Heavily ballet influenced workout regime?

[melell]

Anyone have any experience with this?

[Emilia]

I think Red Robin does, try PM-ing her.

[Taramere]

I did ballet as a kid, and still remember some of the barre exercises and the positions. I do them sporadically as part of general stretching and toning, but I've really lost my flexibility. I remember years back I was in a fitness class and the guy asked me if I was a dancer - which delighted me. At that point I was doing a lot of Callanetics (Callan Pinckney's routine which seems to have stood the test of time and is somewhat influenced by ballet), and I would also do a lot of the stretching exercises dancers do. A year or so previously I'd been staying in a hostel that was mostly inhabited by dancers and drama students. One of my roommates was a ballet student so she'd do her routines in the room and the other roommate and I would try to practice with her. It was a lot of fun, but very hard work. People watch that kind of exercise and think it's nothing because there isn't lots of huffing and puffing and the movements are so slow and gentle looking - but it's really hard work. Essentially you're stretching and doing weights at the same time, with your own body as the weights.

 

Back then everybody was raving about cardio and pooh-poohing the notion that you could lose weight by doing that kind of exercise (yoga, ballet, weights). I let myself get brainwashed into moving more towards cardio at the expense of doing things like Callanetics and ballet exercises.

 

I used to have this fab book that was full of ballet exercises - but of course, with the internet it's so much better because you can search for all that stuff on youtube. But yeah, it would be great if an actual dancer could chip in with some advice on this.

[clia]

I like The Barre Method workouts a lot. They have live classes and you can buy the DVDs as well to do at home. I think they are really great workouts -- I'm always sore the next day.

[StandingO]

Our friend was a ballet dancer and even with 10 years away from serious dancing she was still naturally strong in the lower body and she had a easy time transition into going heavy quickly with exercise like squats and lungs. She was still very flexible because she did yoga etc. On the other hand like most female ballet dancers they don't have much upper body strength and she was quite weak in this area.