Nicholas Kounovsky: The Fitness Engineer

The Original Celebrity Trainer

“If Le Pavillon is the mother of New York's French restaurants, Nicholas Kounovsky can be said to have fathered the exercise studios that keep restaurant-going women in proper shape. Since the Russian-born Kounovsky started standing women on their heads back in 1940, Kounovsky-ing has become a household word. Not anybody's household, of course, but it's part of the language of women who also know the ‘in’ hairdresser and the little jewel of a manicurist.” – Angela Taylor, New York Times, 1969

The idea of a celebrity trainer—both someone who trains celebrities and who becomes famous in their own right—is nothing new. I first became interested in Nicholas Kounovsky after finding a mention of him in an old gossip column, as the man who kept Jacqueline Onassis willowy and svelte. From 1958 to 1968 she attended, usually once a week, his New York gymnastics studio, where she was just one of the many “Beautiful People” who frequented it—others included Dina Merrill, Suzy Parker, and Mary Martin. By then, he was already an internationally famous exercise teacher, described as an "entrepreneur of the body beautiful."

Photo of Kounovsky in his studio from Elaine Ewing’s wonderful history of Pilates and associated exercise practices.

Born in Odessa in 1913 to Russian parents, Kounovsky received an engineering degree from the École supérieure des techniques aéronautiques et de construction automobile in Paris. As he told the Boston Globe decades later, “I began with a study of man-made machines and I realized how little I knew about our own machine. It intrigued me.” His interest in bodily movement led him to start training as a gymnast and then to study physical education and the Sokol Method at L'École normale d'éducation physique. In 1940, Kounovsky moved to New York City and opened a studio on the parlor floor of an old townhouse at 39 West 54th Street. Decades later, he remembered, “Thirty years ago friends told me I was crazy to think I could teach exercise and get paid for it. But I knew I had a good product. My biggest problem was that I had only $7 in my pocket and landlords wouldn’t rent a studio to me. Finally, I convinced one that I would have the rent by the end of the month.” Almost immediately his Midtown gymnasium was set upon by “models and movie stars, writers and fashion photographers, heart specialists, real estate and insurance brokers” who became regulars, hanging their exercise clothes by the door in hundreds of calico laundry bags.

LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1944.