Train Like A Popstar: How Taylor Swift & Beyoncé Prepare For Their Shows
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12 months ago
How to train like you’ll be onstage at sold-out arenas
Whether you’re a devoted fan or you’re staunchly indifferent to the shifts and tides of the music world, you will have heard about the dazzling phenomenon of pop world tours, from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour to Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour. With elaborate dance routines and lengthy setlists, watching these shows is exhausting. Want to know how singers prepare for such intense performances? Here’s the rundown.
Train Like A Popstar: How Taylor Swift & Beyoncé Prepare For Their Shows
Concerts aren’t just concerts anymore; they’re full-blown spectacles, often complete with intricate sets, bespoke costumes and complex choreography. And while it might seem like singers spend most of their time training their voices, artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé devote just as many hours to intensive exercise regimens preparing them for these high-octane shows. But how exactly do you train like a popstar?
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Well, in her recent TIME Magazine interview, Taylor Swift revealed that she prepared for her Eras Tour by running on a treadmill while singing her entire setlist out loud – a setlist that lasts more than three hours. The Eras Tour is, of course, most definitely a spectacle, featuring 16 costume changes, a string of pyrotechnics, and numerous dance routines. All of this required Taylor to start training six months before the first show, she says, and her gym, Dogpound (an ultra-slick facility favoured by a whole host of celebrities), created a bespoke program for her which incorporated weights and conditioning. Alongside this (frankly bewildering) cardio routine, Taylor worked one-on-one with a choreographer for three months before the first show. She also stated that she stopped drinking alcohol during training.
It’s not all about the grind, though – it’s also about recovery. In between runs of shows, Taylor explained her commitment to spending at least one day resting, which is crucial in allowing her voice (and her body) to reset after consecutive nights of running, jumping, belting and generally pouring her heart out to upwards of 60,000 people.
Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, meanwhile, is a similarly high-energy experience, though it’s slightly less physically demanding than the singer’s famous Coachella set in 2018, which saw her commit to a gruelling diet and exercise regimen: ‘No bread, no carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no meat, no fish, no alcohol,’ she reflected in Homecoming, the Netflix film released after her Coachella performance. It sounds like this kind of training certainly isn’t for the faint of heart.
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How To Train Like A Popstar
Themed Spin Classes
If you can’t commit to months of arduous PT sessions – and you don’t have three hours to spend singing on a treadmill – you can still train like Taylor at themed spin classes, offered by the likes of Soul Cycle, 1 Rebel and Psycle, along with a number of other London studios. While these sessions won’t span the entire Eras Tour setlist, they’ll still give you the opportunity to get a good workout in while you belt to your favourite tracks.
TikTok’s Taylor Swift strut workout
Long before the much-discussed TIME interview, TikTok users devised a Taylor-themed treadmill workout of their own. Known as the Taylor Swift Strut Workout, it’s the brainchild of fitness influencer Allie Bennett, and involves walking and running to the beat of ten carefully-selected Taylor tracks (beginning, if you’re curious, with ‘The Man’) and increasing your speed by 0.1mph every time the song changes. The workout lasts 36 minutes in total and ends with a cooldown that sees you strut it out to ‘Style’. What could be better?
