Although I've given up teaching my weekly cardio kickboxing class *sob*, I am trying to make up for it by subbing classes for other instructors whenever possible. This morning, for instance, I subbed a 45 minute "Step Blitz" class (8:15am-9:00am) at the Page Mill YMCA in Palo Alto.
8:15am is kinda early to be teaching a class on a Saturday morning, but I really needed the exercise. It was supposed to be an intermediate class, but I found that most of the participants leaned towards basic/intermediate rather than intermediate/advanced. Before I even started, the first thing one of the participants suggested was "you can make it a 60 minute class!" I took that advice and did indeed teach for an hour. I think that 45 minutes is short for a step aerobics class, because if you consider the warmup/cooldown takes 15 minutes, you're down to 30 minutes of cardio; less if you throw in ab work at the end. Besides, it's hard to teach any fancy combinations because by the time you've managed to break down a couple of 32-count combos, you're basically done.
The class went well for the most part, although I initially had some microphone issues. There's something about this gym: I *always* encounter sound problems there. This week's crisis was annoying feedback from the microphone which reverberated through the speakers which was highly annoying. Fortunately, one of the helpful YMCA staff was able to fix it partway through class. The other minor thing was that a couple of the participants requested that I cue the lead food. Since I teach tapless step, I almost never have to cue the lead leg. I tried explaining this, but they didn't understand what I was talking about. Rather than argue, since I sensed they were getting frustrated, I just cued the lead to avoid further angst. Things went very smoothly after that.
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