7 Amazing Health Benefits Of Barre Fitness
What is Barre Fitness?
In 1959 Lotte Berk, an accomplished ballet dancer invented Barre Fitness after injuring her back. This innovative style of fitness combines elements of Yoga, dance, ballet, and isometric training done on a physical therapy barre. Lotte eventually opened up a Barre Fitness studio in her basement in West End.
Barre Fitness targets your core, arms, glutes, back, and legs – making it a fantastic, full-body workout. Doing this exercise will help you improve your strength and flexibility, and the best part is that this is a low impact fitness training regime, so people of all ages and sizes can take part and benefit the most from it.
Top 7 Advantages of Barre Fitness Training
1. Helps Improve Your Flexibility
For many people, the problem with exercise isn’t the lack of strength of fitness; it is merely flexibility. We all know that stretching and warming up before a workout or a run is imperative, but sometimes things like joint pain or stiff muscles can prevent that and ruin your planned workout. With Barre Fitness, it doesn’t matter if you can’t touch your toes before you start. The workout itself incorporates stretching and holding exercises. Which will, of course, help your muscles stretch out and become more and more limber over time – making it easier to bend down and touch your toes without pulling a hamstring. Flexibility and isometric training are apart of this style of exercise because of the physical therapy element.
2. Makes You Physically Stronger
Being based on ballet, Barre classes usually involve weight and resistance training – a form of exercise that is very gentle on the body in terms of it being a low impact. It’s no secret that weight and resistance training builds muscle, but when you use your body weight against you, you start sculpting and toning that built muscle. A Barre workout will keep your body well conditioned while burning fat plus building and toning muscle.
3. There Are Major Cardio Benefits
In addition to making you tough after a long period of training, this powerhouse exercise routine also has enormous benefits in the field of cardiovascular health. Being created from medical practice, it is no wonder that it could have therapeutic benefits. Practicing Barre Fitness will increase your heart rate during exercise as if you are running or dancing, and keep your heart healthy and active.
4. Beneficial For Weight-Loss
Obesity is a big problem for many people all over the world and especially in the United States. Unfortunately, when it gets to that stage of being over-weight, it becomes difficult to do many types of training as you could very easily injure yourself. When we get to that advanced stage of weight gain, our bodies are in such bad condition that even a mild amount of exertion could be fatal. Again, thanks to the rehabilitative nature of Barre Fitness training, it accommodates people whose bodies are already in poor condition. This exercise helps one lose weight due to the elements of dance and isometric training, burning fat by making the muscles hold parts of the body up and still for a specific period before releasing.
5. Fantastic Workout For Your Core
Involving things like Yoga and Pilates, Barre workouts usually make use of poses that are very demanding on your core. For these exercises, they will let you use extra workout equipment like a fitness ball to get the absolute most out of your core training. Holding any pose for 30 seconds will give your muscles that burn effect and strengthen your core to hold your body up for longer. You may find that this also improves your posture over time, just like any ballet dancer. When your posture is better, your risk of having or getting stiff and sore muscles after a long day, a hard workout or sleeping funny is substantially lower. Over time this will make getting up in the morning and going for a run or going to work early just another part of life, helping you get a fresh start.
6. A Great Endurance Training Regime
For those who are looking to train for an endurance challenge like a marathon or a massive hike, this is perfect. Due to all the cardiovascular benefits offered by Barre Fitness, it automatically comes that it will help you improve your overall fitness and endurance for long distances or long strength training sessions. When you develop stamina, you can train for longer – this automatically makes it a training aid as you manage to get more done in one session.
7. Barre Fitness Targets More Muscle Groups
Targeting more muscle groups might be the most significant benefit offered by this style of training. When you are doing these exercises correctly, you will focus on muscles in one group, which differs from Yoga or Pilates. For example, when you are doing a pose that is designed to target your thigh – you will be working your glutes, hamstrings, and calves in the front, inner and outer parts. The great thing about this is that it will sculpt and define your muscles almost faster than you will be able to build them, something that usually takes its own set of specific exercises.
Is a Barre Fitness Workout for Me?
When you look at all the different benefits offered by Barre Fitness, it is tough to go back to a training regime that only targets one type of training at a time. One can almost think of this style of a workout as the Swiss Army knife of exercises as it involves such a vast variety of training.