Barre, a ballet-inspired workout, often leaves you trembling with exertion. While it may not be the most obvious choice for building muscle, experts explain how barre exercises challenge your muscles in unique ways, building strength and endurance.
Hop into any barre class and your muscles will quickly start to feel it: As you pulse to the beat of the booming playlist, it’s pretty darn common to get “the shakes,” where your body starts trembling from the strain of seemingly endless repetitions. It’s a similar feeling to what you might get from a tough lifting workout.
But do those burning, quivering muscles mean that barre actually “counts” as strength training—even if you never pick up anything heavier than a three-pound weight? We asked barre experts to break down exactly how this popular ballet-inspired workout affects our muscles, and the best way to fit it in with the rest of your exercise routine. So what kind of strength can barre build? The current trendiness of barre can make it seem like a newfangled workout, but it actually dates back decades ago. The regimen centers around traditional strength training movements like lunges and squats, but gives most of them a ballet-inspired twist, like turnout (outward rotation of the legs) or demi-pointe (raising up onto the balls of your feet). Some exercises also use a classic ballet barre to help you balance. Traditionally, most barre moves don’t go through your full range of motion like you would in a typical lifting session. For instance, if you were doing a lunge, you’d normally bend all the way down until your one leg is parallel to the floor, then you’d stand all the way up before you do it all over again. Barre is different: “We go to that end range of motion, so you’re sinking down into a lunge, and then you’re doing little pulses,” exercise physiologist Rachelle Reed, PhD, an instructor at PureBarre, tells SELF. This doesn’t mean it’s any easier, though. The challenge comes from doing a ton of repetitions of these tiny contractions—sometimes for minutes at a time. “You’re in it longer than what you would see in traditional strength training,” Lisa Schale-Drake, online lead instructor at Barre3, tells SELF. That’s possible because, instead of lifting super heavy weights through big ranges, you’re moving just your own bodyweight, or maybe light dumbbells, ankle/wrist weights, or resistance bands in small micro-movements. These mini pulses mimic what you’d get out of an isometric exercise, where you just keep your body still in one challenging spot. “It’s almost like holding a plank for every major muscle group in your body,” Shannon Reznik, a master teacher trainer at PureBarre, tells SELF. These kinds of isometric movements build muscular endurance, or our muscles’ ability to keep firing over an extended period. “This is really focusing much more on your slow-twitch fibers,” Sarah Patterson, CPT, product manager of strength classes at Barre3, tells SELF. These are the fibers designed for the long haul—they don’t generate a ton of power, but they can keep at it for quite some time. “These have a much higher resistance to fatigue and they also recover really, really quickly,” Patterson says. They’re what our bodies rely on for low- or moderate-intensity activities like hiking, low-key cycling or, ya know, day-to-day life like staying upright when you’re just standing around. However, you won’t win any Strongman Challenges just by taking barre class. If you consider strength training as anything that makes your muscles stronger, sure, barre can fit the bill. Although there hasn’t been much research done on barre specifically, there is evidence that this kind of high repetition/low weight exercise can be just as effective for growing muscle as heavy lifting—as long as you keep going close to the point of what exercise scientists call “failure,” where the last couple of reps feel nearly impossible to eke out. But if your goal is to maximize your strength, barre isn’t really the best strategy. By not lifting any heavy weights, you’re limiting the gains you could make because you’re not training your muscles to produce the force and power it takes to move bigger loads. And in the group class format of a barre workout, it can be tricky to systematically increase the challenge over time with the kind of tailored progressive overload strategy that’s known to boost strength most effectively. “The muscle fibers are only adapting to the stimulus that you’re giving them,” Dr. Reed says. “At a certain point, you’re just maintaining rather than continuing to accrue more adaptation.” That said, many barre studios are evolving to enhance the strength benefits of the workout. For instance, Dr. Reed says most instructors at various barre studios now incorporate the full ranges of motion during some exercises to supplement all that isometric work—meaning they’ll now include eccentric and concentric contractions (when the muscles are activated while lengthened or shortened, respectively) for greater strength gains. And many barre studios now have strength-focused classes that use up to 15- or 20-pound weights. But there are other solid reasons to check out barre to
BARRE STRENGTH TRAINING MUSCLE ENDURANCE BALLET EXERCISE
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