The Pilates Effect: Heroes Behind the Revolution

By Stacey Redfield and Sarah Holmes

The true story behind this fitness phenomenon and its long, controversy-plagued road to popular success.

While millions today find the Pilates system helps to strengthen the core, improve posture, and recover from or prevent injuries and pain, Pilates has been clouded in controversy since the beginning. Its origin story is one of greed, ego, celebrities, and lies, with heated legal controversy that threatened the industry.

In The Pilates Effect, Stacey Redfield and Sarah Holmes reveal the hidden history of Pilates. From humble beginnings, Joseph Pilates founded the groundbreaking regimen in New York City and worked closely with his partner Clara to rehabilitate and renew dancers who had been injured or were aging. Although Joseph’s core strengthening regimen was touted as “fifty years ahead of [its] time,” finance and health issues plagued Joe and Clara’s business. A small and devoted group of followers, including Carola Trier, would fight to spread the practice that they felt gave them a second chance at life and rehabilitated their bodies and souls.

A fascinating and inspiring story of fitness in America, The Pilates Effect showcases the people and events that formed an iconic industry, and reveal how it offers positive change for everyday people regardless of gender, ethnicity, or background.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684350896

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

What Is the Pilates Effect?

The story of Pilates is filled with greed and ego, celebrities and lies. It’s hard to imagine that an exercise system commonly known today as the go-to solution for strengthening the core was almost lost to nostalgia. Over the past eighty years, the exercise was picked up, embraced, shunned, dismissed, copied, and transformed and miraculously continues to survive. This method of exercise had limped along for decades under the guidance of its creator, Joseph Pilates, its success dependent on word of mouth passed along among friends who found value in the exercises. In the late 1960s, with Joseph Pilates gone, the studio—floundering from lack of leadership—all but dissolved into the New York City skyline. But a handful of people, recognizing the effect the program had on their bodies, refused to let go of the Pilates system.

This is the story of the first generation of teachers—Eve Gentry, Romana Kryzanowska, Carola Trier, Kathleen Stanford Grant, and Ron Fletcher—to emerge from the original 939 Eighth Avenue Pilates studio. As the early adopters of the method, they were the ones who learned directly from Joseph Pilates and experienced unique versions of his exercises, from which they created their own adaptations of the work. They are the true heroes of this book. If not for their tireless efforts to preserve the Pilates method—sometimes out of sheer desperation for a job—this essential piece of physical culture would have disappeared. For the people who have found comfort and relief in embracing this method of exercise as a way of life, Pilates is a success story. Even with all the controversy, legal battles, and competition, Pilates has not only survived the trends but has spread to become a multibillion-dollar, globally practiced industry.

EXERCISE WITH A PURPOSE

Pilates moved beyond the New York City limits, survived a cross-country migration, and evolved to meet the needs of a contemporary society. By the 1980s, there was big money to be made in the fitness industry, and the Pilates method was fast becoming the hottest workout in the world. Staking claims to the ownership of the Pilates method ignited a heated legal controversy, with a new generation of teachers fighting over intellectual property and free enterprise. The Pilates communities split as teachers were forced to pick sides—classical versus contemporary. One side was attempting to assume the rights over the entire legacy of the movement’s founder, while the other side demanded that the exercise method be free for everyone.

At the root of the story is the marvelously stubborn man known as Uncle Joe, born Joseph Hubertus Pilates to a lower-middle-class family in Germany in 1883, who claimed to be fifty years ahead of his time and established the exercise practice that bears his name. Yet the stories of those who stepped forward to salvage the practice after Joseph died and his business was near financial failure have been silenced by the clatter of popular and commercial culture. Joseph Pilates’s legacy wasn’t exclusively the development of his machines and exercises intended to keep the body fit for life. His expectation was more than mere exercise; rather, the exercise was to be adopted as a lifestyle.

It was a lofty plan, the idea of selling the American people on a system of daily exercise—especially in the 1920s. Pilates’s arrival in New York City had been greeted by a booming economy and people more interested in an easier life than in one that required effort. Pilates had emigrated from Germany after surviving as a prisoner during the First World War. To him, the lack of attention being paid to the continued development of the body was a sure sign of another devastating collapse of society, a grave warning to be heeded, lest history repeat itself.

Pilates was perceived as eccentric, an alarmist, and, to some, a genius, as he was unrelenting about his survival of the fittest ideas. Exercise was his mode of fixing anything that could possibly go wrong with the body. Pilates believed that his system was foolproof: adhering to his program would ward off injury and illness, keeping the body fit for life. He theorized that exercise done in a reclined position reduced stress on the heart and joints. He also maintained a deliberate focus on breathing: filling the lungs completely with each inhalation followed by a complete emptying of the lungs on exhalation. Pilates exercises are corrective in nature, addressing imperfections in the body’s development such as bowlegs, knock-knees, stooped shoulders, swayed backs, and curvatures of the spine. Each exercise was assigned a purpose; although Joseph Pilates’s standard purpose was for da body.

Many of the issues that Pilates treated with his collection of corrective exercises are now managed by physical therapists. Nonetheless, physical therapy is not a replacement for Pilates as an overall, ongoing system of conditioning for the body. While his method is by no means a magic pill to prevent disease, illness, and obesity, the Pilates method has racked up an impressive record of helping practitioners gain and maintain physical strength.

STACEY’S DISCOVERY

Stacey walked into her first Pilates class at a fancy spa looking for an new exercise program that could fix her postpartum body. She hated the way that she felt after back-to-back pregnancies. She was exhausted and still holding twenty pounds of baby weight after an eighty-pound weight gain that she couldn’t lose no matter how hard she tried. Her back and knees ached, and there was an unexplained stabbing pain under her rib cage that doctors had dismissed as a ploy to score a prescription for painkillers.

By the time that class was scheduled to begin, the room was stuffed to capacity, with a few bodies spilling out of the doorway into the hall. They started with a deep breath, and for the next fifty-five minutes, Stacey struggled through what seemed to be a simple series of very basic exercises. She followed as best as she could—inhaling here, exhaling there; bending her right knee, now her left; scooping her belly and pointing her toes—until the class ended with a few minutes of deep breathing. The class flew by quickly, and for the first time Stacey left an exercise class feeling better than she did when she came in. She wasn’t limping or dripping with sweat, dreading the aftermath of sore muscles. After a few months of regular lessons, her posture had improved and her pain was gone. She had finally found exercise that made sense.

PHYSICAL CULTURE

We tend to think of exercise as a modern-day phenomenon invented by a celebrity trainer or a professional athlete instead of something that has been around for centuries. In the early twentieth century, exercise was common, politically motivated, and even trendy. Like all other tried-and-true ideas, exercise continues to reinvent itself generation after generation, with each method promising a better body or a longer life.

The human body continues to fascinate us. There have been no upgrades to it since its creation. What has changed is how we affect the body, meaning that as a society, what we do physically, mentally, and spiritually can have negative effects on our health and well-being. Sure, some things that we do are popular, even fun. But eventually what looks like a great idea to get in shape ends up causing pain or damage, reneging on the promise of a better body that hooked us in.

While we might view exercise as a new idea, exercise systems were well established long before Joseph Pilates came onto the scene. We have always depended on the health and fitness of the body as the best and only defense against injury and illness. Historically, it takes a crippling event that claims lives to prompt a sobering need for change. For example, the fall of the Roman Empire was partially blamed on the leisure mentality of the society that left citizens vulnerable to their enemies, causing nations to beef up their military as a safeguard against attack. And several plagues and pandemics have swept the world through the ages, one so devastating that up to 60 percent of the European population was too weak and sickly to survive it. Despite all of humanity’s advances in science and technology, there was still no substitute for maintaining the physical systems of the body except through daily exercise. While the discovery of medications helped combat some diseases, it still remains that the strong have a better chance to survive.

Programs identified as the physical culture of a society were introduced as a symbol of power. Initially, physical culture was treated as a program to keep the body healthy enough to ward off a plague or an attack. Eventually it was discovered that building visibly strong bodies also had earning potential. It started with a group of men at the end of the nineteenth century who figured out how to make money with their muscles. The strongman was basically a glorified bodybuilder who made his living on the vaudeville circuit, wowing crowds by showing off a well-defined body. Muscles became all the rage, and strongmen stood at the threshold of a new age of exercise. They left little to the imagination, wearing nothing more than skimpy loincloths made of animal skin and a pair of gladiator boots. Yet, this was entertainment. Paying to watch a nearly naked man flexing his muscles was a bit scandalous to an audience that had just emerged from the Victorian era, when showing skin was considered immoral. But the strongmen found acceptance; as long as they posed to emulate the classic Greek statues, they were viewed as living works of art. In the eyes of the public, the strongman became a hero, even a new moral leader. German-born Eugen Sandow was perhaps the most famous strongman of the nineteenth century and can be credited for literally pushing physical culture to the next level. Sandow’s influence set most of the fitness standards not only for England, where he lived, but for most of Europe and paved the way for the next generation of he-men who embraced daily exercise as a way of life.

Advancements in technology during this era were both a blessing and a curse, as the air, once pure, became polluted, and the medical profession discovered several more diseases needing treatment. England led Europe as the leader in the field of physical culture, boasting the most powerful military after commissioning the services of the now world-famous Eugen Sandow, who had been bestowed with the honorary title of Professor of Physical Culture. The physical culturist, revered as a symbol of health, was a new career path for