Duke is one of a select group of six Bar Method students that my staff chose to take class regularly for 60 days, then report on how The Bar Method changed their bodies over that time. The other five students in the group, all women, are aiming to slim down or tone up their bodies. Duke is already slender and already has well-defined muscles. When I asked him about the changes he’d like to make, he told me this story about how the Bar Method is helping him recover from a brutal back injury he suffered last year around the time of his wedding.
Duke’s full name is John Dukellis. He is, as he puts it, “a guy who’s historically chased a ball.” He played collegiate volleyball and golf while studying computers science and business at MIT and Stanford. After graduate school, he ran an international chip security company, and last year, at age 31, he founded a high-tech media start-up. He’s someone who likes to both work and play hard. During the six months leading up to his wedding, Duke and his fiancé Keryun trekked down the Sumerian Gorge in Crete. At home, he is known to spend 80-hour weeks working at this computer.
Last June, two months after his wedding, Duke was blindsided by a back injury that put him flat on his back for half a year. He and Keryun were walking down the aisle of a movie theater in San Francisco’s South Beach district about to see the remake of Star Trek. The couple made their way towards two available seats in the midst of a row. “I took one step over someone,” Duke remembers. That was when he felt his lowest vertebral disk, the one between his spine and his sacrum, tear. “These injuries happen when you go over and you’re twisting,” he explained to me. “Just about every L5/S1 [“Lumbar 5/Sacral 1”] injury happens this way, when you’re rotating and bending down. That’s what pinches the disks.” Duke could no longer stand without pain. His doctors did an MRI that showed the tear. Nonetheless Duke resolved not to let his injury slow him down.
He put a projector on the ceiling of his home office and worked while lying flat on the floor. He got several cortisone injections into his spine and began a regimen of physical therapy. Gradually, his disk began to repair itself. Once he was back on his feet, however, Duke noticed that he had lost a great amount of strength and stamina. “When you spend six months lying down, your body kind of dissolves,” he explained. "So first of all I needed to get the rest of my body back in function again.”
At this stage of his rehabilitation, Duke could stand and walk but could not yet sit comfortably. He needed to gain enough stamina to work long hours in a standing position. He also needed to develop better alignment so that he would not reinjure himself in the future. He had already taken a number of Bar Method class with Keryun. But would The Bar Method work, he wondered, as rehab? He tried several other exercise classes and concluded that the Bar Method was the best fit. “The Bar Method is probably the only workout I’ve found so far where I can get muscle building without threatening the disk. It really is a lot safer than other workouts and just as fierce. The isolations are great. The modifications are very clear.”
I asked Duke how he feels in a classroom dominated by women. He told me that the better he got at the class, the less competitive he actually became. “As you get the technique down,” he explained, “you realize that technique is everything, and you don’t care what the woman in front of you is doing. All you care about is form.”
Duke has been taking the Bar Method regularly since December and feels much stronger. The tear in his disk has healed, and he is now working on shrinking its bulge. He is also feeling much better. “I can drive,” he reports. “I can sit in reclined positions, which is really wonderful. The Bar Method is helping me keep the proper geometry to relieve stress on the disk. The prognosis is that in another month or two I’ll be able to sit.”