Disco Barre is like the craft beer of cardio. Sophie Ritchie opened her east London venue in 2019, when opening a studio with ballet barres and a mission to rediscover the fitness crazes of the past must have seemed like a perfectly legit business plan. What could possibly go wrong? I watch the videos now, Ritchie alone in her studio, with its zany lighting and mirrored walls, and experience it as a masochistic self-taunt. I just want to be in a fancy room with sprung floors and a bunch of women with better hair than me.

In fact, online Disco Barre has its upsides. Some of its influences date back to the 60s and Lotte Berk, a German contemporary dancer. Ritchie learned the Lotte Berk technique via Berk’s 85-year-old daughter, Esther Fairfax – who has been running classes for 47 years – and now teaches these classes herself as well as Disco Barre. If you were alive in the 80s, you will recognise elements of it from that fitness culture. There’s a lot of pelvic floor gyration, tucking in your tail, untucking it, doing the same on tiptoes, then again with a handweight; the emphasis is on minuscule, repetitive movements, or sometimes large, repetitive moments. Everything that looks easy is much harder, and everything that looks hard is impossible. You don’t want to be around well-coiffed people in these circumstances, so I’m glad of the privacy of my own home – even if it means I have to move the sofa to use it as a barre.

There is something deeply nostalgic about these exercises invented by dancers of the last century: often they were trying to solve three problems at once: athletic injury, maintaining aesthetic perfection and the whole world of sex and mortality contained within the phrase “pelvic floor”. There’s a tight focus on specific muscle groups, and the aim is to become like a rock, one muscle at a time. You have to buy into the athlete’s conception of your body as a machine, infinitely responsive to inputs and outputs. Either that, or just do as you’re told.

The routines are often long, discipline being a dancer’s watchword. Ritchie’s last video was 63 minutes, which I had to do in two parts (though I did move the sofa back and forth both times for that additional arm workout). If “disco” makes you think of raw abandon, you can forget that: the soundtrack is more funk, and you cannot throw yourself around.

After one session, I could already feel a certain novel tautness around my sides; if you never exercise, this will be true of any new thing, but as someone accustomed to trying stuff out, it’s quite unusual. However, there’s no point doing it just once. It’s not completely uncharted territory, but it is idiosyncratic, and you waste a lot of concentration at the start trying to figure out which muscle is supposed to be hurting. Any time you lose your mojo, just look up the original Lotte Berk routines on YouTube. It’s like being hypnotised.

What I learned
When Lotte Berk created Disco Barre in the 60s, she had other goals beyond fitness: poise, joy, sexual pleasure.

Three online dance workouts for beginners

• The Mamma Mia Dance workout won’t just give you a physical workout, but an emotional lift, too, thanks to the glorious Abba tunes (they’re not the originals, probably for copyright reasons, but they’re good enough). Part 1 is 20 minutes of easy-to-follow moves that work the arms and legs; they’re relatively static, so you don’t have to break a sweat running or jumping. A countdown clock in the corner of the screen tells you how long you have left on each move, and the workout ends with gentle stretching to The Winner Takes It All.

• At Your Beat, the diverse, inclusive London dance studio, specialises in upbeat, high-energy workouts of every conceivable genre: jazz, K-pop, twerking, Afrobeat, Latin, even Broadway tunes. With fast and stylish choreography, 45-minute classes (nicknamed At Your Gaff) are livestreamed through classpass.com. Start with the beginners’ sessions as these are complex moves.

• You can very much choose your poison with Disney Hiit workouts (youtube.com). There are family-friendly medleys full of Jungle Book hits, but as a grown adult, you’ll want something from the High School Musical franchise. The choreography is like an atomic reaction between an MTV backing video, an aerobics class and an Icelandic hot spring. They tell you to smile a lot; and the ones that don’t, role-model with intense smiling. You should decide in advance how you feel about this, as it may ruin your workout if you keep noticing it.

• This article was amended on 17 March 2021 to clarify the distinction between Disco Barre and the Lotte Berk technique, and to make clear that Ritchie opened her east London studio in 2019 – Disco Barre itself was launched some years earlier.