Bar Method Top Ten Tips

Top Ten Tips

The 10 best reasons to stick with exercise
By Burr Leonard — President, The Bar Method

	Reason 10		To become leaner and more defined.
	Reason 9		To feel and look straighter and more balanced.
	Reason 8		To improve at your sport.
	Reason 7		To achieve better posture and reduce back pain.
	Reason 6		To build up your stamina for life’s challenges.
	Reason 5		To get great legs.
	Reason 4		To gain a tougher, more courageous spirit.
	Reason 3		To live your life as a youthful person.
	Reason 2		To heighten your ability to have deep relationships and to experience joy.
	Reason 1		To get more out of life’s pleasures.

Reason #10: Strengthening Workouts Make You Lean

Aerobic-style workouts have always been popular for their straight-forward cause-and-effect relationship with calories: Eat them; then burn them. But strength training makes a qualitative change on your body by packing in more fuel-burning muscle fiber per square inch of muscle.

The denser your muscle mass becomes the more calories your muscles use up every day. So, if becoming lean is on your top 10 list of reasons to exercise, you need to do strength training. Aerobic exercise alone will not significantly increase your muscle mass and can even reduce strength and tone by using your muscle fiber as fuel.

Reason #9: Exercise Improves Your Posture and Reduces Back Pain

If you aren’t one of the lucky ones who grew up with good posture, getting it takes a major push, and exercise is where to can make that dramatic change. Realignment exercise classes take a three-pronged approach to improving posture:

First, they strengthen the muscles that hold your body upright.

Second, they stretch the muscles that pull you out of alignment.

Third, they require you to keep vertical alignment during much of the class so that your muscles get in the habit of staying that way.

Reason #8: Systematic Exercise Makes You a Better Athlete

Strengthening and stretching exercise is especially effective sports training. Systematic strengthening not only gives your body greater explosive power at the defining moment of your game.

It also teaches you to use muscles that have become lazy and have allowed others to take over. When these muscles come into play, you gain more efficient movement and reduce your risk of injury. Last but not least, your range of motion improves when stretching is part of your workout.

Reason #7: Exercise Balances and Aligns Your Body

Like cars that have traveled over rough roads, our bodies get out of alignment through use. The hours most of us spend on the web, watching television and driving are performed in sitting, slumping and lounging. After years of this lifestyle without exercise, our hips get tight, our derrieres get loose, and our lower backs ache.

Alignment-oriented exercise systems address this condition by adjusting the muscles around your pelvis so that your hips, back, abs and legs fall more easily into a vertical line. These adjustments make you feel taller and allow you to move with more comfort and grace.

Reason #6: Exercise Gives You Stamina

Wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing, stamina is what gets you there and gets it done. Exercise packs this reserve power into your muscles and nervous system. You can surf the web and watch television with absolutely no stamina. But when life gets tough, stamina gives you the get-up-and-go to keep going.

Reason #5: Exercise Gives You Great Legs

(Girls only) Except for those lucky few who were born with genetic silver spoons in their mouths, most of us have to work to get great legs. Strengthening and stretching systems that focus on the large muscle groups, especially those in the legs, give pretty dramatic results.

Reason #4: Exercise Helps You Gain a Tougher, More Courageous Spirit

Working out reduces depression, strengthens the muscles we use to laugh, make love, make our point of view – just about every challenge we face and struggle through in our lifetimes can be met with more spirit and creativity with the help of exercise.

Reason #3: Exercise Gives You a Lifetime of Youthfulness

Exercise slows down aging and can even improve your body over decades. Adaptability is our species’ chief survival tool, so we all possess a huge potential for developing ourselves in the direction of our desires. With patience we can even amaze ourselves. Exercise is one route towards making positive changes happen in our bodies and lives.

Reason #2: Exercising Enriches Relationships

Most kinds of exercise, especially strengthening and stretching systems, rid your body of social tension that builds up in your muscles, and over time can deaden your emotions. Exercise helps wash this emotional clutter out of your muscles, and paves the way for possible renewed good feelings, even joy.

Reason #1: Exercise Enhances Pleasure

Pleasure is a sensation that isn’t usually associated with getting fit, unless you stop and think of all the ways exercise conditions your body to enjoy itself more fully. Working out regularly, for example, allows you to digest and metabolize food more efficiently so that it tastes better and does a better job of energizing you.

Exercise can also be a pleasure all in itself, as Los Angeles Bar Method studio owner Mimi Fleischman discovered when in her 50s. A life-long couch potato until a few years ago, Mimi had always characterized herself as someone who was especially oriented towards pleasure seeking, and the pleasures she most often sought during the first 53 years of her life involved food. Mimi’s body, needless to say, reflected this orientation. (See "before" photo to the right.)

Everything changed when Mimi discovered another pleasure she and her body could enjoy: the deep-muscle experience of an exercise class, in this case one at the Bar Method.

Over the next year and a half, Mimi took class regularly, lost 35 pounds, reshaped her body, and even opened her own Bar Method studio in west L.A. (See "after" photo to the left)

For Mimi, exercise provided a new and exciting bodily activity. But even if you’ll always think of exercise as a chore, the fit body you work hard to develop allows you to sleep more deeply, be more rested during the day, and enjoy doing what you already enjoy doing, but more fully.