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Pilates (pronounced pul-LAH-teez) is a popular exercise regimen that uses special stretches and machines. As a quick browse through our Pilates category confirms, it's a big industry: books, exercise classes, equipment sales, etc. It's also quite popular with rich and famous folks like Minnie Driver, Madonna, and Julia Roberts. Pilates is named after it's creator, Joseph H. Pilates, who was born in Germany in 1880. As a German intern in England during World
War I, he designed a number of ingenious exercise machines using old hospital beds and springs. In 1926, he moved to New York with his wife and opened his own body conditioning studio. Emphasizing flexibility and overall strength over body bulk, Pilates quickly became popular with dancers like Martha Graham and George Balanchine. More and more Pilates studios popped up, and by 1964, The Herald Tribune observed: In dance classes around the United States, hundreds of young students limber up daily with an exercise they know as "pilates" without knowing that the word has a capital "P" and a living, right-breathing namesake. Joseph died in 1968 at the ripe old age of 87. He must have been on to
something.
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