Keeping Things Interesting For Your Body

I believe that I have a bit of a reputation .. I never say ‘no’ when people ask me to sub classes for them. I do it for a few reasons ..

1. I handle excessive free time poorly. I will admit it. I am lazy in my spare time and I like to munch. While I need to learn to manage my down time in the meanwhile I never say no to the chance to eliminate a bit of it.

2. For instructors it always feels good when people ask you to sub. At the gyms I teach at it is usually a compliment. When I find subs I will ask only those people that I know will give the class as good of a workout in my absence.

3. It’s always good to throw a wrench into your ‘typical’ fitness regimen. It keeps the body guessing a bit more often. Guessing leads to changing and adjusting. That usually leads to good stuff!

Number 3 is what we’ll talk about.

Most people who have exercise as part of their lifestyle tend to find what they love, and they stick with it. We get comfortable and we tend to not only stick to those workouts but we also develop a pattern with exercising.

What happens? The body learns the patterns, knows what to expect, and may stop responding as much as we’d like it to.

How can we avoid this? Throw some wrenches in the mix. Maybe add a new workout in there, do things out of order (or in reverse), change the intensity and focus. Find a way to throw your workout out of what you expect it to be. Then, do it again.

Make those changes start happening for you once again because, after all, that is what we work so hard for!

Happy day and thanks for reading!

I have tons of playlists on Spotify, by BPMs, by moves (i.e. seated flats, standing climbs, etc). Feel free to follow me as I am constantly adding to my playlists 🙂

Christina

Feel free to follow me on social media!

Follow @joschmoblo

Follow @_findingfitness – my blog’s twitter

Spinning / Indoor Cycling – 60 Minute Profile – Endurance / Speedwork Profile (60-13-10)

I have not posted a spin profile playlist in a while and so I thought I would share one 🙂

Right now I teach spinning / indoor cycling at two different gyms. At one gym for the month we are focusing on endurance / speedwork profiles and at the other we are working in strength. Needless to say my legs are ‘adjusting’ the going from one extreme to the other!

This was one I taught recently … the goals was to work on seated flat surge improvement while sustaining strong tempos through the rest of class.

The entire profile is an endurance profile, with cadences between 80-110. Knowing that we can briefly look at the details.

Let’s have a look…

 The goal of the profile is to work on the speed intervals during the seated flats. The seated flats are up to the riders whether it’s  small bump in pace or a full out spinning surge. When not in those songs the goal shifts to maintain that endurance pace and momentum. As the seated flats progress they will challenge the rider’s ability to keep pushing ahead.

I typically give options both in and out of the saddle with the intent to work with every personal goal in class. I also always finish with a seated flat as that last ‘blast’ to end class. Turbulence definitely does that …

The seated flats are Juicy Wiggle, Welcome to Africa, Black Betty, Born to Get Wild, and Turbulence.

This playlist is pretty upbeat and ‘pushy’ on tempo, which helps when you are tired! The music keeps you moving!

I hope this helps!

Thanks for reading!

I have tons of playlists on Spotify, by BPMs, by moves (i.e. seated flats, standing climbs, etc). Feel free to follow me as I am constantly adding to my playlists 🙂

Christina

Feel free to follow me on social media!

Follow @joschmoblo

Follow @_findingfitness – my blog’s twitter

Group Fitness Instructors – How Can We Improve Our Class Attendance?

This is a question that I see floating around often enough that I believe it’s worth talking about. As fitness instructors, how can we improve our attendance in class?

I wish that there was a magic formula .. or if you do X, Y, and Z your numbers will definitely go up. But .. there’s not.

Instead let’s talk about some tips that could help:

• Get them involved — People want to participate. Ask them what they want to work on, what moves they love or love to hate, even ask them what songs they want to hear in class. When you give them a chance to contribute they’ll enjoy seeing their opinions come to life in the next class!

• Ask questions — This also rolls into getting them involved but it also creates an open environment where people will talk to you. I have been teaching this class for a few months. They are a quiet, quiet group but week after week I ask for song suggestions and other feedback. Over time they start talking to me about that, or other things. Now, they are not so quiet 🙂

• Care about teaching — This one sounds silly but it’s not. People can see a passionate and knowledgeable instructor. At the same time they can see one who is not ‘there’ in class with them. No one is ever going to get rich from teaching .. that is not why we teach day in and day out. If you don’t love what your doing, if you don’t love helping people reach their fitness goals, then you may want to consider a different path. If they can tell they will not want to take your class because it is not very motivating.

• Evolve your career as an instructor — We go through initial training but after that we should always seek more, learn more. It makes us better instructors and more knowledgeable in the areas of fitness and wellness. That knowledge translates in your classes and people know quickly that you are speaking from the heart and from education. That equates to trusting you as their coach as well.

• Ask for feedback — are you kidding me? No one wants to hear criticism. We hear it and immediately want to run into a corner and hide. But, knowing and improving our teaching will make us both a better and stronger instructors so, it’s tough but worth it.

We’ll talk about more later but for now that is a start!

Happy day and thanks for reading!

I have tons of playlists on Spotify, by BPMs, by moves (i.e. seated flats, standing climbs, etc). Feel free to follow me as I am constantly adding to my playlists 🙂

Christina

Feel free to follow me on social media!

Follow @joschmoblo

Follow @_findingfitness – my blog’s twitter

Group Fitness Instructors – Teaching with Purpose

I have learned, over time, that all group fitness instructors are different, which is not necessarily a bad thing. We see things differently, we plan differently, we have different goals for ourselves and our classes.

I personally am a planner, especially when it comes to my spinning / indoor cycling classes. I like to have goals and purposes with every class I teach and, taking it a bit further, I like to let the people know what we are working towards each class and during the current period. I believe that when people understand the ‘method to the madness’ they will focus in a bit closer.

Now what do these plans have to include? Again, this is where everyone is different. You can micro-manage down to every move in a class or you can just give a general objective instead.

Let’s look at an example..

Let’s say I’m teaching a weights class today. I could approach it one of a few ways:

1. I could say we are going to use weights and walk into class and teach freestyle as I go (assuming I am experienced enough to pull this off, of course). The pros? Less time planning. The cons? You may not be prepared for the full class worth of work or the class may not flow as smoothly.

2. I could make a plan saying that well start with legs, then back, then chest work, and so on .. walk into class and determine the moves based on my ‘outline.’ The pros? Not too much time planning. The cons? Maybe the class flow would be affected here as well but at least you know where you are going.

3. I could outline my class and also list the moves I want to do… so maybe for legs we’ll work on squats, then dead rows and lifts for back, and so on. The pros? You’ll walk in with a good teaching base. The cons? A bit more planning is involved and you’ll still need to fill in the gaps while teaching some.

4. I could outline the class, list the moves, and specify how many of each I’ll do. Example… for legs it could be squats with XX number of single counts, maybe XX squat pulses, and so on. The pros? You’ll have it all laid out for you. The cons? Lots of planning involved.

There are really no wrong answers to this, to be honest. Sometimes as well we have been teaching for so long that our ‘go to’ class formats are something we even have memorized. Another nice trick is to keep a copy of your class layouts, especially the ones you like, so you can grab and reuse them down the road on the fly.

For me, I’m #3. I like to outline the muscle focus and the moves I want to incorporate but I will typically let the music and the workout intensity determine the reps, the length, etc of everything I teach in class.

Anyway, just a few thoughts on the matter. I definitely believe it’s worth trying all the different approaches, and others that I may not have mentioned, to find what works for you!

Happy day and thanks for reading!

I have tons of playlists on Spotify, by BPMs, by moves (i.e. seated flats, standing climbs, etc). Feel free to follow me as I am constantly adding to my playlists 🙂

Christina

Feel free to follow me on social media!

Follow @joschmoblo

Follow @_findingfitness – my blog’s twitter