| Trapped on an island, Joseph Pilates put his time to good use. For Joseph Pilates, the exercises that changed his life took shape on the straw mat of a prison camp. The German-born part-time boxer and circus performer was living in Great Britain when World War I broke out. He was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man where tens of thousands of suspected “enemy aliens” were kept throughout the war. There are few surviving photos from Camp Knockaloe, but one depicts Pilates leading a field full of men in standing exercises. Decades later, the exercise legend would recall devising his physical fitness system, which he called Contrology, by looking at the sickly prisoners around him — starving due to the German blockade of the British Isles — and then at the also starving, yet still sprightly, cats. | 
