Sunday, October 05, 2008

2 Classes in One.

We had seriously toyed around with the idea of doing our double class today but family obligations( neices wedding) in the early afternoon made us reconsider. Tracy would have been fine but she also would have had to carry my ass around all day and that just wouldn't look right :)).
Good thing we didn't either as the guest instructor today was fresh from eight years as an instructor at Bikrams College of Yoga in LA as kicked our asses royally. In short order.
Barking out the dialogue so fast he sounded like an auctioneer at a texas steer auction he made us hold each of the poses at LEAST twice as long as usually while giving us five times as many cues and corrections as we usually get.
Needless to say we were working our butts off from the get.
Add in a totally packed room, hotter than usual( class two days ago with another guest instructor was 112 degrees!), NO BREAKS between poses, everything held twice as long and worked twice as hard, by the time the standing series was over I knew I was in trouble.
I had already gone through my first bottle of water and we had two more serious series to go through and he wasn't missing a freakin' beat.
Things turned from performance to survival very quickly for me.I knew I could put it on cruise control and just coast in but I don't like to do that. Better to pass out than wimp out.I trip a lot but I rarely fall so I knew I could do it, it just wasnt going to be ANY fun at all. Oh well , I paid the ticket I might as well get the T shirt.
When we finished 15 minutes early I realized we HAD done two classes. At least two classes worth of work and in record time as well. No one warned us about that. One beat up puppy I am but this will make everything else seem very easy and sedate.
Another thing, it's not tough at all to smoke people. Making people do twice the work in half the time is easy, then deriding them for not being tough enough is degrading.One of the things almost none of the instructors get is that when a workout has very specific instructions for the length of time of each of the poses and then they aren't carried out correctly it makes it almost impossible for each student to really master the postures.
It's like continuing to move the finish line as the racers get close.
Only one of the teachers lately has really got the dialogue down, imho, with solid timing and cueing. Everyone else is just making things harder or easier for no reason.
Its like any other training; want to smoke someone fast? the formula is simple: heavier weights than you can use for higher reps with no rest between sets or exercises.
Pukey will say hi but exactly what doest that say about you as a trainer or a designer of programs? Not much.The"killer" workout is the easiest program in the world to design.It's the proper one with the correct workload for the correct day for the given contextual circumstance that is hard to come up with.
Ok rant over.


datsit. swings tomorrow.

*EDIT*

It turns out I was delusional and that the class actually ran 15 minutes TOO LONG, not short.He really did hold us in the poses for almost double the time,lol! I thought the class ended at 10 and we finished at 9:45. It should have ended at 9:30.When I looked up at the clock and saw 9:30 and thought we had another half hour I thought I was gonna die,lol.
more water next time,lol.

2 comments:

Franz Snideman said...

"Pukey will say hi but exactly what doest that say about you as a trainer or a designer of programs? Not much.The"killer" workout is the easiest program in the world to design.It's the proper one with the correct workload for the correct day for the given contextual circumstance that is hard to come up with."

So true Rif!Mel Siff had a great quote similar to this as well. Pavel (and you) will argue that getting someone strong is much more difficult, especially when intelligence is sprinkled into the recipe!

Mark Reifkind said...

yes I was remembering Dr Siff when I wrote that. too much information is as bad as too little"
wasnt' it einstein who said ' things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler'?

215 x 1, 225 miss x 2, 205 x 1 x 5 , side and rear delts , floor pushups ( deep, paused) 3 x 9

 Didnt sleep well last night and that didn't help. 205 and 215 were strong ( but not fast) and sure enough I didn't have enough spee...