Bally Total Fitness Board of Directors Re-Affirms Support of CEO Paul Toback, Management Team and Business Plan; Board of Directors Responds To Letter From Emanuel Pearlman.

CHICAGO -- In response to Liberation Investment Group's letter to the Board of Directors of Bally Total Fitness Holding Corp (NYSE: BFT), the Independent Directors of the Board sent the following letter to Liberation Investment Group today.

Dear Mr. Pearlman:

We are in receipt of your letter. We met yesterday as a Board to consider your requests and our response.

We are writing to express to you and our shareholders the Board's unanimous and unqualified support for our CEO Paul Toback and the efforts of Bally's management team. We are pleased that under Mr. Toback's leadership the Company has made significant progress with its turnaround plan, particularly the significant growth in new memberships and improved free cash flow. Paul has adeptly stabilized the Company and navigated through multiple government investigations and restatements, while at the same time instituting a new turnaround plan that is beginning to produce results. We consider your request that we initiate a search for a new CEO not to be in the best interests of shareholders, as it represents further diversion to completing Mr. Toback's very important turnaround efforts.

We have every confidence that Mr. Toback and his team are on the right track and have the right plan to restore Bally to financial success. Any efforts to destabilize the Company, particularly during a critical debt consent solicitation process, are damaging to our ability to return Bally to profitability. Given your past involvement with the Company as a financial advisor to former Bally CEO Lee Hillman during the years that we are now in the process of restating, we are surprised by your lack of understanding of the time and resources required to remedy the accounting so we can resume normal reporting.

We have also considered and unanimously decline your request to be appointed to the Board.

During your role as an advisor to the Company, Bally paid you millions in fees and the stock price, during 2002 alone, fell from a high in the mid 20s to a low of 6. You had years of opportunity to contribute to making Bally a successful company. Instead, you and your colleagues rewarded Bally shareholders with unprecedented levels of new debt and expensive acquisitions, without an operating plan or a capital market plan to increase shareholder value. Our shareholders have already experienced your approach to creating value, and we think your historical actions -- and the millions of dollars your ideas have cost the Company and shareholders to date -- speak for themselves.

Sincerely,

The Independent Directors of the Board of

Bally Total Fitness Holding Corporation