The Essentials With Lia Bartha: Brooklyn Bakeries, Costa Rica Wellness Retreats and Lots of Lip Balm
B the Method founder Lia Bartha talks Pilates, pastries and building a fitness community.
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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.
Her morning skincare routine
I always start off with a glass of water with chlorophyll because I feel like hydration first is key. I’ll do a little ice roller to my face, and I’ll do a little sculpting and depuffing with a NuFace microcurrent. Sometimes I’ll go over it with a gua sha if I have time, but sometimes it’s just one or the other. Then I’ll do a micellar water to the face; Bioderma is a great one. And then I love a liquid topical peptide from Medik8, so I put that on and then a little face oil. I use Akar because it’s made from flowers, it smells good, it’s really clean, and it’s not greasy! I used to be really against face oils because I thought I was going to break out, but it’s not like that at all. This is all spread out throughout the entire morning; I’m making a lunch while I’m ice rolling my face, or I’ll gua sha while I’m telling my kids to go brush their teeth. It’s by no means a relaxing skincare routine, but it is effective, and it makes me feel good.
Her wellness routine
It’s more about what I try to prioritize. Sleep is obviously really important, hydration, and daily movement of some sort—but not necessarily overdoing it. I’m always taking two solid days off of full workouts. In that time, I’m still walking—it doesn’t mean you’re lying flat on the couch and not moving your body at all—but making sure there’s rest and recovery. I try to prioritize foam rolling or using the myofascial ball to work through tight fascia that kind of builds up in the body from working out. And then, obviously, eating right, I think is a big one. I love a dessert, but prioritizing protein so that you can kind of keep a baseline of feeling good and not spiking cortisol and all of that.
The lip balms she loves
I feel like I have to have my lips moisturized or I can’t function. Right now, I’m using this one from Sara Creal. It’s like a lip serum, and there’s something about it that makes it hydrating and plumping at the same time. I’m 41, so I’m always like, ‘How do I get a little bit more life into my lips?’ This one is the one that really does it. I like the Tower 28 clear gloss, and then I love a Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment—those are really wonderful. It comes in different scents, and they’re all so good, so I have like 100 lying around the house. I’ll be in the kitchen, and I’m like, ‘Great, here’s one, I don’t have to go get it from my bedroom.’
What she’s binge-watching
I have two of my best friends that live down the hall from us, and we kind of go from show to show. It was The White Lotus every Sunday, and now we’ve switched to The Last of Us every Sunday. It’s pretty action-packed, so it’s not wonderful for right before bed, but it’s a great show.
What she’s reading
On Mother’s Day, I made everybody go to the bookstore with me, and I picked up The Vegetarian, which I’m just starting. A bunch of my friends have read it and said it’s interesting. And a fun book I read recently is Girlfriend on Mars. It’s kind of a competition for these people to be the first to cultivate a new community on Mars. My husband just finished it, too, and he liked it.
Favorite vacation spot
I love Auberge properties. I’ve hosted all of my retreats at Auberge locations because I like that it’s kind of all-encompassing on property. We did two retreats at Hacienda AltaGracia in Costa Rica, which is so special. It’s hidden in the Talamanca Mountains, and you have to take this tiny—kind of scary—airplane to get there, but it’s worth every second. We did a tour to this waterfall nearby, Mina Escondida, that was such a beautiful experience. It was so loud, and the energy from the earth at that waterfall was just crazy. And then also, my next retreat is at Etéreo in Mexico, which is one of my favorite spots for something beachy. I like just walking down the beach, but you can do some snorkeling in the cenotes, which are underground water caves nearby.
What she’s traveling with
I definitely tend to be more of an overpacker. Because of the [B the Method] app, I really love to livestream on the go, so I do a check bag because I need my props, and my mat, and all of these things. Other than that, I’ve kind of gotten on board with the carry-ons because I do really love being in and out of the airport. I like the Away bags a lot. On the plane, I always have some sort of protein snack—whether it’s a bar or a meat stick—[because] you never know with delays, plane food, all of that stuff, so I’m always making sure I have something; lip balm; and then always my computer because I feel like that’s the time that I get the most uninterrupted work time.
Brooklyn favorites
For more of a brunch, coffee, pastry situation, there’s this place called Otway that makes amazing omelets. They have great pastries, strong coffee, and they have a good matcha, too. And then there’s this place called Ciao, Gloria. Also, really good coffee, the people are great, their pastry selection is insanity. I always think I’m going to go in there for some eggs, and then I’m like, ‘Well, I need this really interesting guava muffin.’ And then I would say for lunch, or sandwiches, or midday desserts, there’s a place called Radio Bakery. I think their first location was in Greenpoint, but they just opened one near me, and I think about it very frequently. I’m like, ‘How often is too often to go there for lunch?’ It's that type of place. And then for dinner and drinks, there’s this place called Leland Eating and Drinking House. They have great seasonal cocktails, their fries are to die for, and they have amazing steamed mussels. They’re always rotating their menu, and it’s just an overall really good vibe.
The one thing in her wardrobe she refuses to part with
I think the thing I’ve hung onto the longest are probably my wedding shoes. They’re those Valentino Rockstud kitten heels in a pinky-beige. We got married in 2014, so at that time, it was like everything. I was actually six months pregnant at my wedding, so they don’t even fit me anymore; my feet were huge and swollen, and we also got married in Hawaii, so the humidity makes your feet swell up. I’ve just hung onto them because I feel like at some point, they’ll become cool again and my daughters will want them, so they’re sitting in my closet in a box.