How to Get Rid of Muffin Top

You know muffin top, that fluffy bit of tummy that hangs over the top of your waistband. The first time someone asked me how to get rid of it, I was a little to quick on the draw with my response. This was before I worked in the fitness industry. I was going for humor, so I said, "Buy bigger pants." She gave me an evil glare.

These days, I realize that such a question is a great teaching opportunity, and there really is a multi-part response. But first, if you need to get rid of your muffin-top tomorrow, the easiest answer really is in the clothing. It doesn't matter how little body fat one has, if the elastic around the middle is too tight, it's going to create a bulge somewhere. So it really wouldn't hurt to buy some leggings with a more forgiving waist.

That response won't do anything for your

Vintage Slimming Belt

hip-waist ratio, or body-fat percentage, so let's tackle that. First off, hopefully we've all gotten the word that spot reduction doesn't really work. So core exercises like crunches and planks are great for building core strength and stability, but they cannot, all by themselves, get rid of your muffin top.

I am afraid, my friends, that what is required is a solid plan of cardiovascular exercise and solid meal planning. The great part about this is that there is no one right answer as to what specific kind of cardio you have to do. I myself experienced great weight loss results after my first daughter was born from just walking and pushing her in the stroller. As my fitness level improved, and as she was able to take longer naps, I started doing exercise videos at home. Later, when she was able to go to kids' care at the gym, I started running on the treadmill, and that was the beginning of my foray into the fitness world.

If walking, workout videos or running aren't for you, maybe you might like dancing, basketball, soccer, swimming, or any other of a million types of human movement. There's no wrong answer. Just find something that causes you to break a sweat, and that you can tolerate well enough to do fairly consistently for 30-60 minutes most days of the week.

Next up is the food aspect. People have written whole books about food and diet plans. Who am I, but a simple personal trainer and a mother of three who has successfully lost and kept from regaining a decent chunk of weight. I find that the simpler I keep my guidelines, the more likely I am to follow them. Here are a few simple food ideas. (Serious idea props go out to my fitspiration, Jonathan Ross, who wrote the book, "Abs Revealed." you should check it out.)

• Whenever you eat, eat a vegetable. Or at least a fruit. For example, sauté some spinach and onions along with your egg in the morning. Slice a banana into your oatmeal. As pictured below, chop up some spinach, tomatoes and strawberries along with a boiled egg for a simple lunch salad.
• Avoid added refined sweeteners. Let's not make this complicated. I mean things that involved, at some point in the assembly process, adding scoops or cups of sweetness. We could spend a lot of time debating the relative virtues of white sugar, brown sugar, maple syrup, honey, Truvia, Splenda, and a thousand other kinds of sweeteners. Let's not. As a general rule, try to get your sweet fix from things that are naturally sweet without human help, like berries, bananas, and oranges. You get the picture. If you, like many of the people in my extended family, like to put spoonfuls of sugar on your breakfast cereal, it's going to take some time to retrain your taste buds. Be patient.

Every time you eat, eat the vegetables.

• Don't eat anything that came out of a deep fat fryer.
• Don't drink calories. Stick with water, unsweet tea, black coffee (with maybe a little milk). Avoid sodas. Even the diet sodas. I hate to bring this up, but beer, wine and liquor also include the emptiest of all calories, alcohol. The relaxation value of a nightly glass of Malbec may be worth it to you you, but 3-4 glasses is probably not helping anything, health-wise.
• Make your own food when possible. It's not always feasible, but it saves both calories and money.

Realize the bullets above are goals, and you won't always meet them. Understand that there will be days when you'll drink all the beer and eat all the cheesecake. Don't let that one day ruin your overall plan. The next morning, put on your stretchy pants, forgive yourself, and get right back on track.

And also, if you'd like more a more detailed and specific workout plan made just for you, contact a personal trainer. Like me. I work with people both in-person and online.

Now go have an awesome day and crush those goals!

An Ode to Treadmill Running

This is not actually an ode, it’s more of a lament: Lamentations on Treadmill Running.

I can’t think of anything more boring, fitness-wise, than running on a treadmill.

At least if you are on a stationary bike, you’re stable enough to read a magazine.

Back in grad school, I could read my homework while stepping on the elliptical. But the treadmill is just too bouncy.

If you happen to be so blessed as to actually enjoy running for the sake of running, then you would most likely prefer to be outside, where you have the diversion of passing cars, squirrels, other humans, trees, and possibly even the movement of light on water (my very favorite thing to see).

But on a treadmill indoors, well, you have none of these things.

I often feel like a hamster on a freaking wheel while on the treadmill, but I still do it. Partly because of heat, insects, rain, and pollen, but mostly because I am still recovering from a back injury (I had two bulging lumbar disks, one high, one low, one left, one right) that occurred about a year and a half ago, and the treadmill creates less impact on feet, knees, hips and back than any real-world surface. It’s a nice transition from nothing and on my way to building up to dirt, track or gravel. I need to start somewhere.  

I’ve been doing all the other kinds of cardio I can think of, just not running. The omission of this cardio category is starting to bother me. I have the suspicion that I am letting fear control me, so I want to get over that hurdle and move forward. 

There are some tricks that I use to make treadmills more bearable, and some tricks that gyms can use to make them more usable. I will start with the gyms. So like, if you are gym shopping, or opening your own gym, these are things to think about.

What gyms can do to make it better

As a gym user, none of these things are in your control, but when you are setting up a home gym or choosing a gym, it’s something to think about. Alternately, if you are a Negative Nancy, I have now armed you with a whole list of complaints for your gym. You’re welcome.

Gyms can arrange the treadmills for maximal entertainment value. 

I do not mean putting the treadmills in front of a big wall of TVs. Who cares. The last thing in the world I want to do is watch more HGTV or FOX News. I want to be able to watch people while I work out. I mean, it would be nice if we could manage to bring in some Chippendale’s dancers to do their daily strength training workout, but really any normal people doing normal things are fine.  

The best setup I’ve seen is cardio equipment on a second-floor deck overlooking a first-floor weight room. You could feel like the hawk-eye observer watching people down below (Not at all creepy). Another great setup is cardio overlooking the outdoor pool. We stayed in a hotel in Las Vegas one time with this setup and a group of badly behaved Kardashian wannabes showed up during my workout for three consecutive days. I didn’t want to leave when my time was up.

Conversely, it is the worst when gyms put a treadmill right in front of a wall. You are already doing the most boring fitness thing imaginable. Now let’s put you in front of a plain white wall while you do it. Or maybe a crooked motivational poster that says something about flying with eagles. Hmm, I’m on a treadmill. At least give me a poster of the African savannah so I can pretend I’m a lion chasing zebras or something.

Gyms can have great music. 

Unfortunately, “great music” is really going to vary depending on who you talk to, so what I mean by this is music that I personally like. And that is going to be music you hate if you aren’t into 80’s pop and breakup songs. (Maybe plan your own playlists for treadmill runs).

Gyms can invest in treadmills that quickly adjust speeds. 

Some treadmills have quick-set buttons that allow you to bump up from, say 4mph to 6, 7 or 8mph by touching a single button. The one I used today required bumping up a tenth of a mile-per-hour at a time, which is ok if you are just going to warm up and then hit a steady pace for the freaking run, but not so great if you want to do sprints. Because if you are going to sprint for 30 seconds at your all-out pace, the last thing in the world you want to do is take an extra 15 seconds trying to bump down a tenth of a mile at a time. You could literally die in the process. I realize I could step on the side rails while I dial it down. But that feels like quitting.

Things that I personally do to make my treadmill experience less hideous:

I bring my music. 

I really need a compelling playlist. I love Spotify for this reason. There are so many running playlists available. It’s fun finding new things. There are two challenges here. One is that if you don’t have access to Wifi where you will be treadmilling, you will need to download your playlist, which means you will need to pay for Spotify, and that is a bummer because we all love free stuff. But maybe you have Wifi in your gym. Yay for you! 

The next challenge for me (probably not you) is that I still don’t really have Bluetooth headphones—well, I do technically own them, but they are almost never charged, so I am still using corded headphones. And once I get going in my run, there is an 85% chance I will catch a cord in one of my hands and yank it out of my ear, probably sending it flying into the person next to me.

I do Sprints! Just like in spin class, sprints interrupt the hellish monotony of the treadmill workout. I’ll do about six minutes at a good 5k pace, then back off, walk for a minute, do another six minutes at a 5k pace, back off, walk, and then do some flat out sprints for a while. For me, sprints are actually really fun. I wish I could do more of them without wanting to vomit.

I climb fake hills! Just like the sprints, the hills break up the monotony. After I get really tired/nauseated from the sprints, I am typically too tired to come back up to my 5k pace for a while, so I pick up the treadmill incline and do a slower-speed uphill walk or jog. I am still recovering from the injury, so I have nothing to prove, just happy to be moving at all.

Big Finish! It’s a thing I do to entertain myself, that I like to finish strong. So I have it in my head that I am always going to sprint across the imaginary finish line (let’s say I have chosen to run 5k that day). So maybe I have like a half mile left. For some moronic reason, I forget how long a half mile really is, and I think I can run flat out for a whole half mile. LOLS. So I run like 0.2 miles and nearly die, and then I have to spend the next 0.1 mile clicking down the speed on the ridiculously slow torture controller on my gym’s treadmill. By then I’m down to like, 0.2 miles remaining. And by the time I’m not gasping for breath anymore, I have about 0.1 mile left and I realize that I have just enough time to actually sprint across the finish line, so I click it all the way back up again, and about the time the treadmill almost gets to a decent running pace (but not my sprint pace), the little computer brain inside the treadmill recognizes the fact that I have completed my goal distance and decides to shut me down. Game over.  Anticlimactic end. But oh well, like I said, I have nothing to prove, and any kind of moving is better than no moving.

As I reach the end of this post, as at the end of this day, I really am just thankful for the health that I have, for the fitness level that I have, and for the ability to keep on moving every day. Even though life presents its challenges, I always appreciate the opportunity to keep on growing!

My spin cycle journey

If you work in a gym, or go to a gym, you probably know there are like 95 spin classes every day. If you don't, you might be wondering what spin is.

Spin is indoor cycling, in case you have lived in a closet or studiously avoided all semblance of athletics for the past 30 years. Spin bikes are stationary bikes with a dial that ratchets up resistance, just like an outdoor bike going into higher gears up a hill. My 87 year-old mom might ask, "Why don't you just ride your bike outside?"

Well, lots of reasons. First, I like to check out the other humans in the class. There are some attractive people in spin classes. I also enjoy group exercise, because I tend to get more carried away when I work out with others. We also have thumping music in spin class, so you can sing along and shoulder-dance (if you have the cardio capacity to spare). And you burn a whole heck of a lot of calories.

I also think that most gyms design their spin rooms to be little hot boxes that cause people to sweat off about 30 lbs per class, so we feel like we've really done something when we leave. The dudes usually leave sweat puddles under their bikes. I'm not that efficient at sweating, so don't puddle up like that. (By the way, dudes, mop up your sweat puddles with the antiseptic spray and wipes. We like a spin room that doesn't smell like sweat bacteria).

Anyhow, I teach yoga and some cardio classes at a couple of gyms, and I have asked my mentors what certifications I should add to my repertoire. "We always need spin," They told me. So I signed up for a spin certification in August. Now my goal is to take as many classes as I can manage between now and then so I don't die in the training. There will be two master classes in one day, and one spin class is pretty intense.

The first class I took, the instructor helped me adjust my bike, but he got my seat so high that the seat was way jammed up in my rear for all but the standing segments of class. By the way, in my mother's generation, the technical term for rear end is "hoo-ha." I just thought I'd mention it, since I already brought up my mom. Anyway, by about 20 minutes into class, my hoo-ha had totally lost all circulation. let me tell you, that's an interesting sensation when the feeling starts to come back. Ahem.

Anyway, that class was pretty good, and my spin journey continued. Took a few more classes and decided to invest in some spin shoes. If you don't know, spin shoes have hard soles to distribute the pressure through your whole foot, so it's not just the ball of your foot that hurts by the end of class, but the whole thing. They also have cleats on the bottom that attach to the bike. This allows you to make your muscles work harder on both the down stroke and the upstroke so that you can hurt twice as bad by the end of class--I mean, so that you can get a more efficient workout and burn more calories! Except no one in North America will sell you bike shoes with the cleats already attached. You have to buy them separately and attach them yourself.

This is one of those little things that really separates people who have been engaged in an activity forever from the newbies. Kind of like trying to sew the ribbons on pointe shoes or put on football pads. Some people just seem to be born with this knowledge, and then there's the rest of us. Of course there are YouTube videos, but to complicate matters, there are two types of cleats (Delta and SPD), so you have to make sure you get the right type of shoe for your what the bike has.

I am an introvert, so of course I hate asking people for help. I consult the Internet when I have questions. So I bought my shoes from Zappos. The description and the reviews said they were compatible with either type of cleat. Long story short, they lied. It took me about two hours, lots of YouTube, 6 shots of tequila and a few broken widgets to realize the shoe and the cleats and the bike would never ride together. But it's all right. Zappos does free shipping both ways.

The Bontrager Women's Mountain Shoe

I finally went to an actual bike shop, talked to an actual person, and bought some in-person shoes. I have a picture here of the shoe I finally bought. These are more boring than the original ones I had to send back. But that's life. Sometimes you end up with the boring shoe that actually works.

For the trial run of getting the shoes to clip into the pedals, my husband chose the early morning time of 8am, when I had a 9:15am class. At this time, I will try not to frighten you with mental imagery, but I had just gotten out of bed and was still in my pajamas. Not athletically attired. Our home spin bike (a cast-off from my gym, and a little rusty in the pedals due years of the aforementioned sweat puddles) was still on his setting, so it was super tall. So there I am, PJs, seat too high, no resistance on the gear, no idea what I'm doing, trying to chase the pedals, look at my feet, and, strictly by force of will, ask the cleats to snap in.

If you are having a hard time imagining how all this might work, then you are in exactly the same mental place I was. Tired. Mostly asleep. Really uncomfortable on an improperly set-up bike, and randomly wiggling my feet around, expecting some kind of "Wingardium Leviosa" thing to happen. It did not. What did happen was that my back started to spasm from being on a too-high bike seat and leaning too far forward over the handles, while having bad form and trying to look at my feet.

I never got my feet clipped in, by my back was jacked up for three days. I haven't had a chance to come back and play with the shoes and cleats again, but I have had the opportunity to watch some more YouTube videos*--and even talk to a person. The two bits of advice I have heard are, try WD-40 on the clips, and set the resistance on the bike as high as I can so I'm not just chasing the bike pedal around.

Meanwhile, I just wait for my back to recover. My first pair of shoes are safely back at Zappos now. And if all this takes long enough, I may even break down and ask one of my spin instructor friends for gasp actual help!

To sum this whole experience up in one small nugget of advice to anyone trying to decide on first-time spin shoes: Call a few nice bike shops in your town. Tell them where you take spin classes. Ask them if they can sell you both the shoes and the cleats, and extra-special bonus points if they can install the cleats for you. If they can, you have a winner. Go there straight away. Once you get your new shoes, don't be like me. Just ask your instructor for help from the beginning. They will be happy to help you, unless if they are total jerks, and if they are jerks, one wonders why you are taking their class to begin with 🤔.

Update: I tried the new shoes in spin class today. I was able to clip in left foot no problem, but the right wouldn't go. I did ask the instructor for help (yes, way!). All I needed to do was push my heel down harder and ta-da. I told her (Jesse Harris) that she was magical. The shoes did make the workout feel more efficient. I still wish I weren't the only one who sings and shouder-dances during my spin classes. I feel so weird and alone grooving by myself there in the back row. 

* Notes: This YouTube video was actually quite helpful in attaching the cleats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLSxmaQeEIM

And this one was pretty helpful in figuring out how to actually clip in, and also pretty entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTdHBUDgI_4

Depression, weight loss, weight gain

I find it interesting and rather frustrating that when our little animal bodies go through times of stress, we release a hormone called cortisol, which (among many other things) makes us want to eat carbs[1]. Another thing cortisol does is increase our body’s tendency to store fat in our abdominal area. To put it in layman’s terms, when you get stressed out, you want to eat a whole bag of cookies and it all goes straight to your belly and/or thighs and butt. You probably already know that.

If we stay stressed for long enough without properly chilling out, cortisol has even worse effects on our systems. Eventually, chronic stress will take a negative toll on the digestive tract. Where once we craved the whole bag of cookies, eventually, it will become difficult to eat anything, and digestion and absorption become compromised. You probably already know this, too. At least once in your life, you may have sat down to dinner with a date who decided to start a fight as soon as the entrees arrived. The waiter sets the once-beautiful lobster/steak/pasta in front of you, now rendered totally inedible by argument. If not, consider yourself blessed. 

Once we reach this phase of stress, we may begin to drop some stress-related weight. I’ve been doing this for a few months now. My weight loss is still under 10 pounds, but I am a generally fit person not trying to lose a lot of weight, so it’s a little frustrating to me. Also annoying is the fact that cortisol doesn’t release its hold on abdominal fat just because it won’t let you eat. The net result is that I am dropping weight from around my already scrawny lower-legs and upper chest, while my belly and butt hold onto it tightly.

If I were to continually repeat this stress cycle over the course of my life, I imagine that I would eventually end up looking like a potato propped up on toothpicks. 

I searched the Internet for a plan to combat the potato-toothpick outcome, and I could find nothing specific. Most of the Internet’s advice was geared toward managing the symptoms of depression (see a professional therapist) and keeping down weight gain (get exercise). All good advice, but it didn’t really address the stress-related weight-loss issue. 

So as a personal trainer and group fitness instructor, I will offer my personal plan of attack to manage this moment that I’m going through, just in case it helps anyone else: 

·     Unwind at the gym. Make sure your exercise includes a mind-body/stress management element like Yoga or Tai-Chi. 

• ·     Focus on moderate-intensity exercise. High intensity exercise is fun, but it adds stress to the body, and releases more cortisol into the blood.
• ·     Take group classes. It’s good to be in a group with other people, especially when you are feeling down, and even when you don’t really feel like it.
• ·     Lift weights. Weight lifting will help build or maintain muscle mass to keep the body from cannibalizing its own muscle mass if you aren’t eating properly. In my personal anecdotal experience, moving weight is also an excellent appetite stimulant. Again, don’t go crazy. Focus on moderate weight and increase gently over time to avoid injury, and adding additional stress and cortisol.
• ·     Make your meals a sanctuary. Allow yourself a half-hour of quiet, stress free time for each meal. If that means you need to eat alone and lock yourself in a storage closet with a candle and Spotify’s Deep Sleep Playlist, do it. You deserve time to digest without conflict.
• ·     Plan easily digestible meals. I am a huge fan of smoothies, because I feel like the cold, semi-liquid ingredients can slide in between the most stressed-out intestines. However, commercially prepared ones can be loaded with sugars and low in nutritional quality. Half a banana, a milk of choice, and a scoop of protein powder tossed together with a few ice cubes in a blender will keep you moving for a few more hours. Add avocado for some healthy fats, greens if your tummy can tolerate them, maybe a beet if you are feeling wild and crazy. Following is a link to some clean-eating smoothie ideas. All very simple and low-sugar: https://www.fitnessmagazine.com/recipes/drink/smoothie/clean-eating-smoothie-recipes/
• ·     Plan easily made meals. If you are already dealing with depression and stress, you know you aren’t actually going to cook the five-course meal, no matter how great it looked on the Food Network. Keep the meal plans simple, and there’s a greater chance you’ll make the food. You can toss a family pack of chicken thighs in the slow cooker with salt and pepper on Sunday, and do absolutely nothing else to it for 5 hours, and you’ll have proteins for the week. Buy few types of vegetables (broccoli, potatoes, sweet potatoes) that you can microwave or roast to go along with it, and that’s dinner in a few minutes all week long. I pull a lot of meal plans from Eatingwell.com http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/21148/seasonal/spring/dinner/quick-easy/. I like how they organize them so that breakfast, lunch and dinner use many of the same ingredients, which is efficient and economical, and none of their meals take terribly long to make. 

My final piece of advice for managing depression and weight loss and gain? Don't feel like you have to keep it a big secret. You don't need to tell everyone all the details of what you are going through, but you can tell your friends that you are having a rough time, and let them know what you need. Like, "Hey, friends, I am really stressed out, and it would help me if you would come to yoga with me to give me some motivation to get there."

Meanwhile, if anyone would like to come to yoga with me, I teach like 5 times a week, so just ask, and I'll tell you where I am. And we can just breathe together.

Namaste, friends!

---

[1]Dina Aronson, MS, RD, Today’s Dietitian 
Vol. 11 No. 11 P. 38, Cortisol — Its Role in Stress, Inflammation, and Indications for Diet Therapy

http://www.todaysdietitian.com/newarchives/111609p38.shtml

See you at the Barre!

For the past two months, I have been working towards my certification as a BarreBody instructor. Sometimes when I write that, people misread it as bare. No one is actually bare, or even scantily clad, during this class. Sorry to disappoint.

BarreBody is based on ballet, Pilates and Yoga principles. We use modern pop music and some movements that you might remember from ballet class (tendus, plies, releves) but with an emphasis on safety and technique.

In a regular ballet class, students normally warm up at the barre, then progress to work in the center, and finally practice their turns, leaps and choreography. In Barre class, we dispense with the leaps, turns and choreography. Instead, we add in more strength and conditioning work.

The focus is always on technique, form, and injury prevention. I think of it as training people for life (good posture, the correct way to bend and pick things up off the floor, how to keep your knees, hips, shoulders and neck happy for a functional life) rather than training them to be dancers.

When my gym owner asked if I would substitute for the current teacher of the class, I had not been taking the Barre class very long. Although I have extensive dance experience, it had been about 12 years since I had taken ballet with regularity. I have been swing dancing in the meantime.

While teaching swing dance, I have frequently wanted to find a way to teach an ongoing “Conditioning for Dancers” class that would focus on these very same principles barre does. I see things in my dance class that I want to work on, like crooked posture and misalignment—or sometimes people ask me about preventing knee pain. Barre addresses all these issues and works on developing the core strength that is essential to any kind of dance, and to life in general.

In the course of the two months that I have been preparing to teach this class, I have practiced my one-hour segment what seems like a million times. I have physically done the exercises, counted along with the music while I am driving (even saying the cues and calling out, “Up, Up, Up!”). My body has experienced an extreme dose of barre over the past eight weeks. 

These are the changes I have seen in my own body:

1) Balance. Although my static (standing still) balance has always been pretty good, it is much better now. I have no problem holding a pose, even on one foot, while other limbs are moving about. Since I practice without holding on to a barre (so that I can stand in different parts of the room) I don’t need to hold onto anything for balance anymore.

2) Inner thighs. In the past, I have used adductor machines at the gym to tone my inner thighs, and what I’ve gotten is chunky inner thighs that rub together when I walk. Not what I was looking for. After eight weeks of intense barre, I can feel clearly defined adductor (inner thigh) muscles. They don’t take up any more space; I can just feel them under my skin.

3) Seat. I feel like everything around my butt feels better and stronger. I have, in the past, experienced some hip pain, especially in my right leg. This is particularly bad after I sit for a long time, like in meetings, movies, or in the car. My hips have felt a lot better in the past eight weeks.

4) Piriformis. The piriformis is a muscle under your glutes that rotates your femur outward. My right piriformis has always been super-tight, which has translated into rotating my right foot outward even when I don’t want to. That has caused some knee pain, and it’s also a factor in the hip pain I mentioned before. Because one of my cues in barre is, “Check and make sure all 10 toes are pointed forward,” I have consistently checked that misalignment several times during each workout. As a result, I am also more aware of that alignment when I do other activities, like squats, walking and running. Overall, this has helped balance out left and right sides, and I feel like the muscles that work against the piriformis have grown stronger as a result.

5) Neck. As a result of cueing, “Shoulders out of your neck/shoulder blades down and back,” my always-troubled neck is really feeling pretty good here lately.

Barre is not the only workout I do. Wednesdays are my hard workout day, where I run on the treadmill and lift. That day, I try to run as fast as I personally can, slowly building up my endurance at a faster (for me) speed. I am up to a mile and a half now. I also changed my lifting methodology. Since barre focuses on low weights and endless reps, I use my Wednesdays to lift weights heavy enough that I can only do one set of five with good form. On Wednesday nights, I am always exhausted, and I sleep wonderfully well.  As a result of the heavy lifting, I can now do real pull-ups, which I never could do before. I am pretty excited about that!

I look forward to teaching Barre regularly now. I am excited about getting to know my students and choreographing new routines. I really think this program is a balanced workout that can improve quality of life and functionality, as well as aesthetics, for a wide range of people (especially dancers!)

I will be teaching at FLY Fitness, 501 William St, Fredericksburg, VA 22904. Mondays at 9am, Tuesdays at 6:30pm, Fridays at 9:30am and Saturdays at 10:30am. http://www.flyfitnessinspiration.com 

                                                     

The things I love in Group Fitness Instructors

I went through a period of about 10 years, maybe longer, when I refused to take a group fitness class. I enjoyed running, lifting, and using the cardio machines, but I thought I did not like classes. This was back in the day when old-school aerobics was really popular, and I always felt like I was the one person going the wrong way when everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. I took one yoga class and I thought I hated it, because this particular teacher liked to do a lot of partner work, which was really not my bag at the time.

When I belonged to the Gold’s Gym in Warrenton, VA, one of the trainers suggested I try the group classes, since they were free with membership. I found that I really did enjoy yoga (it all depends on the teacher) and I loved Zumba. In fact, I loved it so much that I decided I wanted to learn how to Salsa for real, which started my social-dancing history and my launched my fitness education path.

I don’t really enjoy Zumba anymore—the reasons don’t really matter, but I think it has a lot to do with teachers. However, I have taken and taught a lot of group exercise classes in the past 20 years or so. Recently, I have been exploring with some new teachers and methodologies, which started me thinking about the things I like and the things that really turn me off in group fitness instructors. Trying to focus on the positive, I will share the things I love.

Things I love:

1) When teachers make an effort to get to know students’ names. I appreciate teachers who ask you to wear nametags, or look at the class sign-in sheet and attempt to use each student’s name. This is especially helpful when making corrections: “Valerie, be sure to keep your spine straight up and down.”

2) When teachers spend the minutes before class conversing with students.

3) When teachers offer up-and-down modifications of exercises, so that beginner and advanced students can get a good workout in the same class.

4) When teachers allow themselves to stop talking for a few minutes during the course of the class. For me, this allows me to focus on the work and the music.

5) When teachers change their classes often—whether it’s changing out one or two songs and exercises or completely revamping the class from month to month. I enjoy learning new things and challenging myself with the same teacher.

6) When teachers ask permission before making hands-on adjustments. I would prefer that teachers not physically move me at all. I always prefer verbal/visual cues, but if that fails and it’s something really important that could cause injury, they could at least ask, “May I touch you,” or put their hand in the place where they want your foot/arm/shoulder to be, and ask you to move yourself to that spot, instead of trying to move you.

7) When teachers are knowledgeable. They should be able to explain why you shouldn’t lock out your knees on the upward phase of a squat, for example.

8) When teachers don’t assume that you are a brand-new beginner just because they have never seen you in their class before. They also should not assume that you are an expert. I love it when they ask, or wait to see what you can do.

9) When teachers make eye contact with students, or at the very least, watch the students during the class. I have heard teachers, with their faces turned toward the wall, say “that looks great!” (psst, hey, you can’t see us!)

10) Teachers who come to class prepared. They know what they are going to teach, have a play list ready, and know what tools the students will need. 

As I continue to grow as a teacher, I will make it a conscious goal to incorporate these strategies into my personal teaching style.