08/26/2022
Joseph Hubertus Pilates began his career as a proponent and teacher of βphysical cultureβ β a broad-based movement advocating physical education through exercise, athletic excellence, and mental discipline.ββββββββ
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Through his own experience and teaching, he created a system of corrective exercise that he introduced to the American market in the late 1920s.ββββββββ
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Pilates was born in MΓΆnchengladbach, Germany on December 9, 1883. In 1913, he traveled to England, finding work as a circus tumbler. When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, Pilates and his circus troupe were taken into custody as enemy aliens and interned for the duration of the war on the Isle of Man, located off the west coast of England. He was one of several physical culturists who led the campβs daily exercise routines for the more than 24,000 inmates housed there. During this period, Pilates developed his ideas on fitness and gained experience as a teacher.ββββββββ
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After the war, in early 1919, Pilates was repatriated to Germany. In Hamburg and Berlin, he learned from medical practitioners while formulating his ideas on fitness and conditioning.ββββββββ
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Pilatesβ thinking was shaped by his work with injured soldiers during the war, his fatherβs involvement in fitness and sport, and the post-war intellectual era in Germany in which science, literature, philosophy and the arts flourished. European holistic therapies such as hydrotherapy, trigger point therapy and breath work influenced Pilatesβ development, as did meditation and modern dance. He invented an apparatus, improving upon the standard equipment of the time, which could both address physical dysfunction or injury and condition the body. Pilatesβ prototype apparatus eventually became the Universal Reformer.ββββββββ
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Learn more atββββββββ
https://nationalpilatescertificationprogram.org/PMA/About/History-of-Pilates/ββββββββ
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