Ballet up to the barre

“Barre” is an exercise trend. BarreAmped is a barre method. Pure Barre is a barre franchise. And all are available in Arkansas.

Confused yet?

A year ago, Pure Barre - the largest barre exercise franchise, with 198 locations in 38 states - opened its first Arkansas studio in a west Little Rock shopping center. But exercise enthusiasts in the capital city already had access to BarreAmped classes, offered at Zenspin since November 2012. And Zenspin’s Jonesboro studio has offered BarreAmped for nearly two years.

Now all-purpose fitness centers have started their own barre classes, which means that barre, in one form or another, can be found throughout the state, in cities such as Conway, Fort Smith and Fayetteville.

Studio owners try to differentiate between methods, but nearly all local offerings use rubber balls and light handweights, borrowings from yoga and Pilates, and tiny pulsing movements at a ballet barre. (Certain variations - hot barre, cardio barre and aerial barre - haven’t made it here yet.)

And they all claim to target women’s “problem areas” - thighs, gluteals, arms and abdominals.

In a Pure Barre class, Little Rock instructor Meredith Stanton encourages clients to visualize the physique they desire.

“I know it hurts, but finish strong. Think of how good you’re going to look!” she says.

PURE BARRE

Pure Barre began as Carrie’s Ballet Barre in a Michigan basement. It was christened Pure Barre in 2001, and Carrie Dorr, a former dancer and exercise instructor, opened more studios.

In 2009 Pure Barre became a franchise, which Dorr sold to an equity firm three years later. But she remains the chief concept officer, which means she choreographs all the moves used in Pure Barre classes across the country.

Lindsey Newton, 26, co-owns the Little Rock franchise with Michele McCutcheon, 29, a native Arkansan who owns and operates another Pure Barre in Anaheim, Calif.

Newton and McCutcheon know each other from the Little Rock dance community, although McCutcheon was primarily a traditional ballerina and Newton did competitive tap, jazz and hip-hop. McCutcheon gave Newton a few private lessons and sent her off to Colorado to be trained by Dorr herself.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Newton says. She and other soon-to-be instructors took several days of back-to-back classes.

To be trained at headquarters (now located in Spartanburg, S.C.), an instructor must already be a Pure Barre employee.

“The reason they train at the corporate level is so that they’re uniform in every city,” Newton says. Then she giggles. “I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say about corporate.”

Newton has a trim, compact build, bleached blond hair and a frequent grin. She and Mc-Cutcheon paid an initial franchise fee, and they regularly send corporate a cut of their profits.

The Little Rock studio, like all Pure Barre studios, has avocado-tinged walls and a rack of Pure Barre merchandise, which includes $15 “sticky socks” to keep clients from sliding. Franchise owners set their own class prices ($20 in Little Rock) and choose what non-Pure Barre merchandise they offer.

Newton’s location sells $48 sports bras and scented candles and features large, plastic-jeweled chandeliers. The studio has a wall of mirrors, two walls of barres, commercial-grade carpet and muted lighting.

During class, Newton or another instructor - there are two former dancers and two former cheerleaders - strolls the room, speaking into a headset mic.

“And tuck, and hold. And tuck, and hold,” they chant over heart-thumping dance hits.

THE GODMOTHER OF BARRE

Despite recent enthusiasm - thanks largely to celebrities like Natalie Portman, who credited the Barre Beautiful method with her waif-ish Black Swan proportions - barre exercise is nothing new.

German dancer Lotte Berk opened the first barre studio in London in 1959. In 1970, American dancer Lydia Bach opened a Lotte Berk Method studio in Manhattan in New York, although according to Pure Barre spokesman Sam Tannenbaum, Bach did this without Berk’s permission.

Eventually other Berk studios sprang up, mostly in upscale Northeastern ZIP codes. Berk studios still operate in Europe, but the Manhattan location - the last remaining in the United States - closed in 2005.

Many of today’s studios, including Pure Barre, trace their origins to Berk or former Berk Method instructors. According to Tannenbaum, Dorr’s firstPure Barre had a Lotte Berk license - one of two granted “in the history of the barre world.” But Tannenbaum is unclear on what that means or who issued the license.

She says Dorr trained at Lotte Berk’s Manhattan studio, but before that, Dorr had already developed her own style of barre exercise.

PURE BARRE IS NOT BALLET

“We don’t use words like plie, releve, that the average woman is not going to know. We use more layman’s terms - down an inch, up an inch, stuff like that,” Newton says.

And ballet class generally starts at the barre, where the exercises offer a warm-up and foundation for floor combinations, which ultimately become dance numbers.

Pure Barre class begins on the floor, with knee lifts and arm curls. Though some Pure Barre positions are similar to ballet positions, in ballet these motions are fluid rather than pulsing, even when practiced at the barre.

Nor does ballet incorporate the most torturous elements of a Pure Barre class - the planks (a fancy word for holding the “up” position of pushups) or jackknife stomach-curls.

Pure Barre’s actual barre routine involves freezing squats on tiptoe or lifting a leg for long minutes, resulting in pronounced muscle quivers.

The newcomers are obvious. They’re the ones chasing balls that won’t stay clamped between thigh and calf, or white-knuckling the barre and swaying dizzily because they haven’t mastered the art of clenching lower abs and gluteals while still breathing.

“When a muscle fatigues, that’s when it shakes. You want to ideally get to that shaking point in every single exercise,” Newton says.

There is also cursory stretching (about six seconds) following most exercises, which, according to Newton, helps build long, rather than bulky, muscles.

“It takes a couple times coming to get familiar with how to tell your brain to move one muscle,” Newton says.

She can tell when her clients are dancers, because “they have the mind-body connection.”

But most of her clients aren’t dancers.

“We have women of all different fitness levels, all different physiques. It’s really for everybody. When you come in, you don’t feel intimidated, because you’re not walking into a bunch of tiny, ballerina-looking girls. It’s normal women.” REPORTS FROM THE BARRE

Newton says her youngest client is 16, and her oldest is 71. But the average client is more along the lines of Ericka Mays, 42, a developmental therapist on her fourth month of Pure Barre classes. Barre is her sole form of exercise, so she tries to come at least three times a week.

“I liked that it wasn’t a lot of jumping around. It just focused on the areas that I wanted, in terms of toning,” she said. “I wasn’t a real weight-checker, but I can tell I’ve lost inches … I’m a lot more flexible than when I started. I have more energy.”

Maneerat Ta Jalansop, 38, and Courtney Shuffield, 26, are nurses. They’ve just started Pure Barre.

Jalansop wanted something low-impact, so she wouldn’t disturb an old ankle injury. “This is more aerobic than I thought, but it’s not as strenuous on your joints,” she says.

It’s a big change for Shuffield, a runner and former basketball and volleyball player. “It really works out your core,” she says.

“I think it’s difficult at first, because they’re going so fast, and they’re like ‘move this,’ and you’re like, ‘move what ?’And you’re only doing it for a few seconds at a time,” Jalansop says. “After the first class, I was awful. I drive a stick shift. I didn’t think I was going to be able to drive home!”

But they left that first class interested enough to buy a Groupon deal - 10 classes for $85.

Primarily, barre classes target women.

“All these women are like, I don’t know what to do on this machine, and there’s all these men grunting and groaning, and this is primarily like, girl power,” Newton says. “You can come in and not feel intimidated, wear your yoga pants and not feel like anybody’s looking at you.”

But Pure Barre regularly holds “Bring on the Men” classes, which encourage clients to lure husbands and boyfriends to the barre.

“It’s always so much fun. We bribe them with beer afterward,” Newton says.

Thirteen men came to her last Bring on the Men class, and one man attends classes regularly.

“I think the reason that our guy, and the guys who do it in other places, enjoy it is because you’re still getting your butt kicked, but you’re stretching out your muscles, which is what a lot of guys don’t spend time doing.”

ACCORDING TO THE PROS

There isn’t much research on the effect of barre exercise on the cardiovascular system or on increasing bone mass (which may guard against osteoporosis), and many health professionals admit that theyaren’t well-versed in the form.

Andrea Zujko, a New York-based physical therapist who works with elite dancers, has never had a barre patient. She puts barre in the same category as yoga and Pilates - “nonfunctional” exercises that may have functional benefits, such as stabilizing the core and increasing flexibility.

Adam Bruenger, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Central Arkansas, says barre’s trademark muscle-quaking may be beneficial. It’s unlikely to build new muscle, but it might increase “muscle endurance,” which is useful for maintaining proper posture and body alignment.

Zujko and Bruenger caution against tucking the pelvis, a position embraced by Pure Barre but eschewed by some other methods, such as Barre-Amped. (Pure Barre instructors describe the tuck as slight, “a dropping of the tailbone.”)

“It’s not a biomechanicallyi deal position, because it really starts to limit motion at the hip and creates some imbalances among the larger muscles, in terms of making them tight … it could be predisposing to injury,” Zujko says.

Bruenger says pulling the hips back can “flex the spine. If you do that enough over a long period of time, it can lead to disc herniation.”

This posterior pelvic tilt also happens with crunches and jackknives, the latter of which seem to be oft incorporated in barre classes.

According to Bruenger, spine alignment is tricky, in part because many people generally stand with their hips too far forward. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between correcting this, to achieve a “neutral spine” that still allows curvature, and overcorrecting, or “tucking” into a flat spine.

“The instructor really needs to know what’s going on,” he says.