The Hidden Chapters of Pilates History and Their Modern Day Echoes

Ever wondered about the enigmatic figure whose fitness philosophy we all adore? This episode is an is an enlightening exploration into Joseph Pilates, the flawed yet visionary human behind our beloved exercise system. We start with an intimate look at his personal battles, from childhood ailments to the relentless pursuit of physical excellence. His story is not just one of overcoming adversity but also of strict principles and mysterious personal history. We shed light on elements often left in the shadows, like his internment during WWI, where he developed the foundational exercises of Contrology that evolved into today's Pilates, and the stories and legends we have been told.

Get ready to unravel the intricate tapestry of Pilates' life, including the pivotal role women of color played in his legacy, being the only two individuals he personally certified. We stroll through his New York days, where alongside his partner Clara, they cultivated an unconventional gym environment. We take a candid look at his business acumen, or lack thereof, his unique teaching style, and the controversies that arose regarding his behavior and the non-trademarking of his name. This chapter paints a complete picture of a man whose influence on the dance and celebrity communities was as profound as it was complicated.

As we wind down, we will talk about the reverberations of the Pilates trademark dispute and what it means for the divide between classical and contemporary Pilates. I share my personal evolution of the practice into what I call  Sensulates, which honors the essence of Pilates while fostering a liberating approach to movement. This isn't just about fitness; it's about a holistic experience that can enhance one's quality of life, including their sex life. Through personal stories and testimonials, we delve into how embracing this method opens doors to a world of intuitive movement and wellbeing. Join me in this transformational journey, where we honor the past and celebrate the future of movement.

Plus a closing tangent for my fellow hyper focused, neurodivergent friends at the end on my latest obsessions: color theory, and kibbe.

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Don't forget, you're a BAD B! Stand SO tall & proud.


Music: OH YEAH
Musician: Philip E Morris

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Hi, my friends, and welcome back to Hot Girl Pilates. I am here to talk my shit. Yep, I'm here to expose Pilates, and you know it might not necessarily be what you're thinking and it might be exactly what you're thinking, but I just feel like it's really time to clear some air, to speak some truth. You know what, sometimes I literally forget that people don't know that Pilates is named after a guy named Joseph Pilates. It will happen every so often that I'm reminded through some social media and I realize there's still so much misunderstanding about what Pilates is, who Joseph Pilates was, what this system means, what's trite, what's important and what really is not important. So I think it might be helpful to just give a little bit of history, a little bit of backstory, and talk about Joseph Pilates, a little bit about what makes him great and also what makes him just an imperfect human who might have some things in his past that make you really question whether you should put this man on a pedestal at the very least. So that's what I'm going to get into to begin with. Now, joseph Pilates was born in Germany, near a city called Dusseldorf, and one thing that is very well known about Joe is that he was quite sick as a child. He had rickets, he had asthma, he had rheumatic fever and these are things I think that contributed to his personality and why he developed his exercises in the first place. Now Joseph Pilates was a boxer, he was in a circus and he lost one of his eyes at a young age. I think that's something that people might be surprised to know is that Joe has a glass eye, or he had a glass eye. It's pretty obvious when you look at photographs of him, and he was very sick as a young boy and I think learning more about sort of childhood trauma and things that can contribute to our personalities as we age. I think this is complete conjecture, but it might be fair to say that he had something to prove and wanted to. After being bullied for being weak and experiencing illness that made his muscles atrophy, he really had something to prove in regards to his strength. So becoming strong and becoming in control of his muscles and his body was really important to him. As well as aesthetics, joseph Pilates had an extremely strict idea of what was aesthetically beautiful. This is one of my first bones to pick with the man. He was very clear that he doesn't like weightlifting traditional weightlifting because it makes what he considered ugly bulging muscles. So a lot of that rhetoric that you might hear today, where you know some people might say like, oh, this isn't what the work is about. It's not about long, lean lines. Actually, that's exactly what Joseph Pilates wanted Like, just to make that very clear. He was an aesthetics guy and he cared a lot about his appearance and appearing very strong and having great control of his muscles.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Now there's tons of mystery surrounding Joseph Pilates past, his history and there's a lot of things that we will never know because there's no records and the people who may have known Joseph Pilates are older now and many of them have passed away. Joseph Pilates are older now and many of them have passed away. So there's some things that we're going to have to just accept that we may never know and are part of the mystery. If you want to learn more about that, check out a book is called Caged Lion and you can learn about some of the very suspicious history of Joseph Pilates. What happened to his first wife? What happened to his first child? A lot of suspicion there. Okay, red flags being raised again. I just think it's really important to make sure that we're not idolizing this person. Okay, he was a very sketchy character in many ways.

Speaker 1: 4:28

Okay, so continuing on, we know that Joseph Pilates was considered himself an athlete and a boxer. Although he wasn't that great, he did, you know, make many efforts and he did do some professional boxing, it seems, and he was interested in a lot of different fitness modalities fencing, swimming, horseback, riding he was really interested in. Now, it's a little bit hard to really verify this story, but there's a couple of different stories as to why Joseph Pilates was taken into an internment camp during World War I in the year of 1914, 1915. One of those stories is that he was traveling with his circus troop in England and they were taken as illegal aliens. There's some speculation that he might've been on a submarine doing something else when he was taken, but we know that he was brought to the Isle of man in about 1914 or 15, which would have made him 31 or 32 years old Wild to think about, because I'm 31, turning 32 this year and he spent the years of 1915 to 1919 there, so you know, from the ages of 31, 32 to ages 36.

Speaker 1: 5:39

And this is where he developed his mat exercises, pilates. Mat Pilates is a prison workout y'all. That's why it can be done in a small space. You can almost picture Joseph Pilates doing these exercises in, you know, essentially a jail cell, right? So that seems pretty clear that this is where he came up with what he called Contrology, which was the study and art of control. He did not name his exercises, pilates. That was only done after his death. So he had these movements that he was so proud of and you know, presumably he had a lot of time on his hands in an internment camp and he became really obsessed with this work and he also wanted to share it. So he was teaching other prisoners in the Isle of man and he was so strict about aesthetics, so strict about everything being performed perfectly. He writes pretty clearly that most people cannot perform his mat exercises to his liking and because of that he decided to invent many different apparatus in order to help people to get strong enough to perform his mat exercises to his liking. Maybe you've heard the story that the soldiers and the prisoners that Joseph Pilates taught his exercises to famously did not come down with the Spanish flu or the influenza when there was an outbreak at the internment camp. So that was sort of one of the first claims to fame. He was really excited about his work and really excited to share it with the world.

Speaker 1: 7:24

So, skipping forward, we'll jump into his first book, called your Health. In this book he shares a lot of his ideas around movement, around fitness, and in this book there's also, you know, what is maybe considered somewhat of a dirty little secret in the Pilates community, and that's because there is a racial slur used in this book. You know some people say this was a common phrase at the time. But you are free to take this information and, you know, absorb it however you wish, whether you think you know it was a time and place thing, whether you think that it means he could be racist.

Speaker 1: 8:06

I don't think I'm in any position to say whether this man was racist or not. I'm just here to give you the context. I can also say because I think it's important to share this context as well there's only two what we call elders. Elders are teachers who were certified by or trained with Joseph Pilates himself. There's only two that were ever certified by Joe and Lolita. San Miguel was one, the other is Kathy Grant. Both of these women are women of color. I think that context is important here because it can just add a little bit more broad viewpoint of who Joseph Pilates was. The only two people that he ever certified himself personally were women, and not only that, but women of color. So I just wanted to share that tidbit as well.

Speaker 1: 8:56

That being said, let's move on to his next book, which is called Return to Life Through Contrology. So this is a much more commonly known book associated with Joseph Pilates, and it came out later than your Health. This is the book he describes how to do every single mat exercise in the traditional mat Pilates series, and I'm going to call it traditional for a very specific reason that I'll get into in this episode a little bit later in this episode. And I just am here to say that that book you can buy it right now for a very reasonable price and you can do all of the exercises. So I think that there's a lot of people with interest in this industry in making you think that you cannot do these exercises on your own, where that is very untrue. That is just the opposite of what's true and what Joseph Pilates wanted. He wanted everyone to do these exercises on their own, but to follow his very strict regimen in doing so. So in the book you'll find that it's very clear, very descriptive, and that you don't need much else If you want to just practice classical mat Pilates, pick up that book, give it a go. It's also just a really great starting point. And, again, taking into account that not everything Joseph Pilates says is true, definitely not factually accurate and questionable, morality wise, okay.

Speaker 1: 10:20

So, taking all that into account, now Joseph Pilates moved to New York City. He moved there on a ship. He met Clara, his partner, who he never married on that ship. A lot of mystery around that, but Clara was probably the best thing to ever happen to this man. She was a nurse and I think she is a huge part of the reason why we have the history that we have today. So she was his life partner. They never married. They opened a studio in New York city and this studio has no tax record. So, yes, joseph Pilates was a tax fraud. Okay, he did not pay taxes. He has almost no records, he did not keep efficient records and you know, this is just another, you know, flaw of this man. Now, you know, take, I don't think this is any reason to hate him or anything, but it's just a fact Like he was someone who liked to skirt around the rules, break the rules and do things his way.

Speaker 1: 11:24

So at his Pilates gym I also think it's important to note, it was called, referred to, as Joe's gym there was no group classes. So it wasn't like classical or sorry club Pilates where you go in today. There's a teacher, you're putting on music and you're going through the routine. The teacher is guiding you. It wasn't like that at all. There was no music. There was reformers, mats, weights, magic circles and there was charts on the wall with the lists of exercise. Joseph Pil, he would work with you potentially for longer.

Speaker 1: 12:09

And at this gym, you know, a lot of questionable things went down. You know there's stories of Joseph Pilates violently scrubbing people in the bathroom with a very harsh soap, scrubbing their bodies. You know, I don't think Joseph Pilates ever asked for consent when he made a hands-on adjustment. I think he just went for it. That's the kind of guy he was. There was absolutely nothing gentle about the way that Joseph Pilates teaches, which I think is really counterintuitive to what some people might see as Pilates today is like gentle, rehabilitary, like no, he was hardcore, he was harsh, he was, you know, some might even say rough. Okay, and he was running this gym. You'd pay like $5, I believe, to drop in and start your workout. He might come around and adjust to you, but he might not even be there. So that is kind of the history of his gym in New York.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Also important to note is that during this time he never trademarked Pilates. Now we know that he wanted to live somewhat off the grid with his system, but he did not go through the channels to protect or copyright his work. What we do know that he went through the channels to protect were his designs and he trademarked those. So he trademarked his design for Pilates reformer. He has some old designs that actually weren't that great, that were part of his process before he came up with the actual reformer the ladder barrel, the Wanda chair there's trademarks of all those things. So he was obviously a fan of trademarks, not a fan of copywriting the name Pilates, and of course, he didn't refer to his work as Pilates anyways. So that's going to come into play very soon.

Speaker 1: 14:05

Pilates became a very trendy workout amongst actors, actresses, models and became sort of known as, like this celebrity secret. It started to spread from the East Coast to the West Coast where there became, you know, a lot of people in Hollywood doing these exercises. Joseph Pilates spent summers at Jacob's Pillow in Beckett, massachusetts, where he trained dancers, and this is where there's a lot more questionable behavior. There's a talk that someone did at Jacob's Pillow where they describe an instance of Joseph Pilates grabbing their breast and kind of shaming their body, which is just so horrifying, done, you know, in front of class, and that's who this man was. Okay, so just got to keep it real with y'all.

Speaker 1: 14:56

Now enter Romana. Romana Krasinowska is a ballet teacher, was a ballet teacher who became interested in the work of Pilates, found it to be very beneficial for her dancers, her ballet dancers, and she became a teacher of the work as well. It was Romana who brought in a lot of the ballet influence that you see in what we call classical Pilates. This is why I wanted to draw a distinction between traditional Pilates and what folks in the Pilates sphere might refer to as archival Pilates or traditional Pilates, and classical. Classical refers to Romana's influence. She added turnout, she added arabesque, she added a lot of the positions that you might relate. A lot of the work that you see in contemporary Pilates is definitely influenced by Romana, but it is different and it is its own, separate field.

Speaker 1: 15:56

This is where things get a little funky with today's day and age and a bit of like what I would refer to as a Pilates cult going on, and I can speak from experience. I was trained in classical Pilates and in my training program it was very clear that other styles of Pilates were not only not welcome, but that they were stupid and that they were shameful and that if you ever got a job at a studio like Club Pilates, that it was a waste of your time and that those people don't know what they're doing. Essentially and I can just come right out and admit that I was definitely a part of the problem there I wanted I guess I felt sort of righteous in knowing what classical Pilates was and feeling like I had this leg up on teachers who didn't have that education. And gosh, I'm so embarrassed now to admit that, while I'm so grateful for my knowledge of the work, now let's talk a little bit about some of the negative sides of Romana, the creator of classical Pilates.

Speaker 1: 17:06

She was a main character in the Pilates trademark dispute that happened in more recent history, along with a man called Sean Gallagher. They wanted to charge every single teacher who used the word Pilates in their name a fee to use that word and believe that they had ownership over this name Pilates. Thank goodness that lawsuit was settled in favor of the person who was defending Pilates being in the public domain. That did come along with positive and negatives, don't get me wrong. Pilates being in the public domain means that anyone can call Pilates what they're doing, pilates, no matter what. It is Okay. So I do think that it's more so for the good than it is for the bad.

Speaker 1: 17:56

But it created this sort of this strong rift in the Pilates community, specifically in the classical realm, because it was either you're teaching the classical work or you're trash. And I just think people start to treat this like it's some sort of religion, and it's just not. And the people behind this have characteristics that are a bit, are greedy, are unsavory, to say the least, and it's just not something that I think it should be treated as a religion, especially when we look at the roots of this man. I mean, there's no reason to put these people on a pedestal. We can, of course, appreciate their contribution and the incredible movement system that they gave us and that allowed so many of us to have a career, but I also just think it's important to put it in perspective now.

Speaker 1: 18:51

Why did I want to come on here and talk my shit and expose Pilates? Well, a couple weeks ago, I received a comment on social media that said stop using the Pilates discipline to do fuck slash stripper moves. Like, have some respect for Pilates, essentially and gosh, it was so funny in so many ways. Like, first of all, just to call it fuck stripper moves, genius. I love it. But what's ironic about that statement is just that the person who wrote it clearly doesn't know just how much of a Pilates nerd I am and just how much everything I do actually has a reason and can be traced back directly to some of Joe's work himself.

Speaker 1: 19:36

So let me just remind y'all that Joseph Pilates has told people that he decided to create Pilates and to try to make it feel like sex, and he was shocked when he would teach people movements that he felt were so obviously looking like sex and that they would not make the connection. He was shocked and I think he probably got a kick out of it. Even the magic circle, he claims he named it magic circle because it does magic to your thighs and your breasts and blah, blah, blah all the aesthetic things that Joseph Pilates was spewing at the time. But he came clean to the author of Cajun Lion that the reason he called it that is because women's husbands would be like, oh, this is magic after having sex with their wives and, you know, presumably them having a stronger pelvic floor. Let's just say that, all right. So there is no doubt that Joseph Pilates was doing movements for better sex, making them look like sex, wanting to make them feel like sex.

Speaker 1: 20:40

So I don't consider my work a disrespect to the man at all or the system at all, and maybe I'm biased, but that's the fact. That's how I feel. And if you're like Ruth, what the heck are you talking about? I thought you were a Pilates teacher. I thought you just teach Pilates, and that's true. I do teach a lot of Pilates.

Speaker 1: 20:59

But I also started my sensualities practice, which is something that I'm still building and has been really, really fun, just to kind of let go of some of the rigidity and some of what I think is just trite and old about classical Pilates and to bring it into a space that feels a lot more celebratory, a lot more free, a lot more intuitive, circular, non-linear. Our lives are so non-linear and the classical Pilates system is so rigid and so linear. So I think adding this to a Pilates routine, or just adding this as your movement routine in general, is a great way to just incorporate something that feels a bit better to your body. If it does and I'm not here to say sensualities is going to feel better for you than classical Pilates or traditional Pilates. But I am here to tell you that it has a really strong roots in Pilates and that I absolutely have not done everything for no reason. Everything that I do has a reason, has a root behind it, and I can trace almost everything I do back to some sort of Pilates movement, dance, movement, modern dance.

Speaker 1: 22:09

Some people have told me that there feels like there's a yoga influence, which very well might be true. I don't have a ton of education in yoga, but very well there might be some yoga movements in there, and it's obvious that Joseph Pilates was inspired by yoga as well. And sometimes people ask me what's the difference between yoga and Pilates? And I think the most glaring difference is in just how old they are. Right, I think I looked online yoga is 5,000 years old and Pilates is, you know, a hundred years old, so it's a lot younger, but I do think it's time for something new, something more fresh in the Pilates world, and that, to me, is sensualities.

Speaker 1: 22:48

It's so exciting, it's so fun for me to create and I just really wanted to set the record straight here Y'all. Like there's nothing disrespectful about doing movement that feels sensual and that feels good to your body, and if it's giving you better sex, which I can tell. I can't even express how many messages and voice notes I've received about how this has changed my member's sex life for the better. Like it is some of the best reviews I've ever received. Like I just am thrilled. So, if you're curious, feel free to check out my sensualities classes on my app and my website. They live in their own category, but I also have a program that's called the Sensuality slash beat-based beginner series. It's called beat-based as well because we are using music, but Sensuality itself doesn't require music, although I absolutely. If you choose a class that doesn't have music in the background, you might enjoy playing some music on your end, turning down the lights, doing it in your underwear, doing it in the nude, whatever feels right to you, I celebrate. So, yeah, this just I feel needed to be said and I'm really glad that I feel like I got it off my chest.

Speaker 1: 24:01

Okay, so I'm done exposing Pilates and now I just want to talk about a couple things I've been interested in lately my neurodivergent folks. I have had my hyper focus on a couple of different topics, and the first one being color theory and color analysis. So I think I first heard about this on TikTok and I just became kind of just really hyper interested in color theory and how it could change my life. I think what I found really most compelling about this is that it might make it more simple for me to really tone down my closet, to have a more simple wardrobe that looks great on me and that I feel really good about. I recently have been really leaning into clothes that are made of more natural fibers. I find them to be much more comfortable on my skin, especially cotton. Now, a lot of my athletic wear and a lot of the clothes that I have from Aloe and Lululemon I've had for years.

Speaker 1: 25:11

I have no intention on getting rid of my entire wardrobe. I don't think that's productive in any way. I will wear things you know for as long as I can until they're unwearable. You know I think it's important to try our best to make our clothes last as long as we can and not to participate in fast fashion or to try and you know make choices as mindfully as we can. But I do love some natural fiber clothes, my free people cardigan set, the pants I get so many questions about all the time on my social media. They're a hundred percent cotton. I love them. They feel so good. So I've just been really into that and I tried a few different ways to figure out my color season.

Speaker 1: 26:00

I used some of the filters on TikTok and then I did a hack that my cousin taught me, which is actually so smart, which is to ask chat GPT to do your color analysis. It's actually so easy If you have a way to get the, to take a picture of yourself with bright lighting and bright lighting, but not direct lighting, is the best no makeup, of course picture of your face, and then, if you know how to pull the hex codes from that picture, you enter them into chat GPT. It's going to ask for your hair, skin and eye color and it's going to tell you from there what it thinks your season is and the way I figured out my hex codes was using Canva as sort of the intermediary. So I uploaded the picture into Canva. I used the dropper tool, which when you select an area on your picture and you go to draw, let's say, with that color, tap the color and it will tell you what that hex code is. So super easy way, if you want, just like a really accessible way, to figure out your color season. And it gave me autumn. It didn't give me tons more information besides autumn.

Speaker 1: 27:11

And since I've been really hyper-focused on this, I've been chatting about it online and I had a recommendation from one of our members one of our bad bees shout out Claire to check out. This woman created colorful and I went to her page and I followed her and I'm not kidding Within like an hour she had DM me and said hey, I'm so resonating with your work and what you do, like Pilates for better sex. I'm such a fan, so we love. I'm just so cool and she's like I'd love to do your color analysis for free and I was thrilled. So I am in the process of receiving my more thorough color analysis, which I cannot wait to share with everyone. Once I get it, I think it's going to come in about 25 days. It does take a while because you send in one round of photos, which takes time because you have to pull colors from your wardrobe and drape them around your shoulders. They look at those. Then you send a second round of colors which they might ask you for more specific colors to try on, and from there it takes 30 days. So I'm so excited to receive that and I feel like I just love having direction and having just less analysis, paralysis, like if I'm questioning an item, let me see what it's made of and then let me see what color it is. You know that will make it a lot easier to decide if I want to buy it.

Speaker 1: 28:33

The other thing that I sort of got into and is called Kibbe body type. I think Kibbe is a character who's kind of similar to Joseph Pilati. He's like. Here we have a person who is like you know his system is pretty old and a lot of his ideas are likely outdated, but I think it's interesting regardless and I am again fascinated in it. For the same reason I'm interested in color analysis, which is to try to make my life a little bit more simple and to have more direction when it comes to what I'm buying, and this was a little bit. It's still a little tricky for me to figure out.

Speaker 1: 29:12

I did a few different free quizzes online and I came out with soft dramatic as my body type on Kibbe. And one of the easiest ways and I wish I had known this before I started looking to figure out at least which side of the scale you're on has to do with your height. I also think it's important to mention that Kibbe body type is not reflective of you know what your body fat percentage is. It's all about your um, your bone structure and the lengths of your limbs and things like that. So I just wanted to share that because I think that was cool to learn about the system. But if you are like below five foot six, then you know you're on the second half of the chart, and if you're five foot six or higher, you know you're on the second half of the chart. And if you're five foot six or higher, you know you're on the longer side of the chart. So that can kind of help you distinguish where you might fall.

Speaker 1: 30:11

And then I came across soft dramatic and I don't think you need to have every single characteristic to fall into that category because this is the one that suits me the best. But soft dramatics typically have a larger chest as well as bigger hips and kind of an hourglass figure. But I have bigger hips and sort of a smaller chest, but all the other traits were the closest that I could come up with. And then when I looked into sort of what clothing items looked best on that body type, I was just really vibing with the choices big fan of all those items and I felt like a lot of the my favorite pieces were there, which is always fun, and some of the pieces that I get complimented on the most.

Speaker 1: 30:56

There was literally a dress that I own from Rat and Boa that I get so many compliments on was on one list that I found on Reddit for the soft was literally a dress that I own from Rat and Boa that I get so many compliments on was on one list that I found on Reddit for the soft dramatic body type and I was like, okay, this is me. That sold me, you know. So there's two of my obsessions lately and I just wanted I'm so excited to be back on here and I'm going to, you know, continue to record these when I feel inclined and, as always, please feel free to reach out to me anytime. I would love to chat with you and I'm so grateful for you listening, and I hope you stand so tall and proud and have an amazing day. Bad B Okay, you got this.