With the festive season looming over our fitness goals, at the Indulge office at least, we have given in to our cravings for Christmas specials like the stollen bread and have skipped counting calories. However, if you are someone looking to finish 2023 with a dopamine high then the newest entrant to the fitness landscape, Physique 57 could be an effective choice.
Promoting barre workouts that originated in New York City, Physique 57 made its debut in the city after successful celebrity-approved stints in Mumbai. Here, you can sign up for group classes and each session typically lasts 60 minutes with a focus on isometric movement. Barre workouts combine the benefits of pilates, yoga and ballet and boast low-impact, high-intensity exercises.
This workout routine is the perfect trade-off for demanding and rigorous gym workouts. The focus here is to improve posture and engage major muscle groups including the arms, legs, glutes and core. You keep the resistance to a minimum but work even the smallest muscle.
Intrigued by the concept, we found ourselves at one of the morning sessions by Physique 57, the Barre 57, led by instructor Karan. If you are new to this workout routine, we suggest, unlike us, you reach on time. Even the first two minutes of the class are unskippable as the instructors walk you through active warm-up exercises.
Thankfully, we were able to catch up with the rest of the class and got started on the 45-minute session with exercises that targeted the thigh muscles. We performed the flat back chair move to get a little length and definition in our spin.
This move, which required the use of a barre, resembles your classic inclined squat position. We followed this up with a standing upright challenge where we placed an exercise ball in between our thighs and squeezed it while maintaining posture. This exercise, slightly more challenging than the last one, activated our quad muscles and how! We could feel those muscles pumping and with a little break in between, we moved straight to the round back chair movement to give our back a long stretch. You would think that the exercises would get slightly easier from here on but it only got more sweat-inducing.
We moved to an ab circuit with exercises like curl-ups, the boat pose and leg touches with pulse repetitions to achieve that perfect 11-line strong core before the year ends. It’s interesting to note that in between each set, you focus on exercises that build flexibility and agility of the said muscle.
After the ab routine, we performed the tabletop position with legs moving side to side and darts with the elbow touching the opposite knee. We then decided to take a little break before starting the glute sets. We noticed that on a normal day, we would conclude our workout after engaging two muscles but the thing with group classes like Barre 57 is that you borrow energy from others and that is what kept us going. All fired up, we performed the standing push-ups at the barre with a little tweak.
As we pushed down and pulled back up, we moved our legs in three different variations — stamping backwards, butt kicks and long leg pulses. We then moved to an exercise called the ‘hairpin’ which is designed to engage the entire outer glute muscle. With the glutes nearly begging for a break, we jumped straight into the last set of exercises like glute bridges to work the lower hamstrings and back and also strengthen core balance.
We paired this up with 10 more reps of abdominal curls and side twists. After a breather, we finished off the workout with a heart-pumping cardio session. To conclude the session for the day, we grabbed a resistance band for a final set of stretches and a cool down. Surprisingly, even after this high-intensity class, we did not feel exactly sore during the day, making this routine our new preferred choice for more reasons than one.
`1,100 onwards. At Vittal Mallya Road.
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