What is a reformer? The reformer, which looks much like a massage table, was invented by Joseph Pilates during World War I as a rehabilitation device for injured soldiers. The reformer is a contraption with...
The reformer is a contraption with a sliding carriage, so it's like a bed, a massage table, a weight bench, or whatever you want to call. It has pulleys and springs. Joseph Pilates was a German who happened to have the ill-fortune of being in London when World War I broke out, so he was put into a trauma camp. While he was there, the soldiers started to notice that he was doing all these wacky things to keep himself fit. They found out that when he was growing up in Germany, he had all kinds of textbook illnesses like scurvy and rickets, so he wasn't allowed to play outside. He was a spunky little kid, so he was determined to straighten himself out. He developed the basics of Pilates in his pre-teens. By the time he was fourteen, he was actually so well proportioned and aligned that he was hired as a model for an anatomy textbook. From there he went on to become a circus trapeze flier and other crazy things.
Anyway, when the soldiers figured this out, they pulled him out of the camp and put him to work in their hospitals rehabilitating their soldiers. That is where he became totally immersed in this exercise format. He took parts of the hospital beds to rehabilitate people who could do nothing but lie on their backs. The reformer grew out of that. It looks like a cot with pulleys and springs at the head end of it. When you push or pull on the pulleys, you're moving yourself by sliding back and forth on the carriage. The difference between that and what you see in gyms or on TV is that there are no weights. Your own body weight is always going to be the perfect weight for you to move. The only variable is the tension in the springs that you put on. You can use up to five springs and do more than 500 exercises with numerous modifications.
