Lia Bartha spent her entire life immersed in fitness, but it wasn’t until the 2020 pandemic that she built her Brooklyn-based following into B the Method, an international community of thousands of members. The Hawaii native developed low-impact, full-body workouts inspired by her dance background and classical Pilates training, but made compatible for at-home exercise and on-the-go practice—and so B the Method was born. 

Yet Bartha’s path to B the Method wasn’t a linear one. “I danced all the way through college and stopped when I entered the corporate world,” Bartha tells Observer of her start. Working in Los Angeles, Bartha traded dance for the treadmill, and quickly found that the combination of a desk job and overdoing cardio workouts at the gym caused her scoliosis to flare up. “I was really exhausted and burnt out, but I had started working at HBO, where a coworker of mine told me that our work health insurance covered private Pilates sessions,” Bartha recalls of her introduction to the low-impact exercise in 2008.

“I want to say that I immediately fell in love with Pilates, but it wasn’t necessarily that. It took a couple of months of being consistent and working with an instructor that really knew anatomy, but I saw some incredible changes in terms of strength and my physique, and the way that I carried myself—my pain was nearly gone,” Bartha shares. She enrolled in a nine-month certification program and ultimately left her finance career to teach Pilates full-time, both as a private instructor and at the Equinox West Hollywood, where she was later introduced to her future husband, actor Justin Bartha. Within two years, the couple married, welcomed their first child together, and moved to New York City, where Bartha took a break from teaching. Dissatisfied with the fitness class offerings in the city, Bartha began developing her own workouts from her East Village apartment during her daughter’s naptime, using a small stability ball to mimic some of the moving carriage exercises on the Pilates reformer machine.

By 2020, Bartha, who was living in Brooklyn with her husband and their two daughters, had built up a new clientele, teaching what she had dubbed “B the Method” in private lessons and group classes that often ended with coffee and conversation. Once the pandemic hit, Bartha quickly pivoted from in-person to Instagram live, where her form-first approach, emphasizing verbal cues, reached a new audience. “I know that for myself, movement is healing, and it was a very emotionally confusing time. I didn’t have many followers, but we all moved together, and everybody could talk to each other,” says Bartha, whose personal Instagram account has grown to more than 300,000 followers. After several months of teaching free live classes on a near-daily basis, Bartha launched the B the Method app in August 2020, where members can access hundreds of classes, ranging from cardio and strength to lengthening and lymphatic drainage.

But Bartha hasn’t stopped focusing on community. “A huge component of what I loved about what we were doing on Instagram was that community aspect of being together; it’s accountability, it’s motivation, and it’s knowing we’re all in this together,” says Bartha, who continues to offer two livestream classes followed by Q&A sessions each week on the B the Method app. “I’m not editing the videos or picking the perfect pieces, I’m showing up every week as I am—as is everybody else—and I think that’s really important.” There are also in-person training options, with Bartha continuing to offer private lessons, as well as hosting group classes once a month in Brooklyn and once-yearly destination retreats. “I built everything I do from our community, and that is the main driver,” she says.

Following the launch of her two-week Summer Ready Program, Bartha shared her current essentials—from her lip balm lineup to the Brooklyn restaurant she heads to for French fries and a seasonal cocktail.