Balletone™ is a fitness system that blends the principles of dance, pilates and yoga in order to give the athlete a complete body workout. Balletone™ classes focus on motion and an awareness of the movement of the body. There are different types of Balletone™ classes that use various movements to each achieve different levels of difficulty, all of which ultimately aim toward giving the athlete a lean body.
The Balletone™ system began to gain popularity in 2002 for its use of dance postures, especially those of ballet, to provide a workout for its practitioners. The demands of a ballet workout on the body help the athlete to develop better balance and cardiovascular health. The motions also ensure that the athlete is always engaging his or her core muscles, and thus Balletone™ is able to provide a very consistent workout to the body's core.
The Balletone™ system also incorporates postures from other forms of exercise such as yoga and pilates. The idea behind this fusion is to incorporate motions that are already familiar to the athlete. The athlete isn't learning any radically new motions, so he or she can focus on the small differences in the movements and can be aware of the flow of motion. This is supposed to provide a workout that is both muscular and neuromuscular.
There are several different types of Balletone™ classes, and each class has a different level of overall intensity. Sole Synthesis™ is a beginner-level class that introduces athletes to the foundational principles that guide the rest of the classes. Another class that is suitable for beginners is Standing Flow™, which was the first class to appear in the Balletone™ system. This class blends different aspects of dance, pilates and yoga into an overall exercise system. Both of these classes are suitable for beginners, but they also have benefits for more experienced athletes.
The more advanced classes tend to place a greater emphasis on some aspect of the ballet workout. The Center Moves™ class, for instance, focuses on the dance aspects of the system in order to provide an intense cardiovascular workout. Fusion Fitness Training™ utilizes fewer of the ballet exercises and instead emphasizes yoga and pilate postures. There are three different Fusion Fitness Training™ workouts: one that focuses on yoga, one that emphasizes pilates and one that blends the two.
Because the Balletone™ system incorporates so many types of exercise, it is able to provide many benefits. The system involves both lower-body exercises and upper-body exercises, and it provides several stretches that can increase flexibility. The use of motion also provides a good cardiovascular workout and helps the athlete to achieve a lean body.