Posted by Burr Leonard on Tue, Jun 01, 2010 @ 11:46 AM
People have varying attitudes towards food. Some people cherish it as a major source of pleasure. Some struggle with eating too much of it, and others are simply obsessed with it. I myself am the type of person who’s relatively uninterested in food. I don’t cook, I eat mostly take-out, and I don’t know much about recipes, restaurants and what makes a meal memorable. For this reason I’ve always found the world of “foodies” somewhat intriguing and mysterious. I learned a little bit from “Julia and Me” (with Amy Adams and Meryl Streep) which taught me that Julia and Julie loved butter and spent a lot of time in the kitchen.
The last thing I would have imagined is that a lot of foodies are as addicted to exercise as they are to food. Recently a Bar Method
student named Beth Griffin, who happens to be a foodie, set me straight. Beth is a “food blogger” (another phenomenon heretofore unknown to me) with gorgeous photographs and great recipes at
http://www.sweetlifekitchen.com/. We met at a
teacher training session in L.A. where Beth was training to be a Bar Method instructor. Foodies, she told me, tend to love exercise, and they blog and tweet about it all the time. When I looked her up on twitter at
http://twitter.com/oursweetlife I saw that she had tweeted to a friend: "I've made it MANDATORY MONDAYS at #BarMethod, it makes my week so much better & I can burn off wht I ate thru the weekend!"
Another Bar Method studen Diana Hossfeld has a popular food blog
“I eat, I run, I write, I read I Bar Method, and then I do it all over again. (especially the eating part)…"
“A new way to look at dessert: how many Bar Method classes is it worth?"
”Abs still sore from Bar Method class on Wednesday night – nice change from usual source of stomach pain (eating too much)”
Then it hit me: Food. Exercise. Of course they go together! Where have I been? Foodies need exercise to burn off what they eat. Plus, foodies love physical sensations (butter on the taste buds for example) and exercise, plus its aftereffects, happen to be physical sensations.
To find out if my new theory was right, I asked another foodie who is also a Bar Method-ite to tell me how she feels about exercise. Her answer told me that I my assumptions are right on.
“The more sugar I eat the more time I spend at the Bar Method!” Jamie Cantor told me. Jamie is the owner of Platine Cookies at
http://www.platinecookies.com/ - an amazing, highly reviewed bakery with sweets and savories based in Culver City. She also has been a Bar Method teacher for six and a half years. She confirmed the pleasure-seeking link between eating and exercise: “Chocolate contains some chemicals that interact with the brain to make you feel good. In a similar vein, good exercise sends endorphins that can boost your mood as well. So I really see a connection between being a foodie and a Bar Method junkie!”
Diana of “Diana Takes a Bite” came clean about the addictive appeal of combining working out with eating: “The hunger factor plays a role in the link between physical activity and ‘foodie-ism’,” she said. “Exercise – especially intense exercise – makes us hungry. And food always tastes better on an empty stomach.” Like Jamie, she is also up front about the “calories in/calories out” factor. “I turn to exercise as an antidote for my less virtuous eating behavior,” she admitted.
Foodies, I’ve decided, are some of the most enlightened people around because they’re experts at appreciating the simple pleasures of life. “I've been known to buy one pound boxes of See's chocolates -- for myself,” Diana freely admitted to me. “Sometimes I even have the counter girls wrap them up like I'm giving them to someone else.” Who but a foodie could conceive of such a wonderful act of pleasure-seeking whimsy? Cheers!
Posted by Burr Leonard on Tue, Mar 30, 2010 @ 11:59 AM
“I can’t feel my abs!” “When I try to pull in, nothing happens.” “My abs just aren’t changing.” I hear these statements from new students all the time. More than any other muscle group, the abdominals are typically the hardest ones for people to find, work and change. Even when the students’ themselves command their abs to get going, they seem to just sit there. Frustrating!
These people have come up against a maddening feature of our abdominals. They take their own sweet time to respond. In my experience, students’ abs typically take about four times longer than most other muscle groups to gain strength and look tighter. Why are they so slow on the uptake? The main reason is that they’re much thinner than other major muscles groups. You could (hypothetically) hold Arnold Schwarzenegger’s abdominals in one hand, while you could barely lift his quads. Their small mass makes it hard to get your brain around contracting them, especially when they’re weak. There’s not enough muscle fiber to get the job done.
Fortunately our abs have a built-in solution to the problem of their puny size. Our deepest abdominal muscle, the transversus abdominis (“TA”) and our diaphragm are interconnected. This muscle-to-muscle relationship gives us all the ability to jump-start our abs by doing such things as sneezing, coughing, laughing or exhaling sharply with our diaphragm. Now you know why Bar Method teachers are always telling you to “exhale” as you work your abs.
I remember going through the process of getting my own abs up to speed during my first months as a Lotte Berk Method student in the early 80s. I would be doing the “curl” exercise, and the teacher would tell us, “exhale and pull in.” I would exhale, but my abs would not pull in. Then one day after coming to class regularly for about three months, I suddenly felt them come alive. When I later became a teacher, I noticed that many of my students also needed to concentrate on breathing and pulling in for the same three-month interval before their abs kicked in. Now I can happily reassure my beginning students that there’s nothing wrong with their abdominals. Tighter abs are on their way. Their biggest challenge in the meantime: patience!
Of course if you’re carrying excess intramuscular fat between the layers of your ab muscle, you have some additional work to do. Our bodies burn fat “systemically.” That is, it comes off our body as a whole. You can’t “spot” reduce fat. The best way to shrink your waist is to work your largest, most calorie-hungry muscle groups, specifically those in your upper legs and arms. Your abdominals on the other hand aren’t great calorie burners because they’re so thin, the better to wrap tightly around you. So The Bar Method places ab work toward the end of its workout. That way, your already reved-up cardio-vascular system will continue to burn away fat as you focus on your breathing and pulling in.
Read more about The Bar Method's Body Sculpting Secrets.
Find Bar Method Exercise Classes near you.
Sample and Buy Bar Method Exercise DVDs.
Posted by Burr Leonard on Tue, Jan 26, 2010 @ 11:35 AM
A few years ago I took a class from a new teacher who accidentally reversed two exercises called “round-back” and “flat-back” (they are taught only in the studio-based classes and not on the dvds). Most students, myself among them, find these exercises two of the toughest in the workout. That day when the teacher reversed them, they became easy. My heart-rate slowed down, and I did not feel challenged for the rest of the class. Was it my imagination, or did switching the order of these exercises rob them of their edge?
The answer is yes, exercise order can make or break your workout. The Bar Method recognizes this dynamic and uses it to maximize results. Take the above example: Round-back and Flat-back are designed to raise your heart-rate and burn away fat. Flat-back is the harder and faster exercise, and placing it second makes it exponentially harder because your muscles are already pretty fatigued when you get to it. That state of near exhaustion is what you want to get to if you’re aiming for quick body change.
Similarly, The Bar Method places push-ups after its free-weight exercises so that push-ups become intense enough to serve as a bout of interval training. That way, you wrap up the upper-body work section by burning fat off the muscles that the free-weight exercises just sculpted. Why end with push-ups? Because they work a larger portion of your body’s muscles than free-weights do. Yes, if you reversed the order and did push-ups first, the free-weight work will seem more challenging, but free-weights just don’t engage enough of your body’s muscles to ever be a serious burner.
Safety is another reason the Bar Method puts free-weights before push-ups. The human shoulder tends to be vulnerable to injury because of its unusual flexibility relative to other joints. To have our cake (sculpted arms) and eat it too (less fat), the Bar Method starts with the gentler exercises to allow the shoulders to warm up before launching into push-ups.
Most important of all for body change, the Bar Method’s exercise sequence sculpts long, graceful muscles like those of dancers. Their ballet bar workout starts with plies to warm up their thighs and ends with battements to stretch their hips. The Bar Method class uses the same progression. It starts with leg raises that engage your thighs and ends the standing bar work section with seat exercises that extend your leg behind your hip. In the second half of the class, the Bar Method starts with thigh and hip work (round-back and flat-back) and ends with hip stretching (back-dancing). (For more on stretching, see
“How to Sculpt a Dancer’s Body")
The three-fold beauty of this sequence is that it generates plenty of intensity to slim down your body, maximizes joint safety, and constantly elongates your muscles from the initial warm-up to the final stretch.
Posted by Burr Leonard on Tue, Dec 29, 2009 @ 10:09 AM
As the year comes to a close, I would like to republish the most popular blog I've written in 2009. At the bottom of the article, I have also included links to my other blogs which make up this year's five most read.
See you in 2010! Have a very Happy New Year!
HOW THE BAR METHOD SLIMS YOU DOWN AND KEEPS YOU AEROBICALLY FIT
Since the 70s, millions of active Americans have been led to believe that aerobics slims you down and strength work tones your muscles. The truth is not so simple.
In fact most kinds of exercise that keep us moving continuously for more than a few moments, strength work included, are aerobic. Stored fat is our most convenient energy source, so our bodies use it as soon as possible, that is, after you've finished the warm-up stage of your workout. Walking, running, vacuuming, anything that raises your heart rate above resting level, burns both carbs and fat.
The question we should really be asking is: how do we maximize the number of fat calories burned from exercise? To find this out, experts now rely less on how aerobic a particular type of exercise is, and more on how intense it is. Want to know which exercise routine to choose when you're trying to drop a few dress sizes? Experts now suggest you rank them by level of intensity. Pretty straight forward: work harder; use more fuel.
So how do you determine intensity? Think back to that old adage: "feel the burn." The burn in your muscles is a good clue that your workout is getting intense. To find out just how intense, try clocking the amount of time you spend during your workout while experiencing a muscle burn. If it's zero, you're not using a lot of calories. If it's a good part of your workout, you're cooking with fire. Want to up your caloric expenditure? Increase your level of muscle burn until you can barely continue. Now you're cooking with dynamite!
Using intensity as a gauge, you can now see through the old adage that walking's a better fat burner than running. Truth be known, walking does not burn a lot of calories per minute of exercise. Go for a two-hour run and you'll burn about a half a pound of fat. You'd need to walk for five hours to match that result. Yes, compared with running, walking can burn a somewhat higher proportion of fat calories than it does carbs, but compared with running, it simply does not do a good job when it comes to burning total calories. Intense aerobic activity burn calories like crazy and so is doing away with a lot more fat calories per minute of exercise, even if its fat-to-carb ratio is lower than that of walking. Bottom line: walking is not an efficient calorie burner because it's not intense exercise.
For the same reason, yoga and pilates use relatively little energy. Kick up the intensity with running, biking and other aerobic sports, and you get a much better result: more calories consumed and a gain in aerobic stamina to up your caloric burn during your next workout.
Granted: Running, biking, rowing and other high-energy exercise all do an okay job on the "calories out" side of the fuel equation. To do better - to burn even more calories during exercise and to drop even more jean sizes - you'd need to up the level of intensity you experience during aerobics. But how?
Recently a new student walked into a Bar Method studio to sign up for classes. "I'm going to take the Bar Method once a week, because I love it," she told the front desk manager. "But I'm trying to lose some weight, so I'm going to run on the other days." If this student had chosen instead to take the Bar Method four days a week, she probably would have ended up a dress size or two smaller. Like this student, most fitness consumers believe the best remedy for extra pounds is running. It's only when Bar Method students see their bodies shrink beyond what they were able to accomplish by running do they begin to understand that there's something more you can do to shrink your body besides run. To read how Bar Method shapes muscles as well, read How To Sculpt a Dancer's Body.
The problem with running is that by its very nature it's limited in the degree of intensity it can produce. Unless you're planning a brief sprint, running leaves you no choice but to proceed at less than top speed, simply in order to keep going. If you did attempt to run at top speed, your body would give out after a few moments. This is running's catch 22: It challenges you, but there's a kind of glass ceiling of intensity beyond which it won't let you go.
Here are four other blogs that with the one above make up 2009's most popular.
GETTING IN SHAPE: A BODY SCULPTING TRANSFORMATION STORY
THREE BODY SCULPTING SECRETS USED BY THE BAR METHOD
FITNESS TIPS: WHY YOU MIGHT JUST BULK UP BEFORE YOU SLIM DOWN
HOW TO SCULPT A DANCER'S BODY
Posted by Burr Leonard on Fri, Jul 31, 2009 @ 11:07 AM
The Bar Method is famous for quickly changing the shape and look of its clients’ bodies. Why does this exercise system excel at body sculpting? There are three principal reasons that The Bar Method outdoes other workouts in targeted muscle creation and elongation.
1. The Bar Method’s interval training format creates a high level of intensity that boosts the metabolic rate.
The Bar Method calls on multiple muscle groups to perform each 
exercise and prevents these muscles from releasing between reps, working them all the harder. The ballet bar is essential to this process. It lets students easily balance over gravity for minutes without a break while they work their thighs, glutes, hamstrings and posture muscles. This unbroken holding forces more muscle fibers into service than you get while running -- or even in spinning -- by never giving the legs a chance to recover. Students generate more lactic acid in its hour-long workout than they would in a week of typical jogging and thus enjoy lengthy post-exercise calorie burn-offs and heightened metabolic rates. (Click here to read more about exercise and lactic acid.) For the "down" intervals, stretches are ideal for processing any built-up lactic acid. At the same time, these stretches perform the added task of pulling apart the still clenching "muscle filaments" (the parts of our muscles that overlap to contract and separate to release). The result is increased elasticity, which enables muscles to more easily contract and expand, thus becoming functionally stronger.
2. The Bar Method challenges the leg muscles, where most of our bodies’ muscle mass resides, throughout its hour-long workout.
The Bar Method works your largest, most calorie-hungry muscles, namely the ones in your thighs, glutes, and hamstrings. The four thigh muscles, the quads, form our largest muscle group. The glutes are the largest individual muscles and the hamstrings are big and powerful allies. The first half of a Bar Method class is done standing, so that the legs work in various ways for that 30 minutes. The second half of class also works the leg muscles from a seated position. It is common in the Bar Method’s first seated position called “round-back” for most of the students’ legs to be shaking from exertion. In “flat back” the legs are constantly in motion. In “curl” and “back dancing,” the glutes and hamstrings are on fire with effort. The legs don’t nap at The Bar Method and their use gives its students the maximum bang for their bucks.
3. The Bar Method teaches students to isolate key muscles and keep them recruited for sustained periods.
A Bar Method glute or posterior deltoid workout, for instance, starts out by teaching clients to isolate these hard-to-find muscles. Once students succeed in getting into position, they sustain it without breaking until their muscles begin to give out. At this juncture the Bar Method delivers its coup de grace. Just as the holding pattern becomes difficult to maintain, students add small, rhythm bursts of motion to it, never releasing the underlying position. These fiery little pulsations enable everyone in the class to sustain their pose without flagging while they work even more deeply into it. Other workouts that include lunges or squats are releasing the grip of the muscle with each rep, thus never building the burn long enough to generate new muscle mass. Through isolation, whether of the deltoids, the glutes, the transversus abdominis or any of our various hard-to-reach muscles, true sculpting takes place. (Read more about Bar Method's core strengthening exercises here.)
As the New York Times wrote last May in its groundbreaking article on the benefits of interval training: “To go hard, the body must use new muscle fibers. Once these recent recruits are trained, they are available to burn fuel even during easy-does-it workouts.” It is this production of new muscle fiber at which The Bar Method excels. The Times went on to say, “Interval training also stimulates change in mitochondria, where fuel is converted to energy, causing them to burn fat first....” Use of the interval training formula plus sustained use of our biggest muscles and finding and isolating our underused muscles all contribute to The Bar Method’s amazing power to shape bodies.
Find it, use it, build it. And do all of this at a high intensity rate followed by stretching. That’s the body sculpting secret behind the Bar Method workout.
Click here to find Bar Method exercise classes near you.
Click here to sample and buy Bar Method exercise dvd's.
Posted by Burr Leonard on Thu, Feb 26, 2009 @ 05:23 PM
Wait a second! Why would anyone want to produce lactic acid?
Isn't that the waste product that you need to flush out of your system or it will make you sore? Here's where I want to set the records straight. Lactic acid production in exercise is a good thing, in fact a great thing, for your overall state of health and fitness.
So what, actually, is lactic acid? For one, it is not a waste product, and it does not make you sore. Soreness is caused by tiny breaks in your muscles. The truth is, lactic acid is a pure, condensed form of fuel - a kind of power bar -- that your body isn't able to process quickly enough to use for the task at hand. As soon as your body catches a break, so to speak, it goes to work feeding this high-octane fuel to your organs and muscles, which gain from its rich ingredients.
No doubt about it, the health benefits of lactic acid are huge. First, your body uses extra calories for as long as six hours after you stop exercising, just to process the stuff. Once absorbed, lactic acid acts to firm up your muscles and increase your aerobic capacity. In subsequent workout sessions, your body gets better and better at processing this excess fuel, and you gain athletic stamina and a higher metabolic rate. Also, your heart and lungs are now able to send more oxygen through your veins to get rid of fat (which needs a good supply of oxygen to be burned as fuel). Last but not least, the more you "feel the burn" during exercise, the more growth hormone (HGH) - an almost magical substance that helps keep us youthful - your body will make. So: cook up some nice, fresh lactic acid during your workout and you're on your way to becoming your dream "lean, mean, fat burning machine!"
Let's take one more look at lactic acid's many body-slimming benefits:
1. Your body uses extra calories to absorb lactic acid.
2. Every workout session triggers a lengthy post-exercise calorie burn-off, melting away extra calories for hours after you stopped exercising.
3. Once lactic acid is absorbed into your muscles, they become firmer and stronger, increasing your metabolic rate.
4. Your body develops "lactic-acid tolerance", or the ability to work longer before your muscles give out. This added stamina enables you to work harder during exercise, burning more and more calories along the way.
5. Your body gains aerobic capacity, making it both more efficient at burning fat during exercise (Remember, your body needs oxygen to burn fat).
6. Lactic acid stimulates your endocrine system to produce our bodies' own natural anti-aging serum, human growth hormone, staving off the withering effects of aging and keeping your metabolic rate high.
Interval training helps us produce this totally natural weight loss product. With interval training, you can work above your "lactic acid threshold," the point at which your muscles become so fatigued they give out, for brief intervals! After each "full-out-effort" set, you work at a slower pace to give the lactic acid a chance to work its way though your system. Then onto another intense, "feel-the-burn until-you-drop" interval. Your body virtually explodes with energy in the heat of these intense, go-for-broke moments. Your muscles draw energy from every source available, namely the fat and carb stores under your skin and in your belly, and also from within your muscles themselves.
This incredibly intense way of working out generates a huge quantity of lactic acid. In contrast, on a run you have no choice but to stay at or slightly below your "lactic acid threshold." Pit interval training against long distance running in a lactic acid making contest, and minute for minute, interval training wins hands down. Read more about new findings on interval training here.
Click here to find Bar Method exercise classes near you.
Click here to sample and buy Bar Method exercise dvds.
Posted by Burr Leonard on Fri, Jan 30, 2009 @ 08:07 PM
By now most of us know that you can't "spot reduce". That is, you can't burn fat off of one part of your body 
by working that body part.
What you can do is "spot strengthen."
That is, you can develop certain muscles in your body more than others. "Spot strengthening" however, is easier said than done. First, working just one muscle group doesn't generate the caliber of intensity you need to change the visible shape of your body. Second, that one body part you want to change is inseparably connected to a lot of other body parts that are affecting its shape. So leaving out surrounding muscle groups in your exercise routine will not produce an all around change in shape.
Let's say, for example, that you want to lift and define your glutes. So you buy a glute-lifting exercise video and get to work. After a few months you do feel firmer in that area, but you don't see much change in the way you look. The reason for the frustratingly meager results is that your thighs, hips, lower back and calves haven't changed, and they play a role in determining the appearance of your rear. Add thigh-work, and your thighs will lift forward from the front and help make your rear look narrower. Add lower back stretching, and your glutes will sit higher and to grip more firmly. (Read more about the importance of stretching exercises to sculpt your body.) Work your calves and your hamstring muscles, which overlap your calves, will give more definition to the lower part of your rear.
There's second reason bun lifting exercise videos don't work. Our glutes are built for power and endurance: deep, tough and interlaced with fat for extra energy and armor. Therefore bun exercises by themselves don't make a dent in the fat component in your glutes. For your rear to become leaner and more defined, multiple muscles must be competing for fuel at the same time.
Third, that same power and endurance possessed by glutes makes them a tough customer when it comes to getting enough challenge. Spinning, dockey kicks, stair climbers, Pilates, yoga -- you name it - work the hamstrings but barely touch the glutes. The Bar Method has thus far been a lone voice in the wilderness calling for a new look at how glutes function and what challenges them. (Read this article to learn our secrets to sculpting a Bar Butt.)
There's a second key element in the Bar Method's unique ability to reshape muscles: its emphasis on technique. Unlike its imitators, the Bar Method trains its students to identify and use the muscles they want to work - those that truly change the shape of the body. Just as important, students learn not to engage overused muscles such as those in the neck and lower back. This difference is subtle but vital to safe and effective muscle sculpting. An outsider comparing a Bar Method workout with one of its imitators might not see that the students in both classes are using entirely different muscles. This skill is called "differentiation," or the power to use one muscle without unconsciously engaging another. Bar Method teachers are highly trained to help their students learn this important - and up-to-now much neglected - kinetic ability.
In sum, the Bar Method succeeds at reshaping by rewiring the muscles' interconnection. In a Bar Method class, for example, thigh-work and seat work are performed in sequence. During the thigh section, the seat muscles come alive towards the end of the exercise to intensify the elongating contractions of the thighs.
Then during seat-work, the warmed-up, worked out, and now exhausted thighs act as a break against the glutes' and hamstrings' contractions. The result is beautiful scissor-like legs that have narrowed when viewed from the front or back.