NZ Glen : BodyCombat fanatic

If you read this blog regularly you may recall that I registered for the BODYPUMP module a couple months ago. I enjoy Pump (Combat however is definitely my passion) and figured it would be a nice additional feather in my cap. I wasn’t too sure if I wanted to teach it, but, figured if a gym needed cover or the opportunity arose it would be a great skill to have. And I still believe all those things…

What I didn’t count of was the actual weekend rolling around so bloody quickly and me being so unprepared! The last few weeks especially have been very hectic for me, two other local combat instructors have been away and I’ve been covering all their classes (plus mine) resulting in, and this isn’t an exaggeration, my teaching 14 combat classes per week – on top of a full time job. I don’t believe in the “I didn’t have time” excuse (we all have the exact same amount of minutes in a day; what you’re really saying is “it wasn’t a priority for me” ) – but, doing all those classes did mean it was very hard to get a Pump class in. In reality I haven’t done a Pump class in probably 6 weeks…

Now, that’s all well and good but if you know anything about the Pump module you’ll know going into 3 intensive days of absolute Pump craziness when your body hasn’t done a pump class in over a month is NOT a good idea! Day three finally finished today and boy – I am in a lot of pain!!!!

As for the module itself, well I’ll make this relatively brief as I have to be on a plane to Perth in a few hours but the weekend rocked. The module was taken by Matt Thraxton (GFM at Les Mills New Lynn and presenter on the BODYPUMP 69 DVD) itself was structured in a very similar way to the combat module – day one we started with a Pump class (funny that) covered a lot of theory and basically spent the entire day in learning mode. Day two we presented our tracks twice (meaning we did two full classes), more theory, plus we did the BODYPUMP Challenge, which I am convinced is just an excuse for the trainer to literally belt the living crap out of us for an hour (was a blast though!). Day three we presented twice again (different tracks), and spent a bit of time covering our respective strengths and weaknesses based on our performance (much like the combat module watching myself on DVD was a bit of an eye opener!)

There were nine of us in the group and the experience range varied widely, from instructors of other programmes (one was an RPM instructor, another a Jam instructor), a few Personal Trainers, to a couple of people who’d literally never stepped foot on a stage. All up as you’d expect the 3 days entailed a boatload of exercise (probably didn’t help myself that I did a combat class on each of the days as well… gotta get the cardio in ya know! – though the other peeps in the module did think I was rather mental for doing that…)

I learnt a tonne and would like to go into it in more detail but I literally have to get some sleep as I have to be up to go to the airport in 4 hours. As such my postings may be rather sparse (read that as non existent) over the next ten days but I promise I’ll bring you right up to speed right after my holiday… I think it’ll take me about that long to recover!