Loud, bumping music greets you from beyond the glass double doors at Williamsburg’s newest boutique fitness studio, Pure Barre.
A young, peppy instructor with a wireless headset smiles brightly as she calls out instructions for the 55-minute class.
“Curl, and curl. Press back, press back. Up an inch, down an inch. Hold, and pulse, for 10, 9…” the instructor calls into her microphone, guiding the women as they pulse methodically to the sounds of Diplo and David Guetta, squeezing their abs together, lifting their “seat,” flexing their biceps again and again, using the ballet barre for support.
Do you feel the energy? It makes you kind of want to get up and do some work,”
says Amy Perkinson, the petite 25-year-old who co-owns Williamsburg’s first Pure Barre studio with her 53-year-old mother, Terry.
With a background in modern dance, Amy Perkinson began teaching Pure Barre full time in the Southside and in Richmond, driving back and forth each day while living in Richmond and continuing to dance with the Virginia Commonwealth University dance department, from which she graduated in the fall of 2013.
“It became a lot of teaching, and I was really stretching myself thin,” Amy Perkinson explains. At the suggestion of entrepreneurial family members, she and her mother opened their own studio in Williamsburg in October 2015.
The structure of a Pure Barre class is simple: the 55-minute workout begins with a warmup, using core strength to really heat up the body in the first 15 minutes. Then comes the arm sculpting and the thigh toning, followed by some seat and abdominal work. And finally, mercifully, the cool down arrives with a series of stretches to leave you feeling “really, really good.”
The structure, developed by Pure Barre founder Carrie Rezabek Dorr, will always be the same, although the exercises in the sequence will change. A hybrid of Pilates and dance, Pure Barre uses small isometric movements to create “long, lean muscles,” concentrating on the areas women tend to fixate on, like their abs, core, thighs, seat and waistline.
Amy Perkinson says the structure aids in muscle memory, but also prevents plateauing. “It’s a really good, thought-out process of equally balancing not too much change but not too many similarities.
“Pure Barre eliminates all insecurities and judgment, and I think women just overall need that when it comes to fitness,” she says. “They need to be encouraged and know that wherever they are in their fitness goals is great. We’re going to just work towards wherever they want to be.”
The Pure Barre community prides itself on just that—being a community that encourages each other, loves one other and celebrates its accomplishments.
“I think if you just come and try, you’ll fall in love with it,” she says. “The scariest and the hardest step is coming for the first time, and then maybe coming for the second time.”