Who was Joseph Pilates - Young

Born December 1883 in Germany.
Pilates was a sickly child and suffered from asthma, rickets, and rheumatic fever, and he dedicated his entire life to improving his physical strength.
His dad introduced him to gymnastics and body-building, and to martial arts By the age of 14, he was fit enough to pose for anatomical charts.
Pilates crucially came to believe that the "modern" life-style, bad posture, and inefficient breathing lay at the roots of poor health. He ultimately devised a series of exercises and training-techniques and engineered all the equipment, specifications, and tuning required to teach his methods properly. Hence Pilates as we know it was born!