Wednesday Aqua

Woot Woot .... rocked aqua today :)

30 enthusiastic aqua fantastics for class today ( I love 'em, they're gorgeous ladies. An instructor couldn't wish for a better class).

Class format today: Conga circle walk ... that is 3 steps and kick, 3 steps and kick. No-one held anyone else for safety reasons and I seen loads of smiles. The ladies are on to me though, they know circle walks mean a change in direction. The water picks up current really quickly so you MUST keep a really close eye on how much movement the water gets. Today with a large class we walked up to the end of the pool to break the current.

Today there were a couple of new ladies with some health and mobility issues so I got the class to slow right down before the turn around and opposite direction walk. It seemed to work really well, though I still kept my eye on the ones that may potentially struggle.

Included in the warm-up phase were twists and shuffles on the spot. During the introduction I'd asked the ladies to consider whether they were Marchers or Runners ( these classes have different levels and abilities to cater for in the same class). My theory ... marchers are the low impact ladies and runners are the high impact ladies, they get to choose their intensity and can easily swap between. This is the easiest way to teach a multi-leveled large class that I've found yet. It worked for both them and me :)

At this stage I got out of the water so we could shimmy our way up and down. This is a fairly simple move. 1) take a wide step sideways, do 3 single shoulder raises (i.e left right left)  then step legs together. This is a great movement to travel with. For new participants or teaching of new move take it really slow until everyone is getting it then you can speed it up a bit if  aqua fantastics want to, and when more than half have got it suggest a cheeky butt wiggle too, they'll laugh but I did it and I'm sure a few of them did it too. You can't see that well through the water as there's too much movement happening, but everyone moved with me and those that wanted to shimmy did and those that didn't simply didn't. After the shimmy up the pool we did single leg kick front and behind, so marchers did a front heel tap and a back toe tap, where runners did a full front kick and a full back kick. Shimmy down pool and do the same front/ backs on the other leg. I then sent the runners running up the pool and into full shuffles with a tuck jump and the marchers marched up the pool after them for alternating leg front heel tap, back toe tap.

Leaping ladies were next so the marchers took as bigger step as they were comfortable with and breaststroke arms down the pool and when they were nearly there I sent the runners down doing high leaps down after them. Marchers did front heel tap/ back toe tap with the other foot leading this time whilst the runners still had full shuffles to do with the tuck jump :)

Shimmies again to bring down the heart rate a bit as I'd worked them fairly hard and marchers did side toe taps while the runners did full star jumps at the end of the pool. Runners also had 2 Jetstar jumps to do!!

'Locomotion' was playing at this stage so we locomoted our way down the other end for rocking horses, i.e. front knee lift and back leg curl, one of each in a rocking motion back and forth. Ladies love it, great to bring down the heart rate and is an awesome strengthening and flexibility movement.

Runners ran down pool then rolled fists like the disco days while turning side to side, then the marchers followed doing the same movement, runners went forst as they wanted to use more energy so they did the exercise longer while waiting for the marchers to join us.

It was almost finish time but I had one big surprise in store for todays class!! Everyone was in a circle holding hands and I had given them a number, either 1 or 2. The 1's sat on a noodle while the 2's walked in a circle. the 1's had to get their feet off the ground and got towed around. Slow the circle down, all feet down and we passed the noodle to the person on our right ( that's the way we travelled). Now it was time for the 2's to get towed, so feet up and 1's did all of the work.  We did this once more walking to our left this time and the ladies LOVED it. We'll do this again.

This was a new move for the ladies and it didn't take long for them to catch on, and the best part was all abilities felt comfortable doing this. A great cool down exercise. Then we finished with stretching.

Great class today.