Find out how the dance, ballet and pilates-inspired workout began
She fled the Nazis, cavorted with the rich and famous and is credited as being the original creator of what we know today as Barre-based exercise methods.
Lotte Berk was a German Jewish dancer who—with her British husband—lived in London in the late 1930s. Soon after, a back injury led her to devise a series of dance-based exercises effective for rehabilitation, toning, strengthening and keeping off kilos.
In today’s world, what she devised has morphed into various Barre-based methods popular the world over, but none more so on a global scale than Xtend Barre®. So how and why has Berk’s original vision survived so long?
The Lotte Berk Studio
In 1959, inspired by her rehab experience, she opened The Lotte Berk Studio in her basement. Word got around that it helped with creating or sustaining the body beautiful, and she was known as the body sculptor of some pretty famous women—Brooke Shields, Joan Collins and Brit Ekland, to name a few.
As for the method’s now global popularity, how did the Bar (Berk spelled it with one ‘r’) concept spread to the US and lead—eventually—to such methods as Xtend Barre®? The Berk Method was similar to how Pilates morphed and spread around the same time.
See also: This Pilates Guru Hates Exercise
One of Berk’s students, Lydia Bach, was so impressed with the technique that she bought the rights to Lotte’s name and in 1971 opened The Lotte Berk Method exercise studio in Manhattan.
