It is called Pilates, and I had been hearing about it for some time but dismissed it as a faddish \’90s workout. It fit the mold perfectly: It had the requisite exotic name (pronounced puh-LAH-tees), you had to go to a gym to do it, and celebrities hailed it as a miracle workout that managed, with perfect \’90s perversity, to give shapely women the bodies of 12-year-old boys.