Women In Wellness: Sarah Aspinall of Breaking Ballet On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Take a “boredom break”. Every day we need to carve out time — even just 5 minutes — to calm the mind and body to relieve stress. Some people don’t want to meditate, or can’t get out for a walk in the countryside, but they can sit still and do nothing for 5 minutes. No reading, no scrolling through social media. Just sitting and being bored for 5 minutes. See what comes up for you.

As a part of my series about women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Aspinall, Founder of Breaking Ballet — trained dancer, registered ballet teacher, and certified NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) coach, Time Line Therapy and Hypnosis Practitioner.

Sarah, 46, from Hertfordshire, UK, helps busy women prioritise their health and fitness using short and effective ballet-inspired workouts. Sarah’s debut book, ‘Move — How to make exercise happen your way’, went straight in at Number 1 on the Amazon bestseller charts in multiple categories for both paperback and Kindle. Sarah created Breaking Ballet in 2017, after losing touch with her body and feeling chained to her desk, and she has since grown a thriving community of over 18,000 women online across 22 countries, and is proud to have changed the lives of more than 1000 women through her work. Along with her fitness programme, Sarah also shares insightful videos on her Youtube channel to an audience of over 3K subscribers.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

Growing up in Wales I was a painfully shy child. In order to bring me out of my shell, my mum took me along to a ballet class at the age of two and ballet became a huge part of my life from then on. I gained a scholarship to ballet school at the age of 14, but didn’t go because my parents wanted me to follow a more traditional career path. After university, I pursued a career in law and worked for over 10 years as a litigation lawyer at a City firm in London.

But in taking that route, I started to let the things I loved fall away. I was chained to my desk for long hours every day, I didn’t have time to think about my wellbeing and stopped dancing altogether.

I realised that I wasn’t happy and needed to try and find a better way of living for the sake of my mental health and wellbeing. I knew exercise was an important part of that, but I couldn’t find anything that really inspired me, until I found a New York City Ballet Workout class. This reminded me that I had danced because I loved it — it was my passion and it happened to keep me in shape. So why not do that now? That love could help me to get back into fitness and reconnecting with who I really was. I realised I could do fitness and life my way. That realisation set me on a path to reconnect with my passion and make my living from it, by training to become a dance teacher.

Fast forward a few years and I am now running Breaking Ballet, a unique online ballet fitness programme for busy women, serving a thriving community of over 18,000 women across 22 countries.

Movement was the real catalyst for change. It gave me back my confidence, the discipline to re-train and overcome associated anxieties of leaving a successful corporate career. It gave me structure and routine, enabled me to set boundaries and, most importantly, it allowed me to re-connect with myself and discover a whole new way of existing.

But the benefits are not only physical. I know that not everyone finds it easy to motivate themselves, or commit to exercising regularly both to stay fit and healthy, but also to optimise their mental wellbeing. From my own experience, it’s clear to me that exercise is an essential part of mental strength and wellbeing and so I also qualified as a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Hypnosis and Time Line Therapy practitioner to to provide that missing link to help women realise their potential.

In November 2022 I published my debut book “Move — how to make exercise happen your way”.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?

The day I turned 30 changed the course of my life completely. I was on holiday in New York with my best friend, taking a break from my stressful job, when we were mugged at gunpoint. When the mugger took us down an alley and told us to turn around, I remember holding my friend’s hand thinking that was going to be the last moment of my life. It wasn’t and the mugger ran off. We then spent the night with the police trying to identify him. A day later, I was back at work in London and on my way home that evening I was assaulted by a gang of young men, only to be saved by a passing police car.

Over the course of the next few weeks, those incidents made me reevaluate my entire life.

Within two years of my 30th birthday and that fateful evening in New York, I had left my legal career, was married, pregnant with my first child, and was training at the Royal Academy of Dance to become a ballet teacher. My ambition was someday to own my own ballet school for children, but my journey led me down a different path as my interests and passions evolved into something more focused on adults.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I don’t think I have ever had one big mistake — just lots of smaller ones! Moving from a legal career to teaching ballet/fitness was a big leap, but it was taking it online that was the hardest part. Looking back now, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, so if I could do it all again, I would probably have invested in the right business coach in order to streamline things from the start. That said, I think we all learn from our mistakes, so I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t made them.

Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?

My work is impacting women in their 40s and beyond all over the globe. Helping them not only to strengthen and tone their bodies, but bringing more self-awareness to their ageing bodies and giving them a community of like-minded women to support them along the way. Our bodies change and so must the way we approach health and fitness. Breaking Ballet’s aim is to encourage women to feel good about themselves and their lives, to achieve strength and grace in movement and show them that strong bodies can also be feminine.

Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.

1. Reframe the idea of traditional exercise to make it more convenient and in keeping with your lifestyle. You can do this by changing your movement patterns at home by making some of your daily habits a bit more inconvenient, in order to move your body more. For example, if you always place your dinner plates on the upper left hand corner of the bottom shelf in the cupboard, what happens if you move them to the upper right hand corner of the top shelf? It creates a slightly different movement pattern to the ones you are used to. We don’t need to be working out for hours on end each week. Just 15 minutes a day is enough as long as we are consistent and changing our movement patterns regularly.
2. Place exercise equipment somewhere it doesn’t traditionally belong. A balance board in your kitchen or a Bosu ball in your lounge, so that when you are chatting with your family while making dinner, you can hop on the balance board for a few minutes to improve your strength and overall balance. If you are in the lounge watching TV you can do some sit ups on the Bosu ball. I have also installed a pull up bar in the doorway of the spare bedroom and do a few when I’m walking past each day. (The benefit to this tip is that the rest of the family end up getting involved — especially if they are competitive!). Bodyweight training, or strengthening workouts are vital for women to maintain bone and muscle mass as we age.
3. The 80% rule. Stop eating when you are 80% full. Taken from “Power 9”, or longevity lessons (a distillation of the findings of medical researchers, anthropologists, demographers and epidemiologists from research of the Blue Zones). The 20% gap between not being hungry and feeling full could be the difference between losing weight or gaining it. Focus on ensuring every meal contains protein. This is particularly important for women in their 40s and beyond and will also keep you fuller for longer.
4. Set an alarm to go to bed. We set one to wake up, but if we are serious about getting our 7–8 hours sleep a night, set an alarm to go to bed. And go! Don’t then start emptying the dishwasher, putting another load of washing on or tidying the house. Research shows that lack of sleep increases cravings for sweets, carbohydrate-rich foods and salty snacks by between 30–40%. It can also lead to lack of energy, which means you are less likely to exercise.
5. Take a “boredom break”. Every day we need to carve out time — even just 5 minutes — to calm the mind and body to relieve stress. Some people don’t want to meditate, or can’t get out for a walk in the countryside, but they can sit still and do nothing for 5 minutes. No reading, no scrolling through social media. Just sitting and being bored for 5 minutes. See what comes up for you.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I would start a lifelong exercise movement for women in their 40s and beyond to ensure they are future-proofing their bodies. Despite a growing awareness surrounding women’s health issues, (and in particular perimenopause and menopause) there remains a gender disparity when it comes to access to fitness. 1 in 3 women do not do enough exercise, and 64% of women wish they could take more time to devote to their physical health. Women’s symptoms can often be ignored and their health problems are under-researched.

To promote lifelong movement for women, I would create a personalised framework that enables women to make the small changes they need to exercise consistently. This would include ways to optimise their physical and social environment, reframe their fitness mindset, discover their fitness identity/personality and practice more self-compassion. Self-awareness is key to making change and I want women to start prioritising themselves and learning as much about their bodies as possible.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

1. Balancing work and family life is tricky! I have got much better at separating work and home life, but it’s still a challenge when you run your own business. Where possible, I also involve my children in the business. When my new journal came last Christmas, they were responsible for packing them up into boxes and putting address labels on etc. They really enjoyed it and have been excited to watch the success of my book this time around too.
2. Invest time in business connections. Running an online business is much harder than in-person and can be quite lonely. I have built wonderful friendships with fellow entrepreneurs over the years and this is what really supports my business as they are the only ones who truly understand what is involved.
3. Listen to your own intuition. There are plenty of opinions about what you should and shouldn’t be doing with your business and it’s sometimes easy to be swayed into changing your mind about what you are doing or the direction you are heading in. Staying connected to my values and what I enjoy doing has been the biggest learning curve.
4. Focus on one or two things. At the start of my business I was trying to do too many things at once, which led to overwhelm. It can feel frustrating going a little bit slower than you had planned, but mastering each area before you move on to the next is what builds a strong business.
5. Ask for help. I was not good at seeking help at the beginning of my business. It was tough to accept that I didn’t know what I was doing in some areas of my business. But the sooner you ask for help from experts and coaches the less time you waste.

Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?

I am passionate about protecting our mental health and movement is one of the best ways of achieving this. People close to me have suffered with depression and I lost my father to Alzheimers (which I know is a form of dementia and not strictly a mental health issue, but for me keeping a healthy mind/brain is all related). I have suffered with mild anxiety all my life and so know first hand just how important it is to move your body to reduce the (sometimes debilitating) symptoms. I’m also acutely aware of how women can struggle mentally and emotionally with the changes that happen to their ageing bodies through the perimenopausal and menopausal years. This is why my lifelong exercise movement is so important to me.

What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?

They can find me at www.breakingballet.com and join our free weekly newsletter at https://breakingballet.com/#newsletter

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/BreakingBallet/

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/breakingballet/

YouTube http://www.youtube.com/@BreakingBallet

Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.