Meet Your Trainers: Jennifer Hawkins

BarreAmped® Teacher Trainers are what we consider the crème de la crème! Each member of the team has been through our full certification program as well as rigorous apprenticeship. Yet, they are still human and their thighs shake just like yours in class! 😉 Can you see yourself in any part of their stories?

Meet Jennifer Hawkins — BarreAmped® Teacher Trainer and owner of In Bloom Barre & Wellness in Cookeville, TN

We asked Jennifer to share a few thoughts about her experience with the method on her way to becoming an instructor and eventually a Teacher Trainer for BarreAmped®:

Describe your first barre class in 5 words or less: Unexpectedly challenging, yet deeply restorative

What was life like before becoming a barre instructor? Fitness didn’t really have a place in my life before barre. My background is in elementary education. I taught 5-7 years olds how to speak English and overcome challenges of academic learning with a limited vocabulary. Outside of my professional career, I was also a health coach. My love of learning and teaching, combined with my interest in the mind-body connection, became a surprising but natural springboard into teaching barre. 

What was it about BarreAmped® that initially drew you to it? I was so motivated by the challenge of connecting mind to muscle and the intentionality behind every move. I appreciated that the focus of the classes and training for instructors revolved around that intentionality on connection and form.

Any qualms or hesitations about getting certified and beginning to teach? Having no background in the fitness world, I didn’t really know what I didn’t know. I think that worked to my advantage in a lot of ways, but it did create quite a learning curve. I had to learn how to “educate” and lead with my body and convert a lot of head knowledge into a physical modality of teaching. That was disorienting, but also a lot of fun. 

Take us on a journey from your Level 1 certification until now. What has that looked like? When I took my Level 1 training in 2020, I really didn’t have intentions of becoming a “fitness instructor.” I was just going to fill in a few classes here and there at a local studio. My training included a live Spine + Core Anatomy course and a bonus master class — Power Stretch, which I had never taken. I was immediately in love and set a goal to finish my Level 2 certification so that I could eventually get certified in Power Stretch. I got both about a year later. 

Being an avid learner of anything that interests me, I couldn’t stop there. To serve my clients better and round out their workout programming, I added BarreAmped®️ Fire and Level 3 certifications over the next couple of years. I’ve also done BarreAmped®️ CONNECT Coaching with Abbie O’Neal and became a BarreAmped®️ Partner Instructor in 2024.

Around that time, I was feeling a strong pull to combine elements from health coaching and my community of health practitioners with the fitness world that I had grown into. I recognized a need for growth minded but busy women to have access to a community that could meet their needs and support them with trusted resources to care for themselves, as many of them care for so many others.

I stepped away from teaching in October 2024 for what I thought might be a year or so to take a reset and clear my mind. But instead, I was miraculously and immediately invited by a Cookeville business owner to build that exact kind of community in their gorgeous historic downtown space … one that I had ironically been admiring for years.  

So I went right back to teaching just weeks after I told my clients goodbye. I opened a temporary studio in my home for about six months to fill the gap for a few displaced clients until our transition into the new space. That accidentally turned into fourteen classes per week … oops! 

In April 2025, I partnered with a former client turned fellow barre instructor, Amber Whitson, to open In Bloom Barre & Wellness Studio.

We just celebrated our one year anniversary at In Bloom and the growth has been contagious. We invited BarreAmped® for a hybrid online + in-person training experience with Lori Winter and certified SEVEN new instructors!! I also completed my mentorship to become a Teacher Trainer because I believe in the method that much!

I have looked forward to and enjoyed every learning experience with BarreAmped®. I am still amazed, six years later, that I get so much value and learn so many new things every time I open the BarreAmped® Learning Network. It’s an education that truly grows with you. The knowledge goes deeper and deeper the more I apply it and let it change me. The more it changes me, the more others around me are inspired and motivated to follow.

Share your highest high and your lowest low of this teaching and/or business ownership adventure. All the highlights of my journey that I listed above convey the highs without further explanation. But I also spent years getting up before dawn to teach a class that only one or two people showed up for. I have shown up for complete no-show classes. I’ve overdone it physically and forgotten to care for myself. I’ve over planned classes. I’ve under planned classes. I’ve lost clients due to my own inexperience, and I’ve lost clients tragically to sickness. And all of it has grown me. 

If you could go back to the beginning and start again, what would you change, if anything? One thing I would have benefitted from early on is more coaching and mentorship. So that’s something I am incorporating into our studio now for new instructors.

What’s one piece of advice you would give to someone embarking on this path? Narrowing it down to just one is hard! I actually have several:

• Embrace all of it, especially the hard parts. It’s all there to grow you. 
• Be humble enough to remain teachable and you’ll never stop growing.  
• Keep yourself high on your list of priorities and protect the time you need to take care of you. Everything you do flows from that. 
• Hold things that you love with open hands and be willing to lay them down when seasons change. They might just transform into something new and so much better.