Pilates develops controlology exercises during World War I

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We know that Pilates traveled to England when he was 30, but there are at least two different equally plausible stories as to how and why he went. The first story tells us that he went there to box, having exhausted most of the boxing venues in his house. The second states that Joe had started performing successfully in the circus with his brother, and that they had a number of Greek statues that were so popular that they took him to England. Whatever the truth, Pilates was in England in 1914 when World War I broke out and the British interned him as an enemy foreigner. He first went to a small camp near Lancaster, where he began teaching self-defense and wrestling to the other Germans, stating that they would be stronger when they left than when they came in. It was here that Joe began developing his Contrology system. Then he was transferred.

During both World Wars, the British set up their internment camps for foreign civilians on the Isle of Man. Interestingly, they only interned masculine women who were not interned. For the First World War (1914-1918) a very large camp was established on the west coast of the island at Knockaloe. The Knockaloe camp, intended to hold 5,000 men, ended up being enlarged to hold around 24,000. It was 22 acres in size, divided into 23 compounds divided into 4 separate campgrounds. Each camp had its own hospital, theater, cafeteria, printing press, etc. and hospitals were used to treat wounded soldiers on the front lines. The Knockaloe camps were built out of log cabins and became extremely dismal after several years. To make matters worse, the camps did not close right at the end of the war, as there was a long period of post-war hostilities. The camps finally closed at the end of 1919, and most of the internees were deported to Germany.

It was while he was interned at the Knockaloe camp that Joe Pilates began to really experiment with his exercises and theories. Obviously his priority was maintaining his own strength and conditioning, which was not easy given the basic lack of sanitary conditions and the presence of sick and injured inmates and soldiers, but Pilates also had to deal with the great flu epidemic of 1918. In a time when there was no physical therapy or exercise therapy and medicine was relatively archaic, Joe began working with sick and injured men. He taught them to breathe and attached strapped bed springs to the walls next to their hospital beds so they could begin stretching and exercising by pushing or pulling on the springs before they could get out of bed. His patients got out of bed much faster and Joe’s experiments were encouraged. Outside the hospital, he led large groups of interns through their exercise regimen every day, believing wholeheartedly that the more everyone breathed and moved, the better off they would be. “Out with the bad germs and in with fresh new oxygen,” he advised. England lost tens of thousands and although the flu hit the camps extremely hard, only 200 men died at Knockaloe, proving Joe right.

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