'Your Health' by Joseph Pilates: The Book We Don't Talk About

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Joseph Pilates First Publication

While many Pilates education program includes the supplemental reading of Joseph Pilates second book, Return to Life Through Contrology (1945), many skip over his first book Your Health: A Corrective System of Exercising That Revolutionizes the Entire Field of Physical Education (1934). This book is a heartfelt manifesto of sorts asking us to rethink how we approach our fitness and overall well-being. Joseph Pilates had a profound belief—health is not merely the absence of disease but a dynamic state of wellness that encompasses the body, mind, and spirit.

"What is balance of body and mind? It is the conscious control of all muscular movements of the body. It is the correct utilization and application of the leverage principles afforded by the bones comprising the skeletal amework of the body, a complete knowledge of the mechanism of the body, and a full understanding of the principles of equilibrium and gravity as applied to the movements of the body i motion, at rest and in sleep." - Joesph Pilates, Your Health (1934)

Why Do We "Ignore" Your Health?

While I can't be certain why many of us did not study this book when studying the history of Pilates in our certification programs, I suspect it is because of the tone and take Pilates takes with the scientific and medical communities. Pilates takes a bit of a conspiracy-theorist tone as it relates to the motivations of scientists, medical professionals, and leaders and their role in public health initiatives. There are elements to anti-science in unedited versions of Return to Life, as well, but not to the great extent as which Pilates almost rants on and on about in Your Health.

Furthermore, some of his statements in this publication go on to be somewhat hypocritical. One example, Pilates writes, "so-called health specialists, common quacks, proprietors of patent medicines and manufacturers of various forms of mechanical apparatus - lamps, rollers, massaging belts, rowing machines, nostrums, serum and other injections, should, through their advertisements - lure the weaklings? Each quack assures the public that his is the ONLY method of quickly restoring one's health, and he bends his mercenary energies toward reaping the bountiful harvest awaiting him from the lure of the unfortunates, in the form of payments of unwarranted sums for treatments, remedies and services." This certainly doesn't age well as Pilates himself engineered his own apparatus to aid in teaching Contrology (in exchange for money) and is asserting that his method is superior, noting that his personal experience teaching the method on a relatively small sample size in an unscientific manners proves this.

I will even admit, I only made it about a third of the way through before I felt like I had enough and got the message.

What Can We Take from Your Health?

Within controversial rants, Pilates makes several a sound points, though. He points out that we are overwhelmed by health, wellness and fitness media messaging that can be very confusing to the public. He expresses worry that leaders in public health focus on treating illness with medicine rather than preventing illness through preventative wellness efforts and profits from this. He describes that many of things we consume and utilize in our modern society can lead to poor health and that most people are not accountable to their own overall wellness. These are all very valid statements and still true today.

While, I will refrain from listing all of his controversial and anti-science takeaways, I will present a few less controversial key takeaways from this body of work:

• Balance of Body and Mind Is Critical to Good Health

• Bad Habits Lead to Ailments

• Mental Health Improves With Exercise

• Going Against Nature Can Lead To Poor Health

• Obtaining Good Health Is Just One Step, We Must Maintain Good Health
  
  

I don't want to breeze over the fact that Pilates' had some polarizing, anti-science, and racist remarks in this body of work. We need to recognize this part of the history just as much as cherry-picking out the good parts. We are sometimes lead to believe that in order to honor the method, we must stay true to Pilates' original vision of the Pilates method (which he called Contrology.)

However, if we remain steadfast in that argument, we also must accept the bad. What I hope that I and the reader can learn from this is that the method, as we understand it today, has evolved and will continue to evolve. I am not confident I know when it is appropriate to call an evolution of the practice by a new name rather than call it Pilates, but we would be naive to ignore the fact that his original method was called Contrology and we have already adapted the Pilates method to align more with the modern understanding of the body -- for good reasons.