Prior to becoming a Zumba Instructor I was teaching regular old fitness classes, in fact if you’ve been around this blog since the beginning, you might even remember when I went to my first Zumba training. Sadly I can’t link to what I’m sure was an amazing post 😉 since many of my old posts were lost a few years back thanks to some hackers, but the long and short of it is, I had a fitness life before Zumba. After over 3 full years of teaching mostly Zumba, and Zumba specialty classes the initial hype started to wean and last summer I decided it was time to ditch one of my evening Zumba classes and replace it with a more traditional class – enter Body Sculpt.
Body Sculpt was the product of my imagination, but was based loosely on other full body classes that I’d seen around. Essentially, I created a class which consisted of a choreographed warm-up, followed by a song concentrating on legs, then chest, back, triceps, etc. taking participants through a full body workout. I decided to run each class release for 10 classes before changing to a new one which would be in the same format, but with different moves for each body part. I wanted to stick with the same routines long enough for the participants to become proficient with them and to feel an improvement, but to change the routines after 10 weeks to work the muscle group differently and to keep things from getting boring and monotonous.
Anytime you decide to drastically change a class from what they are use to it’s a bit nerve wracking. Sometimes you succeed, other times you fail miserably. Fortunately, this was one of the former. My participant love (to hate) the class, and it is consistently one of (if not the) largest evening class I have these days. Personally I love seeing the changes in my participants from class to class and release to release. It’s for certain one of the most rewarding classes for me as an instructor to teach, I just love it.
Normally on Tuesdays and Thursdays I share with you Zumba videos/choreography, but I need a few weeks to conjure up some new routines for you. In the meantime I thought I would share some Body Sculpt videos. The plan is to pick and choose songs from all of the releases I’ve created so far to put together a full body class for you over the next month or two. Chances are I’ll rotate sharing Body Sculpt videos one week, then Zumba the next as I work on new choreo, but when I’m done you’ll have a full class you can do at home.
This week I’m sharing the two warm-up songs from Body Sculpt 1, and if you like you could really use these for Zumba or Zumba Toning as part of a warm-up without much (any) difficulty.
Now in these warm-up videos I fall back on non-verbal cueing to get the job done (but I verbally cue when teaching in class), but when we get into the actual strength training routines you can be sure I’ll be verbally cueing you. I just wanted to say that for the record. For some reason I find it very weird and awkward to talk at the camera while doing a warm-up or cardio. I think I’m just getting to used to Zumba videos…
I hope you enjoy the Body Sculpt videos as they come out 🙂
Have a great afternoon!
