What is Barre?

Barre is a low-impact, high-intensity, full body workout. While there are different styles of barre, it typically blends elements of ballet, pilates, yoga, and strength training. It focuses on small, precise movements and high repetitions to improve muscular strength, tone and endurance, while improving flexibility and posture. 

Despite its ballet origins, you definitely do not need dance experience to enjoy barre!

What Makes Barre Unique?

Barre stands out from other workouts due to its emphasis on small, precise movements and its ability to target often-overlooked muscles. Unlike traditional strength training, which focuses on large muscle groups with heavy weights, barre uses light resistance and high reps to create lean, elongated muscles.

Additionally, barre’s mind-body connection is similar to yoga and pilates, encouraging you to stay present and focused during the class making it perfect for not only physical fitness, but mental wellbeing.

Structure of a Barre Class

A typical barre class will work all the major muscle groups of the body and usually consists of:

1. Warm-Up: Light cardio and dynamic stretches to prepare the body.

2. Barre Work: Utilising the ballet barre for balance while performing lower body exercises to tone the thighs, glutes, and calves - a small ball is sometimes used to add challenge to exercises

3. Upper Body Exercises: Using light weights (0.5-2kg) to target arms, shoulders, and back.

4. Core Work: Mat exercises focusing on strengthening the abdominal muscles.

5. Cool Down: Stretching to enhance flexibility and aid muscle recovery.

Benefits of Barre

Engaging in regular barre workouts offers numerous benefits:

• Improved Muscle Tone: Highly targeted movements help define and strengthen muscles.

• Low-Impact: Gentle on joints, making it suitable for various fitness levels and those recovering from injuries.

• Increased Endurance: High repetitions build muscular stamina over time.

• Enhanced Flexibility: Incorporation of stretching increases range of motion.

• Better Posture: Focus on alignment and core strength promotes an upright posture.

Do you need to be fit to do barre?

The beauty of barre, is that it's accessible to all ages, abilities and fitness levels - it’s low impact, but high intensity meaning that you’ll get a great workout without having to jump around! You can easily adapt the class to your level, for example, just by how deeply you lower into a squat will make a huge difference to the intensity of the exercise. 

Due to the unique nature of a barre class, even a seasoned athlete will be able to achieve a great workout and feel that ‘barre burn’ as they employ muscles they didn’t even know they existed!

Get ready to feel the barre-burn!

So if you're looking to try a new form of exercise this year - why not give barre a go? Whether you’re looking to build strength, tone u

p or improve flexibility barre is a fun, yet highly effective workout that has something to offer everyone.

Book your free Barre class