#14: Pure Barre

Barre: the workout based on ballet.

I have a cousin who swears by it (shoutout Mia), and a friend, also an acolyte, who said it wouldn’t be a hard enough workout for me (shoutout Sofie), especially if I didn’t know how to properly tuck, a movement I understood as a rotating of the tailbone inward, a pulling in of the abs towards the spine, and a tightening of the pelvic floor. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” Sofie said, “it’s a movement everyone pretends to understand, but no one ever bothers to explain despite it being mentioned 11,000 times per session.”

I was running so late that I calculated the difference between the fee for a missed class and an Uber to get there, and realized Uber was the cheaper option. Arriving frazzled the minute class started, I was told to grab light weights, a ball, and a tube. “Weights…ball…tube, weights…ball…tube” I repeated to myself, grabbing a set of the three-pound weights by the door, along with a squishy, smaller-than-a-soccer-ball-bigger-than-a-softball-sized rubber ball (was crazy hard to describe the size, there are truly not many mid-sized ball sports), and a figure-eight strip of red resistance band tubing.

The instructor saw me and flitted over, introducing herself as Sonnet, and asking if it was my first class. When I nodded, she said wow I thought you were a regular, you have all the right objects, to which I wasted no time putting my foot in my mouth, saying “Yeah, she told me what to get,” pointing to the woman at the front desk, “and I kept repeating it in my head”. Moving past my weirdness seamlessly, she said “Find a place along the barre, this class is full of regulars so you can pretty much look at anyone here if you’re lost”. I glanced and all along the wall of the mirrored room was a sea of thin white women in tight athleisure, each one absorbed in their pre-class stretching ritual. I often wonder when I enter a fitness class where all the women look like statue-esque models—are these women insanely fit/thin because they do this class religiously or does this class simply attract women who would be insanely fit/thin regardless, due to genetics and lifestyle factors outside the scope of exercise?

We started with a quick stretching warm-up, and then were told to drop and do a 90-second plank. Immediately I was annoyed, like we have 90-second plank at home, you don’t need to spend money on a class to get 90 seconds of plank. And during said 90 seconds of plank, I had plenty of time to observe how bad the music was—Bon Iver vibes for a workout class??? Not it. I’ve said this once and I’ll say it a thousand times, hard workouts require music that matches the energy; rap, pop, some techno, maybe rock, even metal, but nottt indie folk.

And it was a hard workout. So many moves isolated specific muscles and left me visibly shaking under the harsh lighting. It was both supremely embarrassing and also kind of cool to watch in the mirror as the little tiny muscles in my legs violently spasmed, while the regulars barely flinched. The instructor bounced over every once in a while, usually to praise me on getting many of the hyper-specific moves correctly on my first try—praise which I was absolutely eating up; I felt as if my decade-plus of workout exploits all culminated in these moments, where a woman named after a form of poetry would essentially tell me my body is good.

But a tonal shift happened for me at one point, when we were doing this weird move where you kneel and basically squeeze and release one butt cheek at a time over and over again, and I felt the instructor standing behind me staring at the right side of my derriere to make sure I was squeezing it correctly. She gave me specific cues to subtly change the movement, and I never felt more like a piece of meat hanging in a butcher’s window in my entire life than I did in that singular moment; when a woman I met that same hour stared intently and from close range at a specific one of my ass cheeks, head bent like a confused dog, scrutinizing. It was at that moment too I realized why everyone in the class was wearing paper-thin leggings, so you could see every last detail of everyone’s body.

In the same vein, when I was doing one bridge-and-tuck combo move (while technically the “tuck” is a part of correctly entering many a yoga pose and vital in heavy lifting, when done as the thing it feels like it belongs more in a pelvic floor physical therapy setting than a brightly lit workout studio), I caught a glance in the mirror, and it looked so sexual it made me blush with recollections of things I’d only previously seen in mirrors conveniently angled near beds for viewing pleasure. The overt humping motions of it all immediately made me think back to a piece in the New Yorker from 2022, Exercise Is Good for You. The Exercise Industry May Not Be, which, amongst other exercise fads, delves into the bizarre history of barre:

“…There’s Lotte Berk, a German-Jewish dancer whose family had fled to London as refugees from Nazism. In 1959, when there were few freestanding exercise studios anywhere, Berk, then forty-six, had the bright idea of opening a dance studio “not for dancers, but for women who wanted to look like dancers,” Friedman writes. Berk’s studio, a former hat factory in the Marylebone neighborhood, was soon drawing trendsetting students, including the writer Edna O’Brien and the Bond girl Britt Ekland. Berk was gung ho about sex. “If you can’t tuck, you can’t fuck,” she liked to say of one of her signature pelvic exercises. Thus was launched the barre method, now the staple offering of hundreds of thriving studios that attract serious women in pricey fitness wear, who care less about the exercise’s louche origins than about its ability to tighten their cores.”

Now I love anything with louche origins as much as the next guy, but I found the barre experience to be predominantly unexciting, with movements too small and controlled and repetitive to be anything beyond boring and joyless—if training for being better at sex is the diametric opposite of sex, I don’t want it. And even if a lot of women I know and love feel empowered by the workouts, I do deeply resent it for originating in the express purpose of laborious efforts to make women more fuckable. Even if it’s definitely a (main) factor in why I hit legs (read: glutes) extra hard at the gym—it’s the principle of the thing.

The class felt so much longer than it actually was, and I found myself repeatedly searching the mirrored room for a clock to see when the torture would end, but there wasn’t one. Even though I wasn’t dripping sweat after (and for reference, I sweat easily and in large volume), it left me exhausted and deeply, primally hungry in a way I had only ever experienced after lifting heavy weights. And while I was sore the next day, which I love and personally take as proof that an exercise is working—even though the jury is out on whether or not delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is proven to be an indicator of muscle growth—I probably wouldn’t go back (unless dragged by a friend) as it simply wasn’t fun to me whatsoever. But if I do go back and end up a loyal barre devotee, as I have become of the [solidcore]/SLT-industrial-complex, please don’t pull up this scathing critique and show me.