When classically trained ballerina Suzy Kaitman opened the doors for her first Ballet Fit class at the Scotia Bank Dance Centre in 2012, only four students showed up.
For four months, she taught one class each week. Since then, five community centres have put her on heavy rotation, she’s stopped teaching other aerobic classes, and aspires to open her own studio within the year. She now teaches 15 classes each week of Ballet Fit, Kaitman’s original, posture-centric, muscle-toning workout that blasts electro-pop during an evolving choreographed routine that advances from plies at the barre to unaided leaps and turns — like ballerinas.
“I started this in Calgary just before the barre fad took off,” she said. “The barre is huge. The ballet trend is huge.”
After half a decade of growing popularity, is this more than a trend? “I really do think so,” said Kaitman. “It just keeps going.”
Like diets and skirt length and beards, fitness has its own fads. Popular innovations like circuit training, intervals and dynamic stretching are incorporated into workouts because they’re effective, but others — Tae Bo or the ThighMaster, for example — reached pop-cultural infamy but were barely around long enough for practitioners to break a sweat.
Practices that have caught on famously in the West include yoga and spinning. They arrived in different decades, but both lifestyles come with their own butt-cupping pants and both were branded trends when they first emerged in large urban centres such as L.A. Yoga is now a $10.2 billion industry, according to Forbes.
Ballet and barre-inspired exercise has its own legion of devotees who fill classes at numerous Vancouver studios like the Bar Method, which was inspired by a German ballet dancer and branded in the U.S. 15 years ago.
Barre Fitness was the first Canadian company to embrace the then-emerging dance conditioning exercise routine when it opened a studio in Yaletown in August, 2010. They have since expanded to the North Shore.
Also in August, 2010, sisters Jey and Karen Wyder opened the country’s first Dailey Method, which was created 10 years earlier by a Californian mother raising three kids.
“Our classes are always full,” said Jey. “We’ve been open five years and we just saw the demand increasing over time and, especially at peak times, our classes are always full.”
When they opened a small studio in Dunbar, the Wyder sisters offered 17 classes a week and had seven instructors, including Jey. They now employ 15 instructors who teach a combined 52 classes each week.
On Friday, the sisters will open a second Dailey Method and increase the weekly class count to 85. Their expansion to Kitsilano in a West Fourth Avenue studio near Burrard Street is replete with skylights and two workout rooms bathed in south-facing light.
“When we first opened in Dunbar, there was such a big demand, our biggest challenge was that there were so many people loving the classes,” said Karen. “The demand has always been there from the beginning. Our No. 1 thing is that it works. I dropped two dress sizes, personally, when I started and I had tried everything — yoga, running, kick boxing, personal training — and this workout it does get results if you come regularly.”
With the second studio, the Dailey Method will offer a wider range of classes, including options for a gentler workout and more intense cardio.
Jey, like her younger sister, dropped several dress sizes once she committed to the barre. “My shape changed,” she said. (Karen added,” People often think we’re the same age and I’m 15 years younger.”)
“People love that long, lean musculature that you get from the class. It’s effective and it’s safe because it’s non-impact,” said Jey. “It’s designed for a broad spectrum of people. My teenage daughter comes to class, I come and so does my mother in her 70s. People are calling every day to see if we’re open yet.”
