AS A movement educator and Pilates specialist. I often get asked “what is Pilates?” and it is difficult to summarise in an easy sentence.

What we today call Pilates is a method of exercise and movement that develops physical strength, with the complementary benefit of flexibility. It requires concentration and focus, coordination of breath and movement, precision of movement and attention to the alignment and stability of the body.

This movement method is based on the lifetime’s work of Joseph Pilates, a German of Greek origin, born in 1883. Joe Pilates was the son of an athlete father and a naturopath mother so it’s unsurprising that his career was in health and exercise.

Just before the First World War he was in Great Britain, probably working as a boxer, performing in the circus as a “living statue” and working with Scotland Yard, training detectives in self defence.

When war broke out he was interned as an undesirable alien and placed in an internment camp on the Isle of Man.

It was here that he first started to develop his machines for exercise.

Working in the hospital there he invented ways of exercising using bed frames and springs. In fact if you visit a Pilates studio today you will easily be able to work out how our contemporary apparatus has been developed from a bed!

Joe returned to Germany after the First World War, but as the political situation there worsened, decided to up sticks and emigrated to the USA in1926.

He met Clara, his wife and teaching partner, on the boat to the States.

Joe’s studio was set up in New York. Of course, he didn’t call his work Pilates, he referred to his method as Contrology.

The studio was in the same building as the New York Ballet and very soon dancers were regular visitors.

Joe’s special machines and his very particular way of working would heal the injuries that dancers were prone to.

These days too, physiotherapists love the Pilates Method for exactly those reasons. The precision of movement means that faulty and damaging movement habits can be overcome and re-learned.

Originally, the Method was all about using Joe’s machines, or apparatus, and he invented lots of them to help his students overcome movement problems and rebuild their strength.

There would be perhaps three people at most in the studio and an eagle eye would be kept on each.

He would require that his student practised several times a week in order to achieve the promised results, and to help them he produced his book, Return to Life Through Contrology (1945) with explicit instructions on how to perform the 34 exercises that he described within. This little book is the foundation for all the group classes that you find today. Although some Pilates classes do seem a long way away from the original intention of Mr Pilates himself!

If you are looking to start a Pilates class in the New Year, bear in mind: a lifetime’s work isn’t learned in a weekend!

Patricia Issitt is a movement therapist and Pilates instructor based in York. Find out more at yorkpilates.com