Getting trained up for Life Support (CPR) can be time consuming and costly for self employed Group Fitness Instructors. Most training on offer takes a minimum of a full day, some of the training isn’t relevant to GFI’s and the cost is a problem to us if we have to get sessions covered to take a whole day off.

This little blog is about how myself and some GFI colleagues went about getting ourselves trained for a minimum cost, at a time that suited us all and it was fun too!

The first thing we (Liz!) did was find out what our insurance company required in terms of training. Then I looked on Google Maps for a local training company, I found Forerunner Training based in Manchester, got in touch and gave them our requirements:

Life Support Training
Sporting Injuries
Saturday Afternoon
Delivered swiftly
We will rent the Studio at our local leisure club.

Forerunner came back to me with a price to train up to 12 of us in 2 hours. Then I spoke to our lovely GFM, Caron at Village Hyde and she agreed to rent us a Studio for a cheap as chips fee. After I added on the rent of the Studio I could split the total cost between us for less than £25 each.

Next I set a date with Forerunner and started to recruit people. Because I was funding the cost of this myself I had to ensure prompt payment so that I could pay Forerunner 7 days ahead of our training day. Internet banking worked great for this (apart from Zoe and Liz being back in the 20th Century and giving me chqs!).

We did the training today, Carl our Trainer was great, very engaging, entertaining and able to cope with the fact that we were in a Dance Studio, he had his Powerpoint up and running in no time.

Here’s a little video we made:

We all agreed that ‘Another one bites the dust’ is much better than ‘Staying Alive’ in terms of a strong beat to follow, some of us found it hard to do only 30 compressions when we were working to the music – 32 count phrasing is far more natural to us!

In all everyone thought the training good value, in particular the fact that we could do this at a time when none of us would need to pay a cover instructor.

After only a couple of weeks with the Gliders, my class at Hurst are already tackling some challenging stuff.

Here we used the Gliders to add something extra to the plank. The sequence shown here does not include the beginner levels, so if you are new to this then please come to class to lean how to do this safely before you try it at home.

I should point out that we have around 25 people in class but last week only Deborah and Yvonne would agree to be filmed!

A great exercise for strengthening the muscles of the back and increasing spinal mobility.

Filmed at Hurst Pilates, April 21st. I’m *really* pleased with the quality, my new iMac and camera have paid off! I just need to sort out a better place for the camera so that I don’t have Debra and Yvonne’s heads in frame! Oh, and I should spend a little more time on editing. . . .

I’ve been struggling to get my head around Tricep press ups for some time, usually I have a bash at it, it doesn’t feel right and I give up!

Today I have been going through the video files on my old computer, deciding what to keep and what to move to my lovely new iMac. I found this video of Cherry Baker demo’ing the perfect Pilates tricep press up, it’s a teacher training video so you only see a couple of reps but it was enough for me to see where I was going wrong.

I’m looking forward to sharing this with my classes soon, planning to do it in every class, apart from Aqua!