As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a long weekend in Ocean City Maryland last weekend for an AFPA conference. To say that the experience has renewed my passion for fitness would be an understatement (as anyone who asked how it went can readily attest). The conference consisted of 10 roughly two hour sessions over a two day period. At any given time frame, there were about 10 different "classes" being taught, and attendees could choose which classes they wanted to take. There were specific "tracks" such as nutrition, group fitness, personal training, yoga, and many others, but we could attend any class we wanted in any track. And so I did. If you are interested in exhaustive details about what I was taught, keep reading. If not...tune in again next time (I promise you won't hurt my feelings).
My first class was "10 mistakes personal trainers make". Fantastic lecture, and it made me think a lot about my situation teaching at Alpha as well as Alpha as a business. The number one mistake cited was not following through on promises, and hopefully I don't make that mistake very often. Another one was "don't be "friends" with your clients". Oops...I will be the first to admit that I fail MISERABLY at that. I love my kickboxing students, and am good friends with many of them, but I think I do a pretty good job of separating the business side from the friendship side. This situation may come back to haunt me some day, but for the foreseeable future, I love teaching kickboxing, and I have great friends who I teach, so both sides of the equation will just have to continue to coexist until someone says "I told you so".
Another class I took taught about ways to avoid burnout. This was geared more towards preventing burnout as a trainer, but I was also interested in what might be said about avoiding burnout as someone trying to stay in shape, because Lord knows we've all been there at some time in our lives, and I'm no exception. The gist of what I learned was....make time for yourself to do things completely unrelated to your job, and you have to take the initiative to find ways to liven up what you're doing and keep it fresh. Easier said than done sometimes, but certainly good advice.
I took a class on bodyweight training. This was a fantastic workshop, and I learned many new exercises I hope to incorporate into classes in the future. Most of the exercises weren't ones that you'll do a few reps and fail, but they contained movement in multiple plains and were very efficient at working multiple muscle groups simultaneously. The same instructor also taught the bootcamp design class I took, which also gave me some great ideas for upcoming workouts.
Two other classes I took were a kickboxing class and an "Athletica" class, which was kind of a weight training class in an aerobic group setting. These classes were really good at showing alternative group workout methods, and really hammered home to me what a difference a good instructor can make on the class. Our instructor had only been doing these classes about 5 years, but he was very smooth and transitioned seamlessly between exercises. Very little downtime. And he pretty much did the entire workout with us as he talked and instructed. To say he was shredded would be an understatement. I do not teach my kickboxing classes as an aerobics class, but some of the concepts were very useful and I'm already using them in my own classes.
I also took some classes that went into detail about core training, and a class on "animal movements" (since I also teach 3-5 year olds, this sounded like a great class to get some ideas).
All in all, I learned a ton this weekend and took a lot of notes. I have a lot of sorting out to do and a lot of links to look up to get my thoughts in line, but I'm really excited about some of the things I'll be adding to classes. One thing I took note of was just how the instructors worked their classes, such as how they motivated and instructed everyone, and how their music fit into their class. When all the elements came together, the class dynamic really was stunning and made everyone seem to come together. I loved that energy and am going to work on bringing it to my classes every time I teach. I definitely have the right group of people in class to make that happen.
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