Yoga-Pilates-Ballet Mash-Up is a Quad Burner

Today's workout: Barre 3 Total Body Lift by Sadie Lincoln
Difficulty: beginner/intermediate
Length: 41 mins
Concept: Ballet-influenced exercises that exhaust your body's stabilizing muscles -- combined with stretching, core, and upper-body weight work -- provide a thorough total-body workout.

Sadie Lincoln may sound like a character from Little House on the Prairie, but her Barre 3 workouts are apparently the hottest thing in L.A. -- with devotees like Madonna among the legions of celebrity fans. I'm still recovering from a cold and thought this would be a soothing, light workout for a lazy day. Boy was I wrong. And I'm glad I was!

Total Body Lift includes the kind of quad-burner thigh work known to practitioners of the Bar Method. And Sadie wastes no time getting you into it -- my quads were even feeling it on the warm-up. Basically, you stand on tip toes and shift your weight forward so all of your body weight is on your thighs and then you lift and lower until you think you're going to pass out. If you're trembling, that means you're doing it right. And when you stand up, you can literally feel all of the blood rushing out of your thighs. And then you do three more sets. Her glute work was definitely ballet-influenced (focusing on the gluteus medius -- the high outer portion of the butt, rather than the maximus like squats do) and I found it a lot easier to nail the form than in similar exercises in Bar Method workouts.

Sadie says that these exercises work the "stabilizing muscles" -- the ones that don't really get worked with large-muscle group work. She says that's why you tremble and that's what helps you get a lean bod. Thirty minutes after the workout and my quads are still kind of jumpy, so I am inclined to believe her.

 Her upper body work uses light weights, but she uses gravity to add resistance, having you bend and straighten to increase the burn. I thought it was pretty thorough, as was the remainder of the workout, which included abs and more lower body. I will definitely be doing this one again.

Pros: Thorough, intense, full-body workout with excellent form pointers.
Cons: You have to really pay attention to form to get the moves right, otherwise you won't feel like it's working.