7 Potential Health Benefits of Barre
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Barre has been around for decades. Yet, this workout — which combines elements of ballet, yoga, and Pilates — is still gaining devotees every year. And it may have something to do with the unique perks of combining three proven workouts into one.
While barre isn’t as well studied as yoga, Pilates, and ballet, it undoubtedly offers health benefits. Here are seven of them.
1. You’ll Strengthen Your Muscles
The combination of ballet, Pilates, and yoga exercises in barre strengthen the whole body, but they primarily target the glutes (buttocks), quadriceps (the muscles in the front of your thighs), hamstrings (the muscles in the back of your thighs), calves, and feet, says Alex Higa, an American Council on Exercise (ACE) certified personal trainer with Tempo in San Francisco.
A barre workout also strengthens your core, along with the rotator cuff (smaller muscles that keep the head of the upper arm bone in your shoulder socket) that are often overlooked in standard strength routines, says Elizabeth Matzkin, MD, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon and the chief of Women’s Sports Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
2. You’ll Build Muscular Endurance
Barre often involves holding your body in different positions at the ballet barre or on the yoga mat. In fitnessspeak, these are known as isometric exercises, in which muscles contract without changing length (or without movement), per the Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Sometimes, your barre instructor may even ask you to add pulses — tiny, repeated up-down motions of a body part — to your isometric holds.
Barre movements are typically small, and thus may not look impressive to an onlooker. Still, they build serious muscular endurance, a skill the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) defines as the ability to produce and maintain force for a prolonged period. Greater muscular endurance can help you maintain better posture and pick up heavy objects with ease, making muscular endurance an essential component of overall health, Higa says.
3. You’ll Gain Flexibility
Flexibility — or the ability of your muscles, ligaments, and tendons to passively stretch — is a vital component of healthy movement, according to the International Sports Science Association (ISSA). With enough flexibility, your soft tissues can move through the proper range of motion, which helps you function better in everyday life — such as when you bend over or crouch to pick something up off the floor or turn your head to see behind you as you’re driving.
Many people lose flexibility as they get older, partly due to inactivity and partly due to the aging process, notes ACE. This is where barre can help, as the workouts feature lots of stretching, Dr. Matzkin says.
4. You’ll Have Better Balance
In addition to flexibility, balance also declines with age. But good balance, which Harvard Health Publishing defines as the ability to distribute your weight in a way that lets you move without toppling over, can prevent injury and improve your ability to perform daily tasks or pursue athletic endeavors. For older adults, balance is essential for preventing falls and related injuries, notes the National Institute on Aging (NIA).
Enter: Barre. This workout incorporates many exercises that require you to balance on one leg while holding onto a ballet barre or chair. Research suggests that single-leg balance may have far-reaching benefits. In a study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the ability to balance on one leg for at least 10 seconds was a predictor of survival in more than 1,700 adults between ages 51 and 75 — those who made it 10 seconds or longer fared better over the course of the 12-year study period than those who didn’t.
5. Your Posture Will Improve
If you’re worried your posture’s been slipping, barre may help you straighten up. During class, you’ll be instructed to focus on proper alignment by elongating your spine and pulling your shoulders down and back, says Dara Driessea, an American Sports and Fitness Association (ASFA) certified personal trainer and barre instructor with FlexIt in Barnegat, New Jersey. Barre exercises also strengthen your chest, shoulders, and core, which helps you maintain proper posture.
6. You’ll Have Better Coordination — and a Fitter Brain (Maybe)
Barre classes typically pair choreography with music, which can build coordination. And the more coordinated you are, the less likely you are to injure yourself. “Coordination becomes more important as you age to help with balance,” Higa says.
Another payoff? “The movements will challenge not only your body but also your brain,” Higa says. While there are no studies on barre specifically, research on dance shows overall brain-health benefits from this activity, making it especially helpful for older adults. One review and meta-analysis found that dance improves working memory, cognitive flexibility (the mental ability to adapt to new or changing events), and learning in older adults with varying levels of cognitive ability.
7. You’ll Get a Mental Health Boost
Given that physical activity has been shown to improve mood — the authors of a past study named exercise the best strategy for regulating mood — it’s not a stretch to say that barre can be uplifting.
“Joyful movement like what you’ll do in barre celebrates what the human body can do,” says Ginger Garner, DPT, an integrative physical therapist and the founder and CEO of Living Well, a lifestyle medicine facility in Greensboro, North Carolina. There’s also a mindfulness component to barre, and “as a result, you’ll get some mental health benefits,” she says. Research shows that mind-body exercises like Pilates and yoga — two elements of barre — can improve mental clarity and positive thinking.
How Much Barre Do You Need to Do?
Unlike aerobic exercise and strength training, barre doesn’t have specific guidelines for how often you should do it to reap the rewards.
For the record, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity and two full-body strength sessions per week. According to Matzkin, barre might be enough to meet your strength training needs, but it may not challenge you enough aerobically to count toward the cardio guidelines.
How can you tell? Try the talk test recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To qualify as moderate intensity, you should be able to talk but not sing during barre. So, if barre isn’t challenging enough to leave you slightly breathless, be sure to incorporate other aerobic activities into your weekly routine.
It’s also worth noting that barre can help older adults squeeze in balance-building activity, as recommended by the CDC to prevent falls and fall-related injuries such as bone fractures.
If you’re new to barre, start with two in-person or virtual classes per week, Driessea says. While classes generally last 45 to 60 minutes, you may want to find a shorter class to begin with, she adds. Then, once your body gets used to barre, you can move to longer and more frequent classes.
Finally, Driessea advises scheduling your workouts so that you’re doing barre on nonconsecutive days (give yourself at least one day off in between).
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