Eager to gain some pain, women belly up to the barre

Instructor Alex Jenner (far right) has her BarreAmped students do seemingly endless sets of pulsing leg lifts at ZenSpin studio in LIttle Rock.
Instructor Alex Jenner (far right) has her BarreAmped students do seemingly endless sets of pulsing leg lifts at ZenSpin studio in LIttle Rock.

In a different world, ZenSpin’s workout room could have been a salon. Heck, this is a strip center in Little Rock’s Heights neighborhood, so that’s an entirely plausible thought.

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BarreAmped students don’t merely stand at the ballet barre and hold on to it for balance, they also press against it from below, as in this lower body exercise, which takes a toll on hip flexors.

The room is a deep rectangle, and mirrors line the long sides as track lighting illuminates the simple beige carpet and rows of wooden ballet barres. Gleaming stationary bicycles reserved for “zen spinning” are squeezed into the back corner.

Ladies lining up in tank tops and leggings will need the open floor space for today’s Barre-Amped class - a workout with roots in the Lotte Berk Method, with a few minor differences.

BarreAmped favors the neutral spine position over the Berk Method’s pelvic tuck and also emphasizes core work and form as well as stretching. Essentially, it’s an offshoot of yoga and Pilates and other body weight-bearing exercises, and it’s fairly new to the Arkansas fitness scene.

I removed my shoes and collected my “equipment” from the bins along the back: one yoga mat, an air-filled rubber ball the size of a coconut, a thick strap roughly 5 feet long and a pair of 1-pound dumbbells.

“One-pound dumbbells?” I scoffed.

Little did I know they were like hand grenades waiting to go off. Right away they would do their damage, but not with their heft.

We began holding the weights with arms out to the side. Static holds and then small, 1-inch arm raises to the front, side, back.

Hold it. Pulse it up and down. Tiny, endless movements, a losing struggle against gravity. And you couldn’t trust the countdown. My arms were burning. “Eight more,” the instructor announced.

“Just eight more,” went my encouraging inner monologue. But then, no, it wasn’t time to drop our arms. It was time to hold the1-pound weapons there again, unmoving. Then, shift our arms into yet another position.

I tried to gauge the time. Had we been here weeks? Months?

Oh, wait, the first song wasn’t even over. It was probably less than five minutes. This was like torture, but mostly of a psychological nature. I kept hearing, “Almost there.” But, no, clearly we were not there.

At long last, the class switches to leg work, after my arms get all huffy and stop talking to me.

We begin on the balls of our feet, like dancers in second position. That’s feet wider than shoulders, toes turned outward, calves flexed. The teacher corrects my form, “Higher on your toes,” she says. I imagine this is easier for women who regularly walk in heels.

We stay in this position. Hold.

Then pulse. “Just eight more,” I hear. I know better than to believe her this time. Suspicions confirmed. She’s just kidding; more pulsing.

Next, we bring our feet close together, put the air-filled ball between our knees. Up on our toes again, except this time our heels are touching each other.

Small, controlled movements up and down.

“One inch up, one inch down.”

My legs start to shake.

“If you’re shaking, that’s good.

That’s when your muscles start to change,” the instructor says.

‘SHAKE TO CHANGE’

Popular in California and along the East Coast, barre classes are gaining ground in Arkansas. (Another recently opened studio, Pure Barre in Little Rock’s Pleasant Ridge Shopping Center, advertises barre classes, but not the BarreAmped method.)

BarreAmped is available at ZenSpin’s outlets in Jonesboro and Little Rock, and at Pilates for You in Fort Smith.

A student of a student of Lotte Berk, Suzanne Bowen developed the method and offers teacher training and certifications through her business in Franklin, Tenn.

ZenSpin owner and operator Camden Hyneman opened her first workout studio in Jonesboro in 2010. She added barre classes there in early 2012 after returning from vacation to find her mother had installed barres in the workout room.

“She always gives me the push I need,” Hyneman said. “She kind of went behind my back on that one, but it worked out nicely.”

When ZenSpin’s studio opened in the Heights in 2012, barres were installed there, too, and the menu of classes was pared to indoor cycling, yoga and variations on Barre-Amped.

Hyneman has an undergraduate degree in psychology. She fell in love with indoor cycling classes while attending school in New York.

“I went to these spin classes, five to seven classes a week for about four years and got totally hooked on it,” she said. “The style of spin we offer is not the type you go to get certified to teach. It’s a method I came up with on my own.”

Though she teaches only indoor cycling classes, Hyneman trained directly with Bowen to learn the BarreAmped method, and her instructors were certified by a master level teacher trainer.

She explains the Barre-Amped “shake to change” motto as “working every muscle to failure, to exhaustion.

“You hold the position until your muscles start to quiver and shake, when you reach exhaustion there’s no denying your muscle is working. We want to let people know that shaking is actually good; it lets them know you’re working. It means you’re doing it correctly. They know when they’re shaking, they’re changing.”

This was a fairly new concept for me. I have spent time in the gym learning to back squat, deadlift and do other Olympic lifts. I’ve worked muscles to failure and even to immediate soreness, but I was unaware of this “shake to change” principle. So I ran it by Gannon White, a biomechanist and assistant professor in the department of health sciences at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

“Muscle shaking is a normal, natural response to simple fatigue. Does it mean anything is changing? With any exercise, we’re always changing, so we don’t need to work to the point of extreme fatigue to see positive changes in our muscles,” he said.

He also says small, controlled, one-inch movements like the pulses done in BarreAmped classes don’t work muscles in ways that support the natural, full range of motion of the joints. “How much of our daily functioning in life requires a static position?” he asks. For pain-free daily life and better performance in most sports, exercises that move muscles through a broader range of motion make more sense.

On the other hand, he says, a class like BarreAmped could be a good introduction to structured exercise for beginning exercisers.

“There’s nothing wrong with any exercise program that will get people moving,” he said. “If it’s going to get some people out there exercising, I’d rather them do that than nothing.”

COMPLEMENTS

Karla Reedy, owner of Pilates For You in Fort Smith, says when she became certified to teach BarreAmped roughly two years ago, she thought some of the cardio-heavy aspects of the fast paced BarreFire and Barre-Boot camp classes would complement the main programs in her Pilates studio.

“There is a little more cardio in BarreAmped. When you’re holding those positions for 1.5 to 2 minutes, your heart rate does get up. It’s not the same as going out and running, but you still get your heart rate up and burn calories,” she says.

Reedy didn’t see muscle shaking in all clients who started the program, but she did notice it in newer participants.

“I think it’s more people that are not in very good shape. My Pilates people that have been with me for a while, they don’t shake like that because they’re already in fairly good shape,” she said.

For workouts that will benefit her exercisers in their everyday activities, she still favors Pilates.

“Functionally, Pilates would be the best. BarreAmped is something fun. It has music. Women can lose inches. It’s safe; if you have good instructors, it’s safe. It’s a totally different workout from working out with weights,” she says.

BEGINNERS

One of ZenSpin’s converts, April Pottorff, 35, was introduced to regular exercise by ZenSpin’s indoor cycling and BarreAmped classes. Her goal was not to lose weight but to become stronger and improve her posture and flexibility.

“I’m such a scaredy-cat, I’ve never worked out in my life,” she said. “It’s an amazing class, especially for beginners - and for people that have been doing it forever because they keep changing it.”

She combines BarreAmped with other classes at ZenSpin.

“I’m … addicted is the wrong word, but I feel so much better. Sometimes I’m tired after work and I don’t want to do it, but I’m so proud when I’m done.”

Her classmate Krysten Wilkins, 31, had been taking step aerobics classes at a local fitness club but had fallen out of her routine. She signed up the first week ZenSpin opened because she had taken barre classes in California with a friend: “I saw the results that she got, and within the first two to three weeks here, I could tell a difference.”

Ultimately it’s about challenging yourself, she says.

“That’s what I do. I don’t know what everybody else is doing, but I try to push myself as hard as I can to keep getting better and better and better.”Barre workouts taught in studios

Beyond the barre work that has always been taught in actual ballet studios, barre exercise is still tiptoeing into Arkansas.

ZenSpin Studio in Jonesboro is at 2704 Alexander Drive, Suite D;

(870) 972-0906. The Little Rock outlet is 5612 R St.; (501) 296-9108. More information is at zenspinstudio.com. The first week of classes at Zen-Spin is free, after which the fee is $12 to $18 a class. Monthly packages range from $148 to $185.

Pilates for You in Fort Smith offers Pilates as well as BarreAmped classes in private or group sessions. Owner Karla Reedy is certified by Stott Pilates, Romana’s Pilates, Power Pilates and The Cooper Institute as well as BarreAmped. (479) 651-6703. More information is on Facebook at the page “Pilates for You and Barre-Amped.”

Pure Barre is at 11525 Cantrell Road, Suite 306, Little Rock; (501) 246-3258. This business teaches a different version of barre exercise than that taught by BarreAmped instructors. More information is at purebarre.com. First class at Pure Barre is free. An introductory package of $99 for a month of unlimited classes is available to new clients.

  • Melissa Tucker

ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 04/29/2013

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