Why Meditation Helped Me With Barre
The following is a guest post by Liz Shaw.
Liz inspires her followers everyday on Instagram with barre exercises, nutrition tips, and her journey with gut health.
How are they connected?
When you first think of barre, your mind may automatically go to ballet dancers — toned, thin, flexible, and strong. But do you think of mindfulness and meditation?
For anyone who has tried a barre class before or practices it regularly, you know that slow death by pulses. The first round warms you up, and the second round is when the beads of sweat start rolling in. By the third round of pulses, you wonder why you decided barre at 6 am was a good idea.
There are a few correlations I see between barre and meditation:
Breathwork
Mind-body connection
Discipline
Digestion
While meditation and mindfulness can help you stay focused, it also helps you narrow in on your breathing, which is so critical to any form of exercise.
Barre uses small, isometric movements to target supporting muscles and ligaments. The movements may seem small, but when done correctly, it can be incredibly challenging.
We often fault back to using momentum, which can make these movements difficult to master. Rather than pulsing our arms, we think they must bounce. Instead of lifting one leg, we think we need momentum to launch our leg into the high heavens.
This is where leveraging proper breathing and mindfulness techniques are so beneficial.
Not only does it allow for synchronicity in movement, but it also allows us to brace our core appropriately. By focusing on the breath, our bodies start to sync to our movement and enable us to slow down our breathing to focus on the intended muscle (sometimes with wall sits, it means REMEMBERING to breathe).
Should I be using momentum for this move, or gently pulsing my leg?
Breathing is also critical for oxygen exchange and bringing much-needed oxygen to the muscles. During some parts of the barre class, your heart rate will be high. Being aware of your breath and how quickly you are breathing can allow you to control and stabilize your heart rate. Fitness instructors are aware of the breath connection, and you will recognize the reminder to keep breathing or slow it down as a familiar cue.
When practicing meditation, you always start with deep, belly breaths. These breaths help calm the mind and body. By focusing on the movement of air through the body, you can still the mind and slow down your heart rate. For this reason, exercise classes like to do this style of breathing during the cooldown.
The practice and art of mindfulness and meditation also tie into discipline. Meditation and mindfulness come from prolonged practice. It will not happen overnight. With continuing practice, though, you will see change.
One of my favourite forms of meditation connects directly to the mind-body connection. You start at the head and move your way down your body to your toes. This practice allows you to narrow in on each body part and recognize the tingling sensations.
With barre, you can do the same. In my classes, I prefer toning exercises versus high cardio. It allows us to be very aware of the muscle groups we’re working when doing these exercises: slow push-ups, donkey-kick pulses, arm-hold pulses, relevé wall sits. You might not leave my class sweating, but you will definitely feel it for the next two days!
The discipline required to do these small movements can take time, especially when starting barre for the first time. Unless you have experienced it through pilates, which is the most similar form of exercise, you will have to train your body to understand those moves. They are deceivingly small movements that, with practice, will lead to a strong, lean, toned body.
Now you might be curious about my last point, digestion. How are mindfulness and barre correlated to digestion? We don’t think about it enough, but when exercising, our bodies are also in a state of stress. Mindfulness and deep-breathing play an essential factor in lowering our stress levels and, in turn, supporting our digestion. Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as belly breathing, is focused on expanding your stomach versus your chest. Naturally, many of us do not use deep breathing techniques in our day-to-day.
For people with gut issues like myself, daily breathing deep down to the diaphragm is part of a daily digestive health regime.
I appreciate the parallel in teachings between barre and meditation. In fact, I love when different areas of my life intersect and strengthen the skills, expertise, and learnings of another area. I’ve noticed how much breathwork and barre go hand in hand, and I lean into both every time I teach or participate in a class.
Next time you participate in a barre class, lean into those meditative techniques to keep your movements slow and controlled.
See you at the barre!
About the Author:
Liz Shaw is a full-time management consultant who lives a wellness-focused lifestyle to ensure longevity. She started her Instagram account @thestrongskinny then www.thestrongskinny.com as a way to discuss the impact of diet culture in our society, plus share low-impact exercises and gut-friendly recipes - all of which contribute to her gut health journey. She shares her experiences in hopes of inspiring positive change in at least one other person.