Barre Workouts Are Really Workouts for Fucking

Barre class, a wildly popular boutique fitness craze that carves a dancer’s bod out of the soft, tofu-like flesh of regular people, is actually a workout for being good at sex. If you’ve been to a barre class, you should not be surprised!

The Cut has a look at the history of barre workout classes that sheds light on what should not have been that much of a secret to anyone with eyes or has performed a series of rhythmic pelvic thrusts on the carpeted floor of an exercise studio after work. Lotte Berk, a delightfully kooky dancer and the mother of all barre exercises today, made it abundantly clear that sex was a major part of the workout, which mixes yoga, dance, and rehabilitative moves of the kind you might encounter in physical therapy. These exercises, as writer Danielle Friedman points out, toned Berk’s bangin’ bod and also made sex much more fun.

She talked about her love affairs while she taught. She named her exercises “The Prostitute” and “Naughty Bottoms.” One move was simply called “The Sex.” Perhaps most famously, she is rumored to have told clients, “If you can’t tuck, you can’t fuck.” And her clients loved her for it.

Various disciples of Berk who learned from her and created their own factions of barre workouts eventually stripped the activity of its lurid, sexy intentions. Though you will find a variation of a move like “The Tuck” at every barre class you attend, barre devotees like Burr Leonard, founder of The Bar Method, will have you know that the sex part is the boring part, you perv.

“To make too much of the sexual aspect — frankly, it becomes boring,” she said to The Cut. “People want to go into class and they want to focus on form. I don’t think they want to really be told again and again how good it is for your sexual health.”

Stripping the boning out of barre and making it about form(zzz) and function(blah) sucks! Make barre about fucking again, even if it is in your own head, and read the entire piece over at The Cut here.