The Inception of BarbellsNBallroom
“I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire.”
- Martha Graham
Welcome to BarbellsNBallroom! I am Marielle Suddarth, a competitive ballroom and Latin dancer, dance instructor, and a NSCA Certified Personal Trainer, located in Nashville, Tennessee.
I have enjoyed dance in a formal capacity since I started classical ballet at the age of eight. Since then it has developed into a love for the craft, the excitement you feel when after hours of frustration you experience success, and feel like you are no longer “doing” choreography but are instead showing the world a small glimpse of who you truly are. Dance, like many art forms, is an enlightened thing and has helped me work through and process many different challenges in my life.
After university, I reluctantly noticed that my traditional adult work life was encroaching on my dance time (the nerve), and my fitness level was quickly starting to decline. “Adulting,” in the traditional sense, is kind of the worst. I started to experience pain in my thoracic spine, which in spite of an fairly severe case of scoliosis, I had previously never felt before. The human body is simply not built to sit at a desk for 40+ hours a week, or in a car hunched over a steering wheel in rush hour traffic. I wanted to become more equipped to combat the changes I was feeling in my physicality and ultimately help others do the same – so I became a NSCA Certified Personal Trainer in 2016.
Through the years I have become more passionate about dance, functional movement training, mobility work, and the belief that it should not simply be accepted that aging results in an unchecked dramatic decline of physicality. True, we all age and our body does change over the years, but with a little work and dedication we can maintain our fitness, mobility, and quality of life. BarbellsNBallroom was created for dancers and non-dancers alike, with a goal to not only assist with longer, injury-free dance careers, but also improve longevity and quality of everyday life. This site will focus on mobility, conditioning, functional strength training, nutrition, as well as ballroom dance specifics that range from pre-competition mental preparation, to fake tanning… It’s simply an amalgamation of my two favorite things - and I hope you find one (if not both subjects) beneficial to you!
-Marielle
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