Maintenance Phase - Pilates

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

Somehow an episode about an old-timey fitness influencer ended up being one of our most wholesome ever. We're as surprised as you are.Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastLinks!Pilates and the “powerhouse"Sick Architecture - Ibiayi Briggs - Body Culture and Contrology World War One: Internment centre 'will unlock' family talesThe Acrobatic Immigrant Who Invented Pilates in a Prisoner of War CampThe exercise phenomenon born in a prisoner-of-war campHistory of PilatesAn Introduction to Clinical PilatesThe Fight for the Soul of Pilates Did you know Pilates was born in prison and inspired by cats? Inside The Shocking (Black) History Of Pilates Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Welcome to Main Nits phase, the podcast that lays on its back and bicycles its legs. Shut up and down. I feel like you've answered the first question, which is Mike. What do you know about Pilates? Literally, I did Pilates for like three weeks, so that's like all I remember doing. And then I quit because it was hard.

It might come here. I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hubs. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at Patreon. You can also get the same audio content on Apple podcasts, as a subscriber. And you can buy T-shirts, mugs, tote bags, all manner of things at T-Public, Michael. Today, we are talking about Pilates. Ponsious Pilates. That's what I always think of

as like a church kid every single time. We are going to be talking about the very surprising story of how Pilates came to be. I'm so excited. I know nothing about Pilates. It's just like a workout. Yeah. The way it was sold to me originally was like, it's like a combination of like yoga and like crossfit.

And then I signed up and I did it like three times and then I didn't see immediate results and then I stopped. Well, where are the results you are looking for? I don't even know. I was like, I just want to be like strong and like flexible and then I wasn't either one and I've remained so. You wanted to be a willowy Pilates lady. Also, the lady who was teaching it,

who was extremely nice, was like the buffest human being I've ever witnessed in my entire life and she was like five foot one. And I was like, this is the short queen energy that I want so bad, but I also don't want to work out like six hours a day. Fair. So I had a whole journey, Aubrey, a whole emotional journey in that class. So I am proud to report that this episode is not going to be a ruiner.

Aay. I'm also proud to report that we don't have any really huge content notes. Wow, for once. It just means we're not gonna get into, like, extremely gnarly oppressive attitudes today. Yeah, Pilates seemed totally fine to me. It was just, like, group exercise and you were stretching and doing setups and stuff.

Like it was, yeah, it was fine. I can see what people like it. Are you ready to get a little primer on Pilates and then we'll dig in on this big long story of where it comes from? The Rediest. So Pilates was originally called Contrology? Oh, I can see why they changed the name.

Yeah, that's terrible. It's not great. It sounds like some sort of eye surgery. Pilates is basically just a workout, right? It's sort of focused on muscle tone, posture, this kind of mind-body connection, and particularly on building abdominal strength. The original set is about 50 individual repetitive exercises that can be done either on a mat

or with specific Pilates equipment. Some of the things that you talked about before, things like yoga and Tai Chi and Ka Pueira are shaped over decades or centuries by a whole bunch of practitioners, often from like a shared geographic region or ethnic community or religious tradition or what have you, right? That is not the case with Pilates. There is a single inventor.

It's Bob Pilates. It's Joseph Pilates. Wait, so that's where the word comes from. It's not even like a fancy word. It's literally just a dude's last name. It's his name. Okay. Joseph Pilates was born on December 9, 1883 in Germany. His mother was a naturopath,

and his father was an avid gymnast who had a gym. Oh, okay. As a child, Joseph Pilates reportedly had asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever. His father introduced him to bodybuilding, boxing, gymnastics, and jujitsu. And Joseph Pilates talked a lot about finding strength and finding relief in his sort of workouts,

right, that that became a real source of joy and strength for him. Strong men were sort of celebrities at the time. And Joseph Pilates especially grew up admiring a kind of strong man celebrity of his day, someone named Eugene Sandow. He reportedly wrapped a chain around his arm and broke it by flexing his muscles. Well, the thing that I was thinking is I was like, listen, I'm wearing a necklace that's on a chain. I bet I could break that one. Yeah, I guess it's like, define chain for me, champ. He bent iron bars was part of his act just like, okay, and at one point he fought a lion.

These, I don't know. This is just taken from Eugene San, I was like tender profile. He went on to open a line of gyms. He wrote books, He published a magazine. And he argued that body culture should train the whole body in order to quote, get rid of the defects that civilization

and the changes it has brought are responsible for making humans neglect their own body. Guys, the civilizational stuff again. We still see this now. It's so fucking weird. Yeah, it's wild. Humans are under some sort of weird, which is hex just do like the same stupid bullshit over again in like many domains, but especially in health and wellness. So Joseph Pilates in his young adulthood pursues both gymnastics and bodybuilding professionally. He was married and widowed by the time he turned 30.

Oh. In 1912 at age 29, Joseph Pilates moves from Germany to England, and he starts working in a wild range of jobs. He is briefly a self-defense trainer for local police and then Scotland Yard. He was a professional boxer and he was a circus performer. Oh, like a Cirque du Soleil, like Acrobat situation. He did two things. One, he was a contortionist. So he would be the guy who bends himself into a pretzel, right? And two, he did a thing that is hard to imagine as a circus now because like my god,

you can't get away from it in city parks in the US. He was the guy who posed as a statue. Oh, they used to do that in circuses? Apparently, in his lead. So like, look how bendy I am and look how still I can hold myself. The two greatest prize traits. I mean, before TV, there wasn't that much else to do. So, you're just watching a guy not move.

Within a couple of years, he settles in Blackpool, which is a northern coastal town in England. That is where he was in 1914 at the outbreak of World War One. Do you know much about what the Brits did in response to the outbreak of World War One? I mean, they fought it? Sure, yeah, fair no specifics. World War One began in July of 1914. By August of that year, the British government passed the Aliens Restrictions Act. That allowed them to in turn anyone who they suspected of espionage or believed to otherwise be a threat to national security. Or anyone who held still for too long. So over the course of the war, over the course course of I think the camps are open for about five years

Britain in turn 116,000 people under the eight restrictions act. That's a huge infrastructure According to national geographic at this time there were 57,000 German immigrants in Britain. Oh, so they locked up like everybody, they just, they went off the rails with this thing, right? Like they went all in. Joseph Pilates was a single man. He wasn't fluent in English.

He was a traveling circus performer. In a world where you're rounding up over 100,000 people, that guy seems suspicious, right? And sort of the conclusion that they come to. They would just go around humming 99 red balloons and see who could hum along from the future. Moina Noinz, they should have balloons. Joseph Pilates was then required to register himself as a quote unquote alien, local police station. Good sign. And ultimately he was sent to Nackalo internment camp on the Isle of Man.

Nackalo was one of the largest internment camps that the Brits operated. Nackalo alone housed 23,000 prisoners of war and 3,000 guards between 1914 and 1919. Wow. These places were awful. and 3,000 guards between 1914 and 1919. Wow. These places were awful. A Swiss doctor visited these internment camps

during World War I and afterwards came up with the term barbed wire disease to characterize the sort of trauma and mental illness that he witnessed there. It was seen as sort of a counterpoint to shell shock, right? Combined sad shell shock and prisoners of war had barbed wire disease was sort of the idea. Yeah.

Naka-lo internment camp is where Pilates is reportedly born. No way. It's from a internment camp. From a fucking internment camp, developed by Joseph Pilates while he is a detainee. No way. So I mean, I guess that makes sense. developed by Joseph Pilates while he is a detainee. No way. So I mean, I guess that makes sense. Why it's all these kind of like do it yourself,

like body weight style exercises. Totally. So Joseph Pilates was there for pretty much the entire remainder of the war. He's there for four years. He spoke and wrote extensively after the fact about the inspiration for Pilates. Do you want to know what inspired him?

Oh, did he see like an upside down bicycle? He's like, I should make kicks from that. The thing that inspired him was the feral cats that came to the camp in search of food scraps. Wait, what? So it's like cat exercises. Where? He said that he watched the ways that they stretched and moved and was like really impressed

by how sort of limber they were. And he believed that to be linked to their alertness and their quick reflexes. I mean, probably true. He's not wrong. We gotta get some cat movements. Yes, this is downward cat. It was because they were in turn designed not only

to tend to folks physical health, but also their mental health, right? He had this idea that the mind and body are connected, which is a very popular idea, but that connection can be lost and he developed what he called controversy to sort of reestablish that connection can be lost and he developed what he called contrology to reestablish that connection. So you read his actual instructions

on how to do these exercises. There's a lot of instruction about what to focus on and what your mind should be doing while you're doing these exercises, right? It's actually a more appealing origin story than a lot of other forms of exercise, where it's like a guy trying to cope with this terrible situation.

There's like lots and lots and lots of better things about this. While he was there, he reportedly led large groups of internees in these exercises. So many articles might refer to this as he had a captive audience, which is so gross. That's not even like really a pun. But also like God helped me if I have to spend four years with a fucking fitness influencer, Yikes.

Did any of them use the phrase, Thinmates? No, no. No, we're not doing this. We're not, I, I got more. We need to be all day. Michael, it's been a long time since I fired you, but I feel the time has come. You're due for a review, Mike. So this camp is also where Joseph Pilates first developed his Pilates equipment. There's Pilates equipment. Do you know you've never seen the Pilates equipment,

like the reformer, I think is the most widely used one? No. Hang on, I'm gonna send you a couple of pictures of people using them. Oh, wow, I never use these. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're basically just like, it's a series of like springs and pulleys and that kind of thing

to add resistance to whatever you're doing. Right. You see these in movies sometimes, somebody has like a strap on their feet, and then they sort of lift themselves up and down with this series of pulleys by like closing their legs or whatever and it sort of slides them back and forth.

It looks very comical to be honest, but I'm sure it's a good workout. It looks goofy, but I bet it's good. Do you know what I mean? I'm a fan of resistance and this kind of stuff. You like sliding back and forth. I do like famously. I like sliding back and forth.

Some people know about you. It's a new comfortable discussing publicly. Oh no. Oh my, no, my DMs. That's your fun fact for me to introduce you at cocktail parties. This is Aubrey. She likes sliding back and forth. So Joseph Pilates worked with a lot of different kinds of people

in this internment camp, but particularly focused on people who were in the infirmary. He focused there because he was like, that felt like him, right? That felt like a place where he could help. It felt like something that he he recognized and he had sort of seen the benefits of movement in his own life and wanted to bring that to more folks, which I imagine led to some really helpful conversations and some really exhausting conversations. Yeah, the beds in the barracks where most folks slept were made of solid wood. It was just a hard wood platform. But the beds in the infirmary had springs, which were way better for sleeping, and they also gave Pilates an opportunity

to kind of tinker with parts. Okay. So he started messing around with the springs and first started rigging springs over patients beds so that they could rest with their limbs elevated, for example, like in cartoons, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, traction. Yeah, totally.

Exactly. And then he started using those springs for resistance in different positions around the bed frame and started doing his exercises using the bed springs, right? Like those little cords that everybody bought during the pandemic. Yeah.

Like rubber. The resistance bands. Slupody bands, yeah. So those were some early prototypes for equipment like the reformer that is still used in Pilates today. Have I seen this man? I don't think you've shown me this man.

Are there photos of this man? We can see a photo of this man. I wanna see a photo of this man. I wanna, I wanna mental image. You sound like Kiki Palmer. Oh. Sorry to this man. I'm the opposite of that. I'm, I'm seeking more information about this man.

Here we go. Here he is when he's older. I actually think the one he's older is like the best wildest look at this guy. Oh, wow. He's standing on a woman as he's doing a sit up. Holy shit. He really enjoyed to stand on people while they were working out. That was like a thing that he did a lot of. Thank you to my Pilates lady for not doing that to me. For not standing on your abdomen. Right, little abs.

Show me a younger one. Show me him in his peak physical form. Yes, yes, hang on. Oh, no, that's him getting stood. Wait, here's him getting stood on. He also requested it apparently. He was verse with the standing on. You keep doing it.

You can't, you can't tell, you can't tell straight people what we're like. Okay nervous. Oh wow, okay, so he's in, I don't know, it's like grandpa underwear. It's like a speedo, but it goes up like above his belly button. It's a very diaper look. He's being stood on and like, I get, he's a very diaper look. He's being stood on and like,

I get he's like doing a crunch as he's being stood on and he's wearing bellatias. Yeah, those are great. Those are good. I've been looking for like summer slippers. He's got because of the way he's laying down. It looks like he's wearing a little crop top. He really does, I know.

So then here is, this is the other photo that we've got. Joseph Pilates reportedly at 57, which I struggle to believe and then at 82. Oh, okay. Yeah, so he's in he's in the diaper speed Os. Obviously. And he's out in the snow in 82 year old one, which is demented in it looks like maybe bare feet or in Valley shoes. He also has a very deep tan. You can see his transition into influencer over this time, because at first he's just like a buff younger dude, and then you can tell he's been on the circuit for a while

by the time he's an older guy. So after he is released from internment, Joseph Pilates moved back to Germany. First he settled in Hamburg, then in Berlin. He worked as a boxing trainer and owned a boxing gym. He got remarried in that time to another woman we know nothing about. He also filed his first patent in 1923

for a piece of exercise equipment that he invented. Okay. Ultimately he patented 26 devices in his lifetime. Wow. Were they mostly like a Pilates, like resistance bandy type stuff? Would you like to hear the names of his inventions? Yes, please. Trappies table, Wanda chair, magicurn. Foot corrector.

Ped Opo. Ooh. Oh no. It's a tough one. Ped Opo, head harness. That sounds like what you had as a kid to fix your teeth. Aubrey. I was gonna say, I don't even have to translate head harness to queer. Uh, toe and finger corrector, spine corrector, lateral,

guillotine and catapult. This feels very like as seen on TV. Yeah, Tony. Are you tired of doing sit-ups the normal way? Get the wonder chair. Yeah, absolutely. So ultimately what leads him to leave Germany, because he does leave Germany, is a a job offer because he had trained with police

and Britain and with Scotland Yard. He was asked to train the German military police. But that was part of an attempt to begin to rebuild the nation's military and his experience at Nacolo left him staunchly anti-war, so he refused the job. And was like, also, I don't like that we're rebuilding our military. I don't wanna be here for another war. And in an extremely prescient move, he immigrated to the US in April of 1926.

Dude, this is by far the least problematic influence you have ever discussed on the show. Honestly. So, when he was like, anti-nazi, not a given for this field. He moves because a boxer that he's training wants him to move to New York and keep training him. And as an incentive, that boxer's manager agrees to finance a studio for Pilates to teach his method in.

Wow. So they fully like pay for him to start a business and to run his like Pilates classes. Dude, this honestly, I don't know why the Pilates people are not like marketing this more. It's wild, right? It was developed in an internment camp and the first studio was a guy who was like fleeing the Nazis. He wasn't fleeing the Nazis.

This is the 20s, right? It's not like things are imminent. He's just like, I don't wanna be in a state that's like trying to build up its military like this. It's not quite as good as anti-Nazi, but it's still like, cancelling Germany because it's problematic. Absolutely agree.

On the boat over from Germany, he meets a woman named Clara Zuner and she becomes his wife. Did he divorce wife too? We have no idea, don't know. Couldn't tell ya. Lost to time. They open a studio in New York City,

it's near a bunch of the city's ballet studios. So, Contrology, as he's calling it at this time, quickly sort of gained a following among dancers who wanted to improve their performance and also particularly reduce their injury recovery time. Okay. His role in the dance world is really sort of cemented when he successfully rehabilitates a modern dance icon

named Ruth Sandini from an injury that she thought was going to end her career. And he's like, no, it's not. And she goes to him. And she is able to dance again. And it becomes this like huge sensational sort of story from their actors start to join in, he becomes a trainer to Lawrence Olivier, Lauren Bacall and Catherine Hepburn. Wow. And he develops a crew of sort of local devotees too. So many of them become Pilates instructors themselves.

His classes were $5 a piece. That's not expensive for back then. Doesn't it? For the 20s? Yeah. Wait, let's put it in an inflation calculator. Wait, do it, do it, do it. $5. Holy shit.

$85.70. Whoa, okay, this is really stretching to the stars. It's not for the people. Yeah, exactly. At this point, sort of early in the life of the studio, the method's biggest asset is one of its best instructors. Kathy Grant is a famous black dancer and chorus girl in New York who came to Joseph Pilates

for injury rehabilitation. And she loved his method so much that she trains to become certified in Pilates for injury rehabilitation. And she loved his method so much that she trains to become sort of certified in Pilates. She trains more than 2,200 hours to get that certification. Wait, what? 2,200 hours? That's like a college degree.

Her class has quickly become some of the most popular in the city, because she's known to be really fun, really encouraging, and also really tough. She was also known for creating adaptive exercises for disabled students, and exercises to deal with specific sort of symptoms that folks were experiencing. So she gets more and more popular and moves to larger and larger venues and ultimately ends up teaching Pilates at the Tish School of the Arts at NYU.

Is this the most wholesome episode we've ever done. I was not expecting this. She is widely cited as one of the most instrumental sort of mentors in launching a generation of Pilates instructors. Like there are many, many, many people who credit her as their mentor, which is like really fun. Like it cool. She seems nice, which is like really fucking cool.

She seems nice. He seems fine. Watch it. Last time I said this halfway through an episode, it turned out we had like a police brutality subplot coming. So there's probably more information you're going to tell me. Yeah, totally. Watch and pump the brakes, buddy.

Yeah. It's not going to be anything like that, but he's just like kind of a dick. Okay. He's also very eccentric. So he usually ran classes in his tight little short shorts, his little like somewhere between briefs and shorts. He wore those shorts, he wore sandals, and that is it. His studio is decorated with paintings, photos, and sculptures of him.

Oh, never. Okay. And most of them are him either naked or in a loin cloth? We're getting closer to problematic stuff. We're getting back into familiar, making arbitrary territory. I didn't want to, we were going to get a nice little detour with Kathy Grant.

And now we're back to the weird shit that we normally traffic in. He's about to mention Hunger Games. I read a biography of him called Caged Lion. And the biographer talks about the first time he met him. And he was like, he shook my hand and then kept sliding his hand up my wrist. And he was like, I couldn't figure out what he was doing. It was like for such a long time.

And he was like, that I realized he was taking my pulse. Oh, what? So not the King of Boundaries. Yeah, that's like free. No, that I realized he was taking my pulse. Oh, what? So not the king of boundaries. Yeah, that's like free. No, that's a weird treat. Totally. But again, there's not anything like more sinister than this that I'm aware of.

Nothing came up in the research, except that he had a really bad temper and was just like a dick to a lot of people. And particularly to students if they frustrated him, he would throw people out of class regularly if they frustrated him. Not great, but also still grating on a curve. C minus, you pass.

Yeah. C is for cookie and that's good enough for me. So there's a 1962 profile of him in sports illustrated that recounts this moment that the author witnesses, the author of the article witnesses. Joseph Pilates is telling a student off for moving and I quote, like an elephant. Oh yeah, that's not good. And it really upsets her.

She says he's calling her an elephant. He says quote, I wouldn't insult the elephant. An elephant could walk into this room and you wouldn't hear it. An elephant walks delicately, but you clump, clump, clump. That doesn't sound accurate about elephants. Americans, baseball players, joggers, weightlifters, straighten the knees. Oh. Is what he says to her.

Okay. Americans, baseball players, joggers, weightlifters, straighten the knees is like a phrase that will come up again. I don't even understand what it means. He is profoundly disapproving of Americans. Actually let's do this quote now. This is in his interview with Sports Illustrated. So this is him talking directly to the reporter.

And this is the brickiest brick. I'm so sorry, but it's wild as hell. The fact that he talks shit on Americans all the time is just gonna make me like him more careful. Okay, he says, Americans, they wanna go 600 miles an hour and they don't know how to walk. Look at them in the street, bent over, coughing. You men with gray faces.

Why can't they look like animals? Look at a cat. Look at any animal. The only animal that doesn't hold its stomach in is the pig. What? Yeah! By exercising your stomach muscles, you ring out the body. You don't catch colds, you don't catch cancer.

You don't get hernias. Do animals get hernias? I mean, maybe. I don't know, it goes to... He seems very confident. Do animals go on diets? Eat what you want, drink what you want. I drink a quart of liquor a day, plus some beers and smoke maybe 15 cigars. And what do Americans do? They play golf, they play baseball, they use half of their muscles,

a quarter of their muscles. They get fat, they play baseball, they use half of their muscles, a quarter of their muscles. They get fat, they go jogging, they go on crazy diets, they jump up and down in crazy exercises, they have bad backs, they have beer bellies, they slouch, they complain, they have hurt, they slouch, they complain, they have hernias. This is fucking incoherent. What's he even saying? This is a rant that he goes on often. He writes a couple of books and this kind of stuff is in there,

where he's like, why aren't Americans more like cats? But also he's like the problem with Americans is like they eat bad, they don't exercise, and then he's like, I drink beer every day. I smoke cigars. This is big drunk uncle energy. Yeah, it really is like, what do Americans do? They play golf, they play baseball, they use half their muscles, a quarter of their muscles.

Yeah. What are you talking about? They're playing sports. What are you talking about? They're playing the wrong sports? So I was a prom king, okay? Yeah. Like you just fully goes into the sketch.

He also writes books During this time he publishes a book in 1934 and one in 1945 His first book is called your health a corrective system of exercising that revolutionizes the entire field of physical Education which I'm sure you read because you're also a weirdo on this stuff But in a much better and different way than him. I also read, return to your life through controversy. What were they like? They're bonkers. It's a lot of photos of him doing the exercises, so you can see how to do it, right? Which makes a lot of sense. But the narrative parts are bananas.

Also as he's publicizing these books, he starts making absolutely wild claims. He claims that the detainees that he trained with in his internment camp quote, ended the war in better shape than when it started. And then not one of them got the flu during the influenza epidemic during the war. You need to have more than one opinion in your life.

You can't just be like, we did exercise, so the internment camps were okay. Nobody got the flu. Yeah, you got the flu. Nobody got the flu. He has some good stuff in his books. To be totally honest, he talks about the importance of, quote, hobbies and all forms of play for, quote, vitality and moral uplift.

Okay. He's like, it's really important to have a good time. He advocates for pleasurable living and he sort of decries the working world for leaving us with too little energy for fun and pleasure and relationships and like social time. How do I know what's pretty? He is a European. Listen.

He's like, you guys need paternity leave and stronger consumer protections. But then there's also stuff like this. He starts talking about circulation as quote, an internal shower. Okay. starts talking about circulation as quote an internal shower. Oh, okay. And keeps talking about the importance of quote fresh pure blood, which absolutely seems like it should be published on the daily storm or like some weird Silicon Valley. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A useful blood shift or the guy who's harvesting blood from his son or whatever. Yeah, he keeps yelling in his book. And when I say yelling, I mean sentences in all caps. Are you really fully going for it? It is like you have been dropped into a Lindy West as I collection. Just like, all caps that's happening now.

He keeps yelling about how our minds should be able to dominate our bodies. Okay. He writes, quote, in all caps, ideally our muscles should obey our will. Reasonably our will should not be dominated by the reflex actions of our muscles. When brain cells are developed, the mind too is developed. Okay, I would also like to control my impulses

when it comes to my use of the internet, but I cannot. Yeah, he's talking about like your body should do everything your mind wills it to do. I mean, I'd love that too. I could fly. Sure, you could be Superman. Yeah. What's your kryptonite if you're Superman? I mean, actually, Grindr, but for the show,

probably say blueberries or something. These are also very clearly the work of the guy who kept yelling about how Americans should be more like animals. Okay. He has a passage in which, again, on its face, you and I would probably agree with him, where he is going off on quacks and sort of scammy, quote unquote, miracle cures. Ooh, cool.

And I am sending you the quote. Unproblematic king. No, that's not true. It is very doubtful indeed, whether a really sane and intelligent person would even think of attempting to prove that any of these many highly recommended cures accomplish one ayoda toward improving the health of anyone, much less affecting a cure. Not the best writer. He shines in other ways.

Pardon this thought, but is it not idiotic, figuratively speaking, to permit oneself to be led around by one's nose by these wholly mercenary, unscrupulous, and irresponsible exploiters who, through their misleading advertisements, fake references, and inconscionable methods, pray upon the blind credulity of the public. That was one sentence. Think it over, you saps. Focus, focus is focus, focus by any other name.

This is basically our show, if written by an AI to be in like 1850s. Speak. Now see here. Think it over you saps. Focus, focus, focus, focus. I'm tired of all the humbug, Aubrey. I got to think it over you saps.

And I was like, this is going in the show. I don't care. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. So Joseph Pilates lived in New York City as a fitness eccentric and, you know, general unsettling dude until his death in 1967 at the age of 83. He dies of emphysema. Oh, because of the smoking likely because of the cigars.

That's what it's generally attributed to. He runs his studio in New York for 40 years. And his wife continues to run it after his death. But after she passes away in 1977, 10 years later, the studio passed through a handful of owners before finally sort of closing for good. But in his lifetime, Pilates never really goes mainstream. It's popularity starts to rise in the wake of the 80s, right? So in the 80s, fitness was dominated by cardio, by aerobics, by bodybuilding, which were all like intense and like pretty high impact forms of exercise. And people were just generally like tired. Right?

Pilates sort of emerged at that time as a gentler, more focused form of exercise, right? Infomercials started selling Pilates equipment in the US in 1996, which is a pretty good gauge of its sort of quote unquote going mainstream. It was an infomercial thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there were Pilates. You could buy a Pilates reformer.

Oh, so it was like the equipment that they were selling. Absolutely. Interesting. Okay. From there, a bunch of celebrities started doing it and sort of touting its virtues publicly. Madonna starts doing Pilates. Jennifer Aniston, Jane Seymour, Uma Thurman, Gwyneth Paltrow. And just a parade of like skinny 90s women.

Just willowy white, wealthy women. Yeah, just the wispy broads of the Trapper Keeper era. In the 2010s, Pilates popularity starts to slump, and it slumps so dramatically. The New York magazine published a piece called The Pilates Pocalypse. How the method that started the boutique fitness trend is going bust. Sure. Basically, it found based on some market research, which like question mark about the

methodologies of market research, kind of always for me. But their estimates based on that market research was that about 10% of Pilates folks stopped doing Pilates in 2011 alone. Okay. That like there's a pretty significant decrease. And that's mostly because just sort of the blooms off the rows as often happens with fitness trends, right? It starts to seem sort of dated.

It starts to be seen as too expensive. It starts to be seen as boring. And now there's stuff like bar and there's a bunch of different kinds of yoga that are more available in the US. And there are like all kinds of fitness classes, right? Soul cycle is starting to come onto the scene, right? Yeah, it's all, these things are always cyclical because they fundamentally can never deliver on their promises. And people oftentimes crave a little bit more variety than just doing the same thing over and over again.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say is like, even if there aren't promises, like you kind of got to mix it up. Especially with these things where they're like fundamentally kind of interchangeable. Like, group exercise seems to be very beneficial, but also like, do you want to do yoga, do you want to crossfit, do you want to do Pilates? Yeah, for most normal ass people, if you're like working a nine to five job and you don't get like a ton of exercise, if you're doing like twice a week, you go to some like exercise class, it's not super important, like what the actual class is. In terms of the data on Pilates, it bears out pretty much the same thing.

It has basically the same benefits of other kinds of exercise, right? There are particular benefits to it, maybe in some cases, there are like lots and lots of health claims about Pilates as there are with so many fitness regimens. But none of those are definitively borne out by the data, right? Cochrane says that, quote, while there is some evidence for the effectiveness of Pilates for low back pain, there is no conclusive evidence that it is superior to other forms of exercise. Another meta-analysis found that there was evidence that Pilates was more effective than other forms of exercise, but this is the difference between something that's statistically significant and something that's statistically significant

and something that's clinically significant. So the one study is reporting on like, it's statistically significant that it's a little bit better, but like clinically that doesn't change your approach. That doesn't like mean that a ton of doctors are gonna start prescribing, Pilates, all that kind of stuff, right? I can hear a bunch of our listeners opening a new tab

to write us an email. I'm gonna say like, if it worked for you, great, you don't have to tell us that. God bless. We believe you just because something on average is not necessarily like the cure all doesn't take away from you that it worked. So like if it was good for your lower back

and you love Pilates in a genuine way, like, that's great. We're so thrilled for you. You don't have to correct us that we said an average was not your individual experience. So a little coda to the Joseph Pilates story, the Joseph Pilates name and image have been subject to some really fascinating lawsuits in recent years.

The first one is in 1992, so this is well after Joseph Pilates has passed. A Pilates teacher named Sean Gallagher bought the trademarks and the brand name of Pilates for $17,000. Oh, that's like nothing. Even in 1992 dollars, that is a song, right? For this kind of transaction.

With that purchase, he received boxes containing over 1,000 photos and old company materials and all kinds of sort of proprietary stuff from the studio in the company. He's buying this from the old studio owners. And he starts sending cease and desist letters to other instructors and businesses who are using the word Pilates.

Oh, it's a patent troll thing. He buy up the property and then you just like threaten people with lawsuits and I settle for like whatever a couple hundred or a couple thousand bucks and you basically just like make money this way. He argues that he's not a patent troll because he really is a Pilates teacher and he really does care about the legacy and Dada Dada all of this kind of stuff right? Sure. In 1998, one of his cases makes its way to federal court in the Southern District of New York. Two years later in 2000, the case finally wrapped up with the judge ruling that Pilates was a generic

term like aerobics or yoga. And then it was therefore free for anyone to use. So say goodbye to that 17 grand dude. So all it took was like one person to challenge this and it basically just immediately gets overturned. Yeah, totally. And like, the ruling also sort of cast some aspersions on Gallagher and was like, we know you're not doing this

on the up and up. So knocking off, right? Okay. Well, that might have sent somebody else packing. It did not stop Sean Gallagher. Oh, no. And there was a new piece about him last year in the New York Times.

He is now saying that he is the rightful owner of all the photos and materials that he got in those boxes that came with the trademark and what have you. He says that that is because he wants to protect the integrity of the Pilates method. But his critics say that those images already existed in other places and were already in use. You can find them on the internet. He didn't put them there. But essentially he has started reporting other people's posts on Instagram if they use a picture of Joseph Pilates that is relevant in his back in boxes.

That's elephantity. What a shitty epilogue. What a weird way to spend your time. Oh, it's like bonkers, and they're all people who are like, I wanted you to see how to do these exercises properly. So here are photos of the founder of this thing doing it the way he thinks you should do it.

So one woman received those complaints on Instagram and Instagram pulled one of her posts down. She then did a fairly common thing. She shared a screenshot of Instagram's message being like, what the fuck? That message from Instagram includes a tiny thumbnail of the original image, so he reports that one too. Oh, nice, okay.

And gets it taken down as well. Okay. Right, like, that's the level that this dude is operating at. Other people have written to him ahead of time to ask clarifying questions about what they can and can't use, only to find that their questions prompted him to go back through their feeds and report past posts as copyright violations. Is he making any money on this? Or he's just like reporting people and getting stuff taken down? He's just getting things taken down at this point. That's so weird. Okay. One of those was a violation because the person posting posted a picture of themselves holding Sean Gallagher's book and advising her followers to buy it.

Okay. And he's like, report this post. You didn't have authorization to use that photo. Like, she is marketing your book, dude. Yeah. What are you mad about? I always wanted to write an article about this one. I said, have posts of like, how easy it is for just one random busy body

to just like ruin it for everybody, for like no reason, and fields where like this isn't happening, it just like luck that some random ass dude hasn't like made this a project. Totally. So here is a quote from a New York Times piece about this set of lawsuits called The Fight for the Soul of Pilates.

Nice. There you go. When she was notified by Mehta that the second of her accounts had been removed after complaints from Mr. Gallagher, she clicked the box to indicate that she questioned the validity of his copyright claim. Mr. Gallagher said Mehta notified him that it would restore Ms. Kelly's account unless he took legal action to assert his ownership of the images she had posted. That is when he sued her. So cut it out unless you're actually going to back this up with legal claims and he's like yeah, I'm going to back it up with legal claims. Okay, you thought you were going to call my bluff nice try. God.

This is only making me stronger. God. This is only making me stronger. That case is making its way through the court system now, but it is a fascinating, weird arc for Pilates to take, right? That it has started in ostensibly a pretty altruistic way, right? Whether or not you're like a big fan of how Joseph Lattie's goes about things. Like, it seems like his motivations here were genuinely pretty good. And over time, that legacy sort of grows and then gets big enough to be a target for extremely petty patent.

Yeah. I like the episodes that are just like, we're not canceling anything. It's just like, here's like a fun story. This is a fun story of this thing that like, if you don't do Pilates, that's fine, if you do Pilates, that's fine. Don't care. But here's probably something you didn't know about it.

Yeah, this is Halo Top. This is Angela Lansbury, this is, I mean, we kind of canceled Halo Top. But this is different. We were just like, it's fine. It's just mostly air. Honestly, that's like most of our episodes. It's fine, but air. Oh, my God. Thanks for watching!