Joseph Hubertus Pilates was born in 1880 near Dusseldorf Germany. He was a frail child and suffered from asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever. His poor health and worries about tuberculosis led him to become passionate about physical fitness as a way to improve his health. He took up bodybuilding, diving, skiing and gymnastics. By the time he was 14 he was posing for anatomy charts. He later studied yoga and karate. In 1912 he moved to England where he was a boxer and circus performer and taught self-defense to detectives.

When World War I broke out two years later he was designated at "enemy alien" and interned with other German nationals at a prison camp in Lancaster and later on the Isle of Man. This period of forced "idleness" offered him an opportunity to develop and refine his ideas about health and body-building. He began to form the predecessors of his equipment by experimenting with his bunk, bedsprings, and a chair. He became a nurse in the camp hospital where he attached springs to hospital beds to help non-ambulatory patients begin to exercise and rehabilitate. He taught self-defense, wrestling, body-building, and rehabilitation to all of his fellow internees. He boasted later that because they followed his regimen that not a single one of his fellow internees had been laid low by the influenza epidemic that killed thousands in England in 1918.

After the war he returned to Germany where he created fitness training programs for the Hamburg city police force. In the early '20s his work first took hold in the world of dance when he met Rudolf von Laban. Laban incorporated some of Joe's body-building techniques into his own teaching. It was from him that Hanya Holm first learned of Joe's work, which she made part of the regular warm-up in the Holm technique.

When he received an invitation to train the new German Army he decided it was time to leave for America. He met his wife Clara on the boat on the way to America. Clara was a nursery and kindergarten teacher. They were drawn together by a mutual interest in health and exercise and decided to open a physical fitness studio together.

In New York many dancers became fans of his work, including Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, George Balanchine and Martha Graham. They often sent their dancers to him, particularly when they were injured. Joe and Clara continued to personally oversee their clients into the 1960's. He died in 1967 at the age of 87.