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

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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

How Can We Be Better Fitness Instructors?

How can we be better fitness instructors? I think about this quite often because it’s important to me that people find value in myself, and my classes, as helping them towards their fitness goals. Like most people I am always striving to learn more, to reach more, to do more.

What can we do as instructors, to improve? Here are a few of my thoughts …

• Be personable, yet professional.  People should be comfortable coming up to you, asking questions about their health, and possibly talking about personal details that may be affecting their goals. At the same time you want to have a decent boundary where your respect as an instructor doesn’t get compromised.

• Be knowledgeable, but don’t answer questions you don’t know. I’ve witnessed instructors over time that ‘circled’ around questions because they did not know the answer. There is nothing wrong with saying you don’t know, or that you will find out and get back to them. Give them correct information. I had a member come up to me one time asking about yoga modifications for pregnancy. I was clueless … so I went home, went to my research options, and returned the next day with a list of modifications she needed to make.
• Get them involved. I ask my people all the time to give me song requests and people generally enjoy to hear their suggestions ‘come to life.’ When you let the members be a part of the class they’ll love the experience that much more.

• Ask for feedback. Sometimes we cringe on asking for feedback, thinking it’s going to hurt our feelings. Guess what? We only see ‘our version’ of ourselves. Good or bad, sometimes it is good to receive feedback. That helps us to ‘tweak’ our presence, our teaching. It may help us describe something different or find a new way to motivate others. Don’t want to put people on the spot? What about creating a suggestion box, or handing out papers to your members for people to submit at will? Trust me, you’ll enjoy the positives and you’ll appreciate the quality suggestions.

• Always think about fitness progression. I try to not settle into my teaching. Make every class a bit different and think of new ways to challenge your class and keep them out of those fitness plateaus.

• Keep up with the fitness times. It’s good to keep up with trends (good or bad). We can learn new positive things and we can also be prepared to field questions on the topics that we may not agree with.

I am sure I could add many more but that is a great 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

Keep your workouts challenging, for both you and your body

I teach at a few of the local gyms, which I LOVE by the way!

Sometimes I get into a rut where I find something I love and that’s all I want to do when I am working out (and not teaching). Then, I have to banish myself from doing that again for the next few weeks!

It is easy to do something that we find fun or something our body can handle better.

For instance, I could sit on a spinning bike 6 days a week if you let me. In fact, I used to spin about 5 days a week more than a year ago. Did I lose weight? Sure, to a point … and then guess what? My body learned that song and dance and I hit a plateau. Shocked, aren’t you?

What is easy or fun is not necessarily the key to improving our physical strength.

I have made huge strides in my personal goals lately by just being random with my workouts and my lifestyle.

I have walked the steps at lunch .. up and down the stairs until it was seriously NOT fun.
I’ve added in short, mean high impact workouts.
I take random rest days so my body has no clue when it is getting a real break.
Some days I just walk, slowly.
Occasionally I will walk into the gym and hop on those rotating steps from … ahem .. down under!
Other nights I load in Beachbody’s Insanity Asylum workouts for some evening fun!

My point is this .. we like to do the stuff that is easier for us, funner for us, but sometimes you have to add in a bunch of curve balls to make sure your muscles keep responding and don’t get too used to life. So have a little of both .. the fun stuff and then shuffle in random other workouts.

Throw the cards in the air and make it different each week. Keep it fun and keep it challenging. See if that helps your journey!

Feel free to follow me on social media!

Follow @joschmoblo

Follow @_findingfitness – my blog’s twitter