Script:
I spent three videos talking about the amazing Down Dog app suite. So far, I talked about Yoga, HIIT, and Meditation, giving glowing reviews for all of them. Well, the happiness is over as I am now reviewing one of the company’s newest apps on the app store… Down Dog Barre. Let me tell you that the app’s features are what is really Barre here! Ha… got to thumbs me up now due to that pun.
[Introduction]
Barre is a workout technique that is based on the movements from Ballet. You get your curtsy bends, your leg lifts, and more. The point of Barre is to get that slim yet strong Ballerina or Ballerino body that people want so bad. Look at that dude’s thighs… I need to get those in my life. Besides the ballet body, Barre includes the benefits of improving your posture through working out the smaller muscles that aren’t targeted with machine workouts. While the original idea of Barre consisted of body weight exercises, most classes now adays include bands and weights to increase the variety of movements.
Before I purchased a Down Dog subscription I’d never heard of Barre. After doing the workout for a little while I can tell that this is not for me. I am a six foot two nearly three-hundred-pound guy. What I need is some cardio. I don’t need toning until maybe after I lose some weight. Even still I don’t think I’ll ever do Barre again. Not knocking it for others who are into this format but I found this style of working out to be boring. It doesn’t align well with the goals that I have for myself nor my attitude. I like the more rough kind of grungy vibe of an old Boxing gym rather than what Barre seems to align itself with.
That is my feeling on the workout and I couldn’t tell if it is just a bad flavor due to the Down Dog application. To get into Down Dog, the company offers Down Dog Barre comes bundled with a subscription to its application suite. There are a total of six apps from the company. Running, meditation, prenatal yoga, regular Yoga, HIIT, and Barre. For sixty bucks a year, the subscription is cheap enough to be one of the App Store’s most popular and highest-rated apps. The main focus of the company is with its original Yoga app, with people viewing the rest of the suite as a bonus. I felt that both Meditation and HIIT where up there with the original Yoga App but Down Dog Barre definitely feels like a side project.
The Down Dog Barre app has a four-point, nine-star overall ranking, but I do not know why. There are a very limited number of exercises and the options are just not there in Barre. Got to get my rhymes out of the way. The settings of the app include the main circle control for how long you want to do the exercise. That’s the format for all of Down Dogs apps. From there, you have just three options to change up your workout. Three… Yoga, you had like twenty of them, but not for Barre. The first option is your focus, which is what you want to train. You have total body, core strength, thighs, glutes and thighs and glutes. The arms and back area are missing entirely from the app which is largely disappointing. There are Barre Arms Workout that have hundreds of thousands of views… yet this app doesn’t have a single workout focused in this area.
The second option allows you to adjust your timing from fourteen seconds to eighteen seconds and twenty-two seconds. I’m not sure why there isn’t a longer hold period like there is in Down Dogs’ other apps, but that’s the common theme here. Lastly, there are music options, which are standard for the Down Dog suite of apps. These are the only three options in the entire application. Checking the Pure Barre website, a company that provides Barre classes, you can see everything from a combination of Barre and yoga to Barre and weight training and more. The app doesn’t even let you use dumbbells. Just so much is missing here that makes the app feel barely finished.
The workouts themselves are fine. You mostly go from movement to movement, holding for however long you picked. I did get the kind of toning sore that you get from Wii Fit. Again, its not a bad workout if you are looking for toning, but it’s not really something for me. Holding your leg out for twenty seconds does cause a burn but is also boring. It doesn’t help that with the limited types of workouts, I was repeating the same thing repeatedly. I planned on doing Down Dog Barre for sixty days as I do for the other apps, but I had to give up after day twenty. It’s just so boring. Again, I blame Down Dog, as googling barre classes online brings a much more fun vibe from the classes. The reviews on the app say that it’s a calming aesthetic, but I say it’s a boring one.
With that said, let me get through the statistics. I played down dog for a total of twenty days. My Sunday off strategy brings it down to eighteen days of doing the app. Here is the table containing the data for these eighteen days. In total, I burned one-thousand six hundred and forty-seven calories. That comes down to ninety-one point five calories per session being burned. I spent a total of three hours and forty-three minutes doing this app… still too long considering I was repeating the exercise over and over again. That breaks down to twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds for my session. Lastly, Calories per minute burned is seven point four, which is pretty low. I burned more playing VR video games than doing a workout-focused app.
I would still recommend the Down Dog subscription for everything but Barre. There isn’t enough meat on the bones to make this worth anything but a cursory glance. This was my first Introduction to this workout style, and I have to say that I was initially turned off by the whole practice due to how boring this app is. If you want better Barre, then go to YouTube for your fix. Maybe check out Pure Barre, as that looks pretty cool. However, in my opinion, this application is a skip. Still, Down Dog is batting a three out of four home runs… it’s still impressive in my book. Let’s hope running will be amazing and something I can do. I am a very obese man, so I am not looking forward to sixty days of running… lord help me.
So, guys, that is it for today’s review of Down Dog Barre. If you liked this review, please give it a big thumbs up. In fact, go through all my videos and give them a thumbs up. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel, as I hope to reach a thousand subscribers by the end of the year. If you have any thoughts or comments, please leave them below. I try to go through and respond to every comment I receive. If you have any ideas on further challenges, please leave them below so I can add them to the list to complete. Visit my website at jack-jenkins.com to see the table in full and read the script. Follow me on Instagram and X @truejackjenk. Lastly, have a fantastic day, everyone. If you are wondering how to improve your life… you can’t do it alone. We can improve… together!