In 1914 Joseph Pilates was sitting in a World War I-era internment camp watching his fellow inmates waste away when he had an idea. As he later recounted to a journalist, the skinny prison courtyard cats kept spry and limber, stretching and moving even as they starved — could the German citizens interned in the camp at the Isle of Man do something similar? Pilates developed what would later become his namesake: a regimen of repetitive, controlled body movements with minimal…
