Note: Burr Leonard will be my September 8 TeleSeminar guest.
If you haven’t yet had the chance, be sure to view the up-close-and-personal video experience with the Bar Method creator Burr Leonard: Raising the Bar on studio workouts: the Bar Method.
Not only will you see clips from a live class taught by Burr, but you will also see my private lesson in one of my Bar Method favorites, “the Pretzel”.
What follows here is Part Two of a series of excerpts from an interview with Burr; you’ll find the transcript of Part One here: the Bar Method Studio Experience: choreographic genius.
Here, Burr elaborates upon the reason behind the extraordinary body-shaping power of the Bar Method technique.
Lani Muelrath: I know that we could have plenty of conversation about the process of how you’re teaching. But I also wanted to cover some of the other items, like the physicality of it.
What is it about the Bar Method that shapes women’s bodies as it does? Because you can walk into a Bar Method class and either everybody who has that body shape is coming to your classes, or they get it because they come to your classes. So what is your explanation about how it targets body shaping so well?
Burr Leonard: Well, we target the muscles that play the biggest role in changing the shape of the body.
We recognize that shaping is a positioning activity. It’s…if you’re not in position, you’re not getting the results, and therefore it’s impossible to teach a whole class and just go “rahrahrah!” You have to have the teaching technique in place and help teach the students how to isolate the muscle, find it, and use it.
And as we’ve been discussing, we developed that teaching technique around our exercise workout, so that all the students get a chance to find those muscles. And especially the muscles in the back of the body. We’re talking about muscles that not only play a great role in changing the shape of the body – some of our largest muscles are in the back of our body: the triceps, the glutes, the hamstrings, and the calves. A lot of systems kind of play lip service to them because they’r on the back side, so out-of-sight out-of-mind.
Number two, because we evolved from 4-legged creatures and stood up straight, and became very visual, we are intrinsically out of touch with these muscles. I can, ah, tell a student to pull with the seat and they’ll pull with something completely different! Because they can’t see their back sides, they can’t find the muscle. And so we use, again, our teaching technique to help students discover that muscle and wake it up – and change it.
Number three, level of intensity. Level of intensity is something that the exercise world is recognizing more and more. It’s important in fitness. I think years ago we thought walking was fine, because it burned calories. But intensity stimulates the body to generate youthfulness, growth hormone…intensity is important.
So again, what we do is positioning. Intensity can’t be achieved by just doing more reps or making the music louder or making it more aerobic. It has to be achieved by getting into that muscle, using the rest of the body as an anchor, and holding onto that muscle until it’s shaking and burning.
And going back to our technique of teaching people how to get into that muscle and then guiding them both mentally, physically, and emotionally through that experience gives people the ability to change their bodies really very quickly.
