Pilates has long been mocked as the regimen of middle-aged Manhattan neurotics. Samantha from Sex and the City was an adherent and today social media is awash with so-called “Pilates princesses.” Stefon Diggs, the 6ft, 191lb Washington Commanders wide receiver, has been filmed stretching on – and falling from – a reformer Pilates machine. Since 2020, online searches for Pilates have grown fourfold.
But the success of Pilates is comparatively recent. By the time of his death in New York City in 1967, Joseph Pilates’s method was not particularly well-known and, according to friends, he felt bitter about it. Science, he thought, had not recognized his contribution to physical wellness. In his latter years he drank rather too much and chain-smoked cigars. One story has him becoming such a nuisance at Jacob’s Pillow, the dance school in Massachusetts run by Ted Shawn, that he was eventually banned. In the end he died from emphysema, probably brought on by too many cigars. Still, he managed to reach the ripe old age of 83.
Joseph Pilates was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany in 1883. As a child he was sickly and bullied. He became determined to put on muscle, which he did via gymnastics and body-building, and was so successful that by the age of 14 he was able to pose as an anatomical model. He boxed, did jiu-jitsu and was successful with the ladies. He lived in Britain for a time, where he ran training courses in self-defense for the police. In short, he was a magnificent physical specimen.
Pilates ran and worked out on the Manhattan streets in winter dressed only in swimming trunks
Pilates emigrated to the US in 1925 and lived there until his death 42 years later. He opened his New York studio at 939 Eighth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen in 1926, in a building that also housed dance studios. This accident of geography shaped his entire career, since the studio’s proximity to dance spaces was why dancers discovered him; these celebrated practitioners included George Balanchine, Martha Graham and Jerome Robbins.
Stories of Pilates’s behavior are numerous. He reportedly ran and worked out on the Manhattan streets in winter dressed only in swimming trunks. He conducted his sessions with a cigar clamped firmly between his teeth; his studio was often so full of smoke that students had to open the windows.
In 1962, Sports Illustrated ran a profile of Pilates entitled “Learning to be an animal.” At the time of the piece, Pilates was in his late seventies, still in the studio in Hell’s Kitchen and teaching every session himself. The walls were decorated with paintings, photographs and sculptures of Pilates in the nude, showing him spearfishing at 56, posing as an allegorical “Spirit of Air” figure on the floor of the Nebraska state capitol at 60 and skiing at 78. He argued that humans should learn to move with the same agility, strength and efficiency as wild animals.
Once in America, Pilates entered into the spirit of free enterprise and designed furniture and exercise equipment such as the Wunda Chair, the Cadillac trapeze table, the Ped-o-Pull and the Ladder Barrel. He saw American furniture as a source of disease and patented many items, calling them “Pilates Automatic Balanced Health Furniture.” He invented a special V-shaped bed. He wrote: “This ‘V’ bed is especially adopted for the expectant mother, who requires all the comfort and rest she can get and also requires a perfect spine. This is the natural bed for the hospital for expectant mothers, asthma sufferers and consumptives.”
A bed for asthma and TB? It sounds almost too good to be true. Pilates left a significant quantity of written work about his exercise regimen, so we can examine some of his other claims. Though exhibiting much good sense about the importance of physical activity and good posture, they are full of over-promising bunkum. Among the principles of his system, which he dubbed “contrology,” is the following: “Proper carriage of the spine is the only natural preventive against abdominal obesity, shortness of breath, asthma, high and low blood pressure and various forms of heart disease. It is confidently asserted by me that practically all human ailments are directly traceable to wrong habits which can only be corrected through the immediate adoption of right (natural, normal) habits.”
And in a direct challenge to both science and humility, Pilates said: “Everyone possessing the moral courage owes it to himself and to humanity to investigate the merits claimed for ‘contrology’ by me.”
Scientists did indeed investigate Pilates’s claims. They found very little evidence that his system is more effective than any other sort of exercise in alleviating even the most minor of medical conditions, such as lower back pain, let alone heart disease, tuberculosis, “weak kidneys,” high and low blood pressure and “practically all human ailments.” Meta-studies abound, and they all show that Pilates works pretty well – compared to doing no exercise at all.
Yet Pilates keeps expanding, developing offshoots and denominations at frightening speed. There is barre Pilates, yogalates, contemporary Pilates and, for the traditionalists among us, classical Pilates. The most popular is reformer Pilates, not in fact evidence of a Pilates Martin Luther, but named after an expensive combination exercise bed/medieval torture device with pulleys and springs. It is modeled on Joseph Pilates’s “universal reformer,” a tool for totally transforming the human body.
Reformer Pilates is often promoted as a way to build “core strength.” But even Pilates himself did not believe there was such a thing as a “core,” and there is no mention of the word in any of his extensive writings. Yet this concept is now central to many of his latter-day adherents. Such is the flexibility of the system that it can contort itself into whatever the latest fad demands. Reformer Pilates is the subject of celebrity endorsements and a roiling TikTok craze.
Does it matter that much of the theory underlying Pilates is nonsense? I would argue it does, insofar as its adherents are encouraged to believe in pseudoscience. Luckily tuberculosis is rarely encountered these days and asthma can be controlled with inexpensive inhalers. But there is still no known cure for charlatans who want to get rich from the worried well.
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