Want to get even more out of your barre workout? Teaming the brain and the body during your workouts makes for a significantly more productive barre workout. With a bit of focus and dedicated practice you can increase your workout efficiency by leveraging your body’s own muscles using controlled opposition, aka “resistance”.
How to focus on upping your body’s resistance? During your next barre workout:
- Concentrate on rooting your limbs on the body (draw the shoulder blades back and down)
- Keep the abdominals engaged (draw the abdominals in and up)
- Hug the midline of the body (draw the legs together with resistance – even if they do not touch).
Maintaining these connections during your barre workout will increase the muscle work while keeping the exercises safe. Once you have been able to make these connections, you will feel the increased resistance within the exercises.
Try this! Stand with your hands by your sides. Root the shoulders on the back. Draw the abdominals in. Hug the thighs together. Next, extend and lift the arms out in front of you to just above shoulder height. Imagine you have heavy weights tied to your arms. Find your own bodies internal resistance to raise the heavy weights. Now, keep the same resistance and work in your body to imagine you are pushing a heavy weight to the floor. Did you feel the difference in how it feels to focus on engaging resistance, rather than just carrying out the motions without intention?
Once you have found the connections and resistance – feel how much more your muscles are working than if you were to simply raise and lower your arms. This can be translated to many barre exercises, including those that have weights in the hands. Using your body’s internal resistance when you exercise, along with weights, creates even more of a workload on your muscles, while still allowing you to work safely and efficiently.
Find your resistance and take your barre workout to the next level!
Yours in Fitness,
Colleen Ketchum, Founder of the BeyondBarre Method
& Owner of the BeyondBarre Method Flagship location – Pilates In Motion Fitness Studio