Fashion designer and Gyrotonic teacher lives to give people freedom in their bodies.

There is a saying in the Gyrotonic discipline that goes like this: “Stop moving, and you die.”

Breathing is movement, after all. As its founder Juliu Horvath says, “When something stops moving, it’s an expression of death. The more it moves, the more it’s an expression of life.”

By that logic, Domini Anne might never die.

The 38-year-old mother of one (with another on the way) helps clients recover from injuries and find greater body control and range of motion. She also travels the region and country to train other movement coaches as one of the world’s few specialized Gyrotonic and Gyrokinesis master trainers. Meanwhile she designs supple, eco-friendly threads for her luxury athletic wear line, Domini Anne. The vision is clothing you can both work out and socialize in. Think yoga gear with curbside cred.

The Weekly tracked the onetime professional ballerina to her Carmel studio to train on different apparatuses designed to, as the official Gyrotonic website puts it, “facilitate exercise sequences composed of spiraling, circular movements.”

One journalist called the primary contraption of pulleys and knobs (the pulley tower unit) “what you’d get if you crossbred a torture rack and a gynecologist’s examining table.” The workout is more of a cross between Pilates and tai chi.

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Weekly: You’ve got some stuff going on.

Anne: For a while I felt like I had dueling passions and dueling careers. I had a feeling I had to give all of my time to one of them for it to succeed. Then I had an epiphany that I’m here on this Earth to help people love the experience of being in their body. And my two careers go hand in hand: freedom in Gyrotonics and freedom of movement in the clothing itself. They’re yoga clothes that look fancy enough to wear to dinner. As an instructor, you get tired of wearing sweatpants day in and day out. I started at 14 when I was a punk rocker and a ballerina. I didn’t want to change from striped tights and Doc Martens to pink.

You’ve called Gyrotonic the antithesis of weight lifting.

Not all styles only deal with contraction, but for the most part, they contract into the body, building a shorter, tighter muscle. We use muscular tension to create expansion and strength, like you feel with a yawn, a stretch that goes through your whole system. Gyrotonic never isolates one muscle. We’re looking at a chain, a whole circuit. That also sets it apart from Pilates.

Gyrotonic encourages play and nonrepetition. Why is that so important?

We believe that stagnation equals death. The cause of all disease is stagnation, be it emotional, physical, mental, spiritual. You’re building brain plasticity to adapt to whatever changes take place. You’re essentially able to move like Bruce Lee. Strength is flexibility, the ability to be able to work with whatever’s coming at you.

Juliu says, “Be like elephant, like rhinoceros, like a gazelle, like a bird.” What’s that about?

He’s talking about plasticity and playfulness. The ability to see a quality in an animal movement helps re-create a similar feeling. He says the three ideal animals are the octopus, the monkey and the cat. If you can find movement that follows all three of those, you will have the freest body possible. A cat is totally relaxed in the sun one minute, then hears a noise and is alert, going from zero to 1,000 in an instant. You hope to train your nervous system to be relaxed but active at any point.

If you could gift readers one bit of body awareness, what would that be?

Watch your breath move through your system and let the movement follow. There’s a ton of different breaths you can do – I’m teaching a breathing intensive now – and breathing is the power for movement. When you’re just contorting muscles, you only experience one-third of the power. You have a connected movement no matter what.

I’ve heard you say metaphor is important to your practice. Why is that?

They expand your mind. It’s easier to connect with an image than basic facts. You can see someone, hear something and feel something. When you give an image, you are hitting all three.

GROUP GYROTONIC classes are $20; private sessions $75/hour, packages available. Learn more at www.carmelgyrotonic.com. Clothing line infomation, images and sales at www.dominianne.com