與Joseph Pilates共度的一天
- Feb 22, 2025
- 10 min read
Updated: Feb 22, 2025
A Day with Joseph Pilates
Mar 14, 2016 -- by I.C. Rapoport
JOE PILATES – The Assignment That Would Last a Lifetime (October 4, 1961)
October First arrived. We counted the days. Only two more weeks together. I had already given up hope of some sort of reprieve. Besides, I had worked hard to make the transition from civilian to soldier as painless as possible. I always knew that as long as I was taking pictures, whatever situation I was in was tolerable. In some odd way, I was looking forward to being drafted, to shoot my own basic training, perhaps to finally get that big photo essay onto the pages of LIFE magazine. October 13th drew ever nearer and Mary and I spent a lot of time together those last days before induction.
Then, another call from Buddy Bloodgood of Sports Illustrated.
“Have you been drafted yet?” he barked into the phone.
“I’m not leaving until the 13th,” I answered.
“So, then you have time for a one-day job? Tomorrow, all day. Right here in Manhattan.” Of course I had the time. Anything to take my mind off the coming separation. I was happy to take any assignment, plus I desperately needed the money. “Okay,” he continued. “Go to 939 Eighth Avenue, by 56th Street, and meet our reporter. There’s an old guy there named Joe Pilates who has some sort of health gym. One of our freelance writers has been going to him for some kind of treatments, and he’s written an article about him. Go there and illustrate that article. The guy’s got these torture machines, with belts and pulleys and springs, and he connects them to people and stretches them out, or God knows what. Get some pictures of him looking wild. You know, crazy, too. Wild and crazy.”
So, I went to Joe Pilates’ gymnasium on 8th Avenue. It didn’t take long for me to see that I had stepped into a modern day, inquisition-like, torture chamber. While the S.I. reporter and I waited for our subject to appear in the entryway I watched a shapely young woman in black leotards hanging upside down, her feet “tied” onto the upper rails of a “rack,” her head and shoulder pressed down on a padded bed. She clutched at a wooden bar connected by steel springs to side posts and she held it over her head. Breathing heavily, she struggled with each agonizing pull on the bar. I was certain that after several more repetitions she would soon confess to anything.
Joe Pilates – as he looked when he first stepped out from behind the curtain – “I’m Eighty,” he said
“People pay for this,” I asked myself?
Before I could answer a curtain was pulled aside and a near-naked man stepped into the room, barefoot and wearing only black briefs, he dried his hands on a small white towel.
“Joe Pilates,” he said, smiling. I had been told he was 80 years old, but this guy, though looking way older than me (I knew what my grandpa looked like at age 80) didn’t look a day over 60. As far as the shape he was in, he could have been in his mid-40s. The only telltale sign of his age was the “crepe-like” texture of his golden-brown skin. But under the skin were ageless muscles, iron hard, taut and powerful. In the afternoon of our photo-shoot Joe had run me through all of the cliché strength confrontations: thumb wrestling (he pinned me in a moment; the pressure he exerted on my thumb: unbearable). We arm-wrestled. “Just do it with me,” he said with a soft, Teutonic accent. I did. No contest. He had me stand on his stomach while he sucked it in and then raised me higher using only his abdominal muscles. When he asked me if I could touch my toes (I couldn’t) he bent forward and touched his palms to the carpeted floor and twinkled his eyes at me. “You know why I do this?” he asked, then answered: “Because I train. Everyday, I have trained. When I was in circus, I was training. When I was home, I was training.” He pointed around his gym. “In here, with all this, you too can also touch your hand to the floor.”
When I mentioned that I would be entering military service in a few days Joe told me it would do me good to be out in the cold, early morning air. And while adjusting the springs on his Reformer machine (speaking of the Inquisition) he confided that when it snowed he liked to run around in it, barefooted. “Do that when you’re in the Army,” he said, “they make you a commando.”
Well, wild and crazy is what I had expected or hoped for, The wilder the better, for my purposes, I thought. But Joe wouldn’t cooperate with Buddy’s preconceptions. Joe was nice. He asked me what kind of pictures I had in mind. I could hardly tell him “wild and crazy.”
“Just do what you normally do here,” I replied. He gave us a tour and explained his interesting and inventive machines. He demonstrated how to use them. I shot pictures. He talked. He told me of his days in Germany, his internment in a British Enemy Citizens’ Camp; how he developed his exercise methods by watching the camp animals carefully, how they stretched upon waking. After all, he explained, animals don’t have exercise programs—their lives are their program. Humans avoid the natural conditioning available to them by sitting and standing incorrectly. Unless an animal is disabled or injured, it has only one way to lie down, one way to sit, one way to stand, to walk and to run. People slouch and they slide, they shuffle, they don’t walk naturally. They have a hundred ways to move, most of them wrong. He was here to correct all that, he emphasized, to teach us how to be natural again.
Joe helps a Ballerina get set on the Universal Reformer
When Joe mentioned that his method of Contrology, if practiced routinely, would help keep people from falling victim to diseases I asked him for a clarification. I couldn’t see how stretching and pulling the body in different directions would prevent desease. So, he explained it to me – as if I were a child,
“You have these firemen on their trucks parking in firehouses all around in your body, here and here,” he pointed to his armpits, his neck and groin. “They are waiting to put out the fires in your body – fires that start when there is the germs coming inside when you have a cut. AN open wound. Then the alarm goes off and the firetrucks rush to the trouble – this is happening all the time. But, when you have the everyday aches and pains, also, the firemen are going, busy, busy all the time. Look at all the people on the streets now, how they are walking around in pain all the time. The firemen, they are so busy putting out these fires from these stupid things. So, with Contrology, when you practice this, the body is healthy and in good shape and the firemen, they are quiet in their firehouses and when the bad germs come, like influenza or bronchitis, there is plenty of firetrucks ready to go out – and kill them…”
Here I am, being taught by Joe Pilates – on the Bednasium – doing my first “Hundred”, well, “forty-five”
Later, I asked to be photographed on one of his earliest inventions, the Bednasium, a sort of hospital bed that had springs attached to its metal-frame headboard. When I climbed onto the bed wearing trousers, shirt and tie, Joe stopped me. If I was going to exercise on his equipment I had to be in “trunks,” same as his Speedo-like briefs. I went into the changing area where I found a cardboard box containing a dozen black Jantzen briefs, chose a medium, then posed for a photograph meant for Buddy Bloodgood’s wall. I couldn’t possibly know that 50 years later this photo would be seen by thousands of people around the world.
Robert “Bob” Wernick, the author of the Sports Illustrated article on Joe that I was asked to illustrate (Feb. 1962) works with him on his Teaser. Bob was a regular client of Mr. Pilates © I C Rapoport
Chuck, age 19, College Boy with his Ricoh – 35.
Photo Michael Amberger
The Early Years – Part 1
Memories of Joe Pilates from Bob Wernick & Chuck Rapoport
與約瑟夫普拉提共度的一天 2016 年 3 月 14 日 —
在約瑟夫普拉提、生活雜誌、任務、體育畫報、遊記中
喬普拉提－一生難忘的任務
（1961 年 10 月 4 日）
十月一日到了。我們數著日子。 我們只在一起兩週了。我已經放棄了獲得某種緩解的希望。此外，我一直努力讓從平民到士兵的轉變盡可能輕鬆。我一直都知道，只要我在拍照，無論處於什麼情況都是可以忍受的。不知為何，我期待著被徵召入伍，拍攝我自己的基本訓練，也許最後能把那篇大型攝影散文刊登在《生活》雜誌上。 10 月 13 日越來越近了，在入職前的最後幾天裡，瑪麗和我在一起度過了很多時間。
然後，體育畫報 的巴迪布拉德古德又打來電話。
“你被徵召了嗎？”他對著電話吼道。
我回答： “我直到 13 號才走。 ”
「那麼，你有時間做一天的工作嗎？明天，一整天。就在曼哈頓這裡。我當然有時間。任何事都可以讓我忘記即將到來的分離。我很樂意接受任何任務，而且我迫切需要錢。 「好的，」他繼續說。 「前往第八大道 939 號， 56街附近，與我們的記者見面。那裡有一位名叫喬·普拉提 (Joe Pilates) 的老人，他經營著一家健身房。我們的一位自由撰稿人一直去找他進行某種治療，並寫了一篇關於他的文章。去那裡並說明那篇文章。這個傢伙有這些帶有皮帶、滑輪和彈簧的酷刑機器，他把它們連接到人身上並將他們拉長，或者只有上帝知道會發生什麼。拍一些他看起來很狂野的照片。你知道，也很瘋狂。狂野而瘋狂。
因此，我去了第八大道 的喬普拉提健身房。不久後我就意識到，我走進了一個現代的、類似宗教裁判所的酷刑室。當我和SI記者在入口處等待我們的採訪對像出現時，我看到一個身材勻稱的年輕女子身穿黑色緊身衣倒掛著，她的腳「綁」在「架子」的上欄桿上，頭和肩膀壓在軟墊床上。她抓住一根由鋼彈簧連接到側柱上的木桿，並將其舉過頭頂。她呼吸沉重，每一次痛苦地拉動槓桿，都令她吃力。我確信再重複幾次之後她很快就會坦白一切。
喬·普拉提——當他第一次從幕後走出來時——“我八十歲了，”他說
「人們為此付錢嗎？」我問自己？
我還來不及回答，窗簾就被拉開了，一個幾乎赤裸的男人走進房間，光著腳，只穿著黑色內褲，用一條白小毛巾擦乾雙手。
「喬·普拉提，」他笑著說。有人告訴我他已經 80 歲了，但這個傢伙雖然看起來比我老很多（我知道我爺爺 80 歲的樣子），但看起來不超過 60 歲。唯一能顯示出他年齡的，是金棕色皮膚上「縐紗般」的紋理。但在皮膚之下是永恆的肌肉，堅硬如鐵，緊繃有力。在我們拍照的那天下午，喬讓我練習了所有老套的力量對抗：拇指摔跤（他立刻把我壓住了；他對我拇指施加的壓力令人難以忍受）。我們進行腕力較量。 「跟我一起做就好了，」他用柔和的日耳曼口音說道。 是的。沒有比賽。他讓我站在他的肚子上，然後他吸氣，只用腹肌將我抬高。當他問我是否可以觸摸我的腳趾（我不能）時，他彎下腰，用手掌觸摸地毯，並對我眨著眼睛。 “你知道我為什麼這麼做嗎？”他問道，然後回答：“因為我訓練。”我每天都進行訓練。當我在馬戲團時，我正在接受訓練。當我在家時，我正在訓練。他指著健身房周圍。 “在這裡，有了這些，你也可以用手觸摸地板。”
當我提到我幾天後就要參軍時，喬告訴我，出去呼吸一下清晨的清涼空氣對我有好處。在調整他的 Reformer 機器的彈簧時（談到宗教裁判所），他透露說，下雪時他喜歡赤腳在裡面跑來跑去。 “當你參軍時就這麼做，”他說，“他們會讓你成為一名突擊隊員。”
好吧，我期待或希望的是狂野和瘋狂，我想，就我的目的而言，越狂野越好。但喬不肯接受巴迪的先入為主。喬人很好。他問我想要什麼樣的照片。我很難用言語來形容他「狂野而瘋狂」。
我回答：“就像你平常在這裡做的事一樣。”他帶領我們參觀並講解了他那些有趣且富有創意的機器。他示範瞭如何使用它們。我拍了照片。他說話了。他向我講述了他在德國的日子，以及他被關押在英國敵方公民營的經歷；他透過仔細觀察營地裡的動物以及它們醒來後如何伸展身體來發展自己的運動方法。他解釋說，畢竟，動物沒有運動計畫——它們的生活就是它們的計畫。人類透過不正確的坐姿和站姿來逃避自然的調節。除非動物殘疾或受傷，否則它只有一種方式躺下、一種方式坐下、一種方式站立、一種方式行走和奔跑。人們彎腰駝背、滑行、拖著腳步走路，走路不自然。他們有一百種行動方式，但大多數都是錯的。他強調說，他來這裡就是為了糾正這一切，教我們如何恢復大自然。
Joe幫助芭蕾舞者在 Universal Reformer 上練習
當喬提到他的控制學方法如果經常實踐，將有助於防止人們患病時，我請他澄清一下。 我看不出如何透過向不同方向伸展和拉動身體來預防疾病。所以他向我解釋了——就像我是個孩子一樣，
「這些消防員開著他們的卡車停在消防局周圍，到處都是你的身體，這裡和這裡，」他指著他的腋窩、脖子和腹股溝。 「它們正等著撲滅你體內的火焰——當你被割傷時，細菌進入體內就會引起火焰。一個開放性傷口。然後警報響起，消防車趕往現場——這種情況經常發生。 但是，當你每天都有疼痛的時候，消防員也會一直忙碌著。 看看現在街上的人們，他們一直在痛苦中行走。 消防員們正忙著撲滅這些愚蠢的東西所引起的火災。所以，當你練習控制術時，你的身體就會健康、狀態良好，消防員也會在消防站裡保持安靜，而當流感或支氣管炎等壞細菌來臨時，就會有大量的消防車隨時準備出動——殺死它們...... ”
後來，我要求在他最早的發明之一 Bednasium 上拍照，Bednasium 是一種醫院病床，在金屬框架床頭板上裝有彈簧。當我穿著褲子、襯衫和領帶爬上床時，喬攔住了我。如果我要使用他的健身器材鍛煉，我必須穿著“平角褲”，就像他的 Speedo 三角褲一樣。我走進更衣室，找到一個紙箱，裡面裝著十幾條黑色的Jantzen內褲，選了一條中號的，然後擺好姿勢，準備貼在 Buddy Bloodgood 的牆上。我不可能知道 50 年後這張照片會被世界各地成千上萬的人看到。
Robert “Bob” Wernick 是《體育畫報》上關於喬的文章的作者，我曾受邀為那篇文章繪製插圖(1962 年 2 月)，他與喬一起合作製作了 Teaser。 Bob 是 Pilates 先生的常客 © IC Rapoport
Joe Pilates / Learning to be an Animal
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