CEO Corner: Balanced Body’s Ken Endelman on Building a Pilates Empire

Ken Endelman founded Balanced Body in 1976 thanks to a chance encounter. Over 50 years, the company has served as a key driving force behind Pilates’ meteoric rise

For those who truly know, Balanced Body is practically synonymous with Pilates itself. 

Besides owning the “Pilates.com” domain name and being the fitness modality’s largest equipment maker, the company helped pave the way for the growth of the modern Pilates industry itself after it won a key legal case in 2000, which found that the term “pilates” couldn’t be trademarked. 

But there’s a parallel universe in which Balanced Body never existed. Ken Endelman founded the company in 1976, essentially by happenstance while running a waterbed store in Hollywood. 

Today, Balanced Body’s equipment — including its famous Allegro reformer — and education programs are used by countless fitness studios, colleges, pro sports teams and physical therapy facilities across the globe.

To coincide with the company’s 50th anniversary, Endelman sat down with Athletech News to discuss the chance encounter that led to him founding Balanced Body, trace the rise of the modern Pilates movement and share what’s coming next for the company as it looks to stay on top in a suddenly crowded market. 

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Athletech News: Take us all the way back to the 1970s. Why did you decide to create Balanced Body?

Ken Endelman: Lots of times you’ll talk to CEOs and they’ll say, “I had this epiphany; I had this vision; I knew in my heart that this is where I needed to go.” For me, it was none of that.

I had a waterbed store in Hollywood. I was making custom furniture in order to survive. A lady came in to me and asked me to build this thing she called an apparatus. At that point, there were probably 10 Pilates studios in the world. In Hollywood at this time, people would come into my store, and they’d want a special deal or a discount, and in exchange they would promise you either money, drugs or sex. So I was really jaded, but finally I agreed, and I started making reformers. 

At the very beginning, it was just another gig — it was like if somebody came in and wanted me to build a dresser or a table. But as I was making the equipment, I was starting to see the same customers over and over again, and they were talking about how phenomenal this stuff was. I started doing some research, and I realized that maybe there was something going on here. But I still didn’t really take it that seriously until about the mid-’80s.

So that’s how it got started. It just grew and grew — we started selling not just in Los Angeles, but Northern California, then Colorado and Texas, and then the East Coast. People kept on buying equipment because we figured out how to make it consistently, and we were always improving it.

ATN: When do you think Pilates started to gain mainstream relevance in the fitness world? Was it back then in the 1980s, or a later date?

KE: There were a couple of big tipping points in the Pilates world. Prior to 2000, people weren’t allowed to use the word “pilates” to describe what they taught. There was a big lawsuit, and basically, when it was resolved, it found that Pilates was a method of exercise, and therefore it couldn’t be trademarked. People could actually advertise that they were doing Pilates. That was a huge milestone.

The internet also became real around that time. It was a giant equalizer among businesses because small businesses could advertise and people could find them easily. That created a whole bunch of opportunities for Pilates. That’s when big, group reformer classes really started, and that’s when we came up with the Allegro 1. Then, the Australians got a hold of Pilates. They took the reformer class concept to a whole different level, and then it came back to the United States. Before then, it was considered blasphemous that you could do 10 reformers in a room. From there, it started growing commercially.

ATN: It seems like we’re living through another Pilates boom post-pandemic. What’s driving that?

KE: The pandemic is the biggest reason I think Pilates is growing right now. Everybody came out of the pandemic taking their health seriously. Pilates just works unbelievably well, and it’s got this strength as a brand. There’s this positivity that’s associated with Pilates. When you say “pilates,” people automatically think of it as a good thing — the thing that they should be doing. It’s aspirational. We’ve got so much more media now than we ever have in the past. Famous football players and baseball players, they talk about Pilates like it’s apple pie. So we’re getting unbelievable free advertising.

And then you add to that the fact that the money has now found Pilates. People are investing in Pilates who had never invested in it before. It wasn’t until recently that people thought this was a viable business.

ATN: With the boom has come a lot more competition, including in the Pilates equipment space. How does Balanced Body stand out from rival brands in 2026?

KE: It’s great to be the OG. We’ve got 50 years of experience and literally hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide who are telling us what we should be doing better and what works well. That experience, feedback and knowledge is precious, and it’s going to take a long time for people to learn what we’ve learned in order to know the secret sauce.

The other thing that’s really important is that we’re totally integrated. We’re making stuff here in the U.S., we’re warehousing in the U.S., we’re shipping from the U.S. and we’re using almost all U.S. components.

We also provide education, and we have experience in not just supporting the fitness industry, but in supporting physical therapists and sports teams. Pilates is our business, so we want to make everyone successful. 

ATN: Several brands have come out with digitally connected Pilates equipment featuring TV screens and virtual instruction. Could Balanced Body ever get in on the connected Pilates trend?

KE: The answer is definitely yes. But I think it can be done a lot better.

For us, what’s really important is that if we do this, we’ll do it in such a way that improves the customer and instructor experience. We want to use technology in a way that gives people the tools to actually improve their experience, and not just bells and whistles. Bells and whistles are really easy — cardio on a reformer, for instance, is stupid, because Pilates is not a cardio exercise. You can put it on there, but you’re just wasting it real estate.

ATN: How confident are you that the current, post-pandemic Pilates boom is here to stay and not just a fad?

KE: Pilates has been around for 100 years, and things that take a long time to evolve usually take a long time to go away. Pilates, at its root, is really good exercise, and the people who practice Pilates find it fun. Our customers are really sticky — they stay with it more than in other modalities.

I do worry a little bit because people in the fitness industry are so used to fads, they’ll just treat it like one, and they’ll kind of create their own destiny. They’ll say, “Okay, well, it’s been five years, let’s go over the next thing.”  I’ve always been taught that if you focus on offering the best product and the best service, then profit is a byproduct. I think that if people just look at Pilates in terms of just the way to make money because it is so profitable, they’ll overlook the quality of service they’re offering.

ATN: Balanced Body just celebrated its 50th anniversary. What are your goals for the brand in the years ahead to make sure you stay on top?

KE: We want to continue to be the place to go for everything in Pilates. It’s kind of simple. It doesn’t matter whether you want to open up a home studio or a big gym; we want to be the place to go. And we want to continue to lead the industry. If you look at all the patents on all the new equipment that’s coming out, almost every single one of them cites Ken Endelman as prior art. So they’re all working off of our stuff, and I want to keep it that way. I want to keep as many competitors in the rear-view mirror as I possibly can. And spread Pilates, because it’s a phenomenal modality, and the people who practice it get so much benefit.