Getting in shape can improve general happiness, boost energy levels, and grant the confidence to sit at Helen of Troy's lunch table. Approach greatness with today's Groupon: for $20, you get three one-hour dance fitness classes at Pop Physique (a $60 value). Choose between the following locations: Costa Mesa or Seal Beach.
Pop Physique's founder, former professional ballerina Jennifer Williams, leads barre-based sessions in body toning. The Costa Mesa location's schedule and the Seal Beach location's schedule both overflow with sessions of Pop Sculpt, the studio's signature class, in which ballet moves coalesce with Pilates and gentle weight training. During each one-hour course, students repeat a series of movements designed to strengthen the body, shape the core, and foster enough flexibility to add a personal finishing touch to incomplete rubber-band balls. Sessions can torch more than 500 calories in each class, and long-term practice often endows participants with pristine posture and tightened abs. The studios supply patrons with the necessary eco mats, exercise balls, and weights for each session.
Pop Physique
At the end of a fruitful career that led her from the Cincinnati Ballet to the Sacramento Ballet, Jennifer Williams funneled her dance savvy into creating the barre-inspired exercise system taught at Pop Physique, a 2013 CityVoter finalist for Best Gym. Her fleet of handpicked and personally trained instructors pairs graceful ballet moves with other low-impact exercises in order to chisel cores without injuring muscles. Deep stretches further preserve tendons and leave each student more relaxed than a tortoise moseying past a state patrolman with a radar gun. Sessions run multiple times a day, seven days a week at an expanding network of SoCal locations. The roomy studios are lined with sprung dance floors and design accents that lend each location a distinct personality and a chance to forget its past as a storage room for defective food processors.