are better for Pilates. While some people wear their athleisure gear all day.

To confuse matters even more some users are opting for a mix of tight and baggy gear. Professor Samantha Noelle Sheppard speculates that all this gymwear is performative: “You think it shows fitness and the idea of an athletic body and a healthy mind. But what it shows is a healthy bank account.” New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino suggests that, ”Athleisure broadcasts your commitment to controlling your body through working out.”

Amid all the meaning attached to gymwear perhaps the best comment came in a letter from Guardian reader Jennifer Henley: “One of the joys of being an old lady is not giving a damn about workout clothes. All of us geriatric women at our Pilates class wear loose jogging bottoms and baggy T-shirts. All that matters is we are still here and can move… just!”

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The Pilates Central Team