Joe was born in Ger­many in 1880. He was a frail and sickly child who suf­fered from asthma, rick­ets and rheumatic fever. Older boys picked on him and unable to defend him­self he ded­i­cated him­self to becom­ing stronger. A fam­ily physi­cian gave him a dis­carded anatomy book and as he put it “I learned every page, every part of the body; I would move each part as I mem­o­rized it. As a child, I would lie in the woods for hours, hid­ing and watch­ing the ani­mals move, how the mother taught the young,” he said. He stud­ied both East­ern and West­ern forms of exer­cise, includ­ing yoga, Zen, and ancient Greek and Roman mind/body reg­i­mens. By the time he was 14, his ded­i­ca­tion to fit­ness and health had devel­oped his body to the point that he was mod­el­ing for anatomy charts.

As a young man, he became an accom­plished boxer, gym­nast, skier and diver. There are 2 ver­sions of how he trav­eled to Eng­land. One ver­sion has it that in 1912 he decided to go there to work as a boxer, and another, that by 1914 he and his brother were cir­cus per­form­ers, tour­ing Eng­land with their troupe. In 1914, WWI broke out and Joe was interned in Eng­land for his Ger­man cit­i­zen­ship. In the “camp” he taught wrestling and self-defense, boast­ing that his stu­dents would emerge stronger than they were before being interned. It was here that he began devis­ing his sys­tem of orig­i­nal exer­cises that later became known as “Contrology”. Transferred to another camp, on The Isle of Man, he became a nurse and worked with many internees who suf­fered from wartime dis­eases and trauma. He devised equip­ment to reha­bil­i­tate them, tak­ing the springs from the beds and rig­ging exer­cise appa­ra­tus for the bedrid­den! In 1918, a ter­ri­ble epi­demic of influenza swept the world, killing mil­lions of peo­ple, tens of thou­sands in Eng­land. None of Joe’s fol­low­ers suc­cumbed even though the camps were the hard­est hit!

After the war Joe returned to Ger­many and began train­ing the Ham­burg Mil­i­tary Police in self defense and phys­i­cal train­ing. He also began tak­ing on per­sonal clients. He said, “I invented all these machines. Began back in Ger­many, was there until 1925 used to exer­cise rheumatic patients. I thought, why use my strength? So I made a machine to do it for me. Look, you see it resists your move­ments in just the right way so those inner mus­cles really have to work against it. That way you can con­cen­trate on move­ment. You must always do it slowly and smoothly. Then your whole body is in it.” It was at this time that he met Rudolf von Laban, a famous move­ment ana­lyst, who is said to have incor­po­rated some of Joe’s the­o­ries and exer­cises into his own work. Pilates was not happy with the polit­i­cal cli­mate in Ger­many in 1925 so he decided to leave. He was encour­aged to go to the United States.

It was en route to the U.S. that Joe met his future wife, Clara. She was a kinder­garten teacher who was suf­fer­ing from arthritic pain and Joe worked with her on the boat to heal her. Upon arriv­ing in New York City in 1926 they opened a gym at 939 Eighth Ave, in the same build­ing as sev­eral dance stu­dios and rehearsal spaces. “Contrology” (later known by his sir name) grad­u­ally became an intrin­sic part of many dancers’ train­ing and rehab work. Dancers were sent to Joe to be “fixed”. Both Martha Gra­ham and George Bal­an­chine sent their dancers to Joe Pilates for strength­en­ing and “bal­anc­ing” as well as rehabilitation. He was a friend and teacher to such renowned dancer/choreographers as Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, and Jerome Rob­bins and many required their dancers to go to Joe. However, Joe counted many socialites as well as plumbers and doc­tors to his list of clients.

For over forty years he worked at assess­ing and per­fect­ing his method. Joe was pas­sion­ate about under­stand­ing move­ment and anatomy. Joe felt his work was “50 years ahead of (his) time”. Joe’s def­i­n­i­tion of phys­i­cal fit­ness was:

the attain­ment and main­te­nance of a uni­formly devel­oped body with a sound mind fully capa­ble of nat­u­rally, eas­ily and sat­is­fac­to­rily per­form­ing our many and var­ied daily tasks with spon­ta­neous zest and pleasure.

In Jan­u­ary 1966 there was a fire in their build­ing. Joe returned to his stu­dio to try and save any­thing pos­si­ble and fell through the burnt out floor­boards, hang­ing by his hands from a beam for quite some time until res­cued by the fire­fight­ers. It is assumed that this inci­dent directly led to his death in Octo­ber 1967, at the age of 87. Clara con­tin­ued to teach and run the stu­dio until her death 10 years later, in 1977. At this time Romana Kryzanowska took over the stu­dio and has ded­i­cated her life to teach­ing Joe’s work as he him­self devised it.

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