Strength & Energy Flow. Live Online with Heather Barton

Set yourself up to move gracefully and efficiently through your day! In this unique class, Heather combines her backgrounds in sports therapy, osteopathy and dance to help you joyfully and mindfully build functional strength, endurance and coordination. You’ll also enhance your posture.

Each class, you will flow through four phases: 

1. a mobility warmup that encourages fluid flexibility through the different joints and fascial chains of your body,
2. a series of core-activation and full-body strength exercises coordinated with your breath, 
3. a mood-boosting HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) circuit to increase your circulation, boost your energy levels and free the tissues of stress, 
4. finishing with a mindful cool-down to calm your nervous system.

Heather always gives exercise options for different levels, as well as for anyone with movement restrictions, so you can join us whatever your current level of fitness may be. Her wide knowledge and good humour will guide you to feeling stronger and more energetic in no time!

Equipment needed:

• running shoes or bare feet
• yoga mat / carpet 
• drinking water
• light weights – optional for some exercises 

As a former dancer, Heather loves creative movement! While she carefully plans out every class, she also makes sure that each is unique, adapted to the students in attendance, and includes a few moves that you won’t find in a typical gym class!

Heather Barton

Heather’s classes joyfully blend aspects of her background in dance, sports training, years at the yoga studio, and her profession as an osteopathic manual practitioner. This lady knows her stuff!  You’ll experience her love of creative movement, healthy biomechanics and the human spirit.

Growing up in northern British Columbia, Heather spent most of her free time either at the dance studio or running in the forest. Since then, she’s spent much of her life studying the beautiful moving architecture of the human body, fascinated by the ways we live in and through our bodies. 

After several years of dancing ballet professionally in the United States and in Canada, she settled in Montreal to study biology and Exercise Science at Concordia University, graduating with a BSc., specialization in Athletic Therapy. She is also an Osteopath, licensed in Canada as an osteopathic manual practitioner, having completed the seven-year program at the Collège d’Études Ostéopathiques de Montréal.

Heather’s favorite continuing education courses that inform her work include: the global movement approaches of the Postural Restoration Institute (PRI), and Seth Oberst’s stress and movement approach.

While she enjoys working with a wide variety of athletes, from rugby players to flamenco dancers, Heather has discovered that she really loves working with “regular” people like herself, helping them to connect with their own strength, power and resilience and to feel more joyfully present in their own bodies.

When not working, Heather enjoys spending time out in nature with her delightful family doing “movement nerd” activities such as hiking, skiing, learning to mountain bike and attempting to surf.