The Reformer: From Bedframe to Boutique

For anyone who walks into a group class every day, the Reformer is simply the apparatus: the carriage that slides along metal rails, the footbar, the cluster of colored springs hooked to the end of the frame. It’s the piece that has visually defined the method for the last three decades — the one that shows up in every boutique-studio photograph, the one that props up the entire group-class business model. But its lineage, like the Cadillac’s, which we’ve told in these pages before, is as humble as any object born of urgency: it began as a bed.

We’ve told that origin story here already: at the Knockaloe internment camp during the First World War, Joseph Pilates tied springs to infirmary bedframes so that bedridden internees could exercise. Over the years, that single gesture split into two distinct pieces of equipment: one kept its vertical structure and became the Cadillac; the other flattened out into a sliding bed with its own carriage. That second apparatus is what we now call the Reformer.

A Patent Without Springs

On August 24, 1925, already settled in the United States, Pilates filed a patent application for what he called Gymnastic Apparatus: a “movable carriage… adapted to receive the user in a recumbent position,” mounted on a frame with tracks, with an adjustable shoulder rest and a foot platform. The patent office granted it on March 15, 1927, under number 1,621,477. It is, technically, the Reformer’s founding document.

There’s a detail that surprises even people who’ve taught on this machine for years: according to a reconstruction by researcher Kevin Bowen drawing on the patent archives, that first registered version didn’t use springs at all — it used a weight stack as its resistance system. The design we recognize the apparatus by today — the adjustable-tension springs, direct descendants of the ones Pilates tied to the beds at Knockaloe — arrived later, through studio practice rather than through the patent. Pilates named it the Universal Reformer and included it, now fitted with springs, in his book Your Health (1934).

From Eighth Avenue to Sacramento

Gratz, the New York metalworking shop that has been in business since 1928, built an aluminum version of the Reformer during Pilates’ lifetime; it remains the only manufacturer he personally endorsed. But the serial production we know today — the 80-inch frame, the softened edges — wasn’t his idea. According to Bowen, it was Romana Kryzanowska, his closest student, who pushed manufacturing forward after Pilates’ death in 1967, using her own equipment collection as a template; even the earliest rope handles, he notes, were made from toilet-paper-roll holders.

In 1976, in Los Angeles, a furniture and waterbed maker named Ken Endelman was asked by a client, Isa Bohn, a Pilates teacher, to build her a better Reformer than the ones on the market. Endelman studied the original designs, consulted with other teachers, and ended up founding what is now Balanced Body, the industry’s largest manufacturer. A key collaboration with Ron Fletcher — the dancer who brought the method to Beverly Hills, whose story we’ve also told in this magazine — followed in 1984, producing the adjustable footbar and, per Bowen’s reconstruction, the lighter, fifth yellow spring proposed by teacher Stefan Frease along with a color-coded thread system: the direct ancestor of the colored tabs that mark spring resistance today.

That’s how Pilates himself put it in a 1946 interview, and the line sums up the logic of his invention better than any sales brochure could: not a brute-force machine, but a device that negotiates with the body, yielding and resisting at once.

The Word No One Could Own

What actually detonated the industry was a court ruling, not a patent. In 2000, a New York court declared the word “Pilates” generic and no longer eligible for trademark protection — the trial that, as we’ve covered elsewhere in this section, freed the method’s name for anyone to use. From that point on, building Reformers stopped being the territory of a single company: Peak Pilates, Stott (now Merrithew), and Basil Pilates — founded in 1990 as a spinoff of Gratz — entered the market with their own variants, swapping wood for metal and adding adjustable pulleys and riser systems. At the far end of the spectrum came the Megaformer, the oversized version through which trainer Sebastien Lagree popularized, starting around 2010, a high-intensity training format that has little left in common with original Contrology — and that is, even so, a direct descendant of that carriage on rails patented in 1927.

A century after that patent application, the Reformer is built in aluminum, carbon fiber, and certified wood, in workshops from California to Turkey. But the mechanism that makes it work — a body pushing, a spring answering — remains, in essence, the same gesture a man locked away on an island improvised by tying springs to a hospital bed.