Monday Aqua

Today is the last day of filling in for amazing boss lady as she is due home from China tomorrow. School swimming terms start next week when school goes back here and it's life back to normal ?? if there is such a thing.

Today we had 28 lovelies turn up for aqua so I made it a circuit class using water dumbbells, noodles and just body movements. To begin we had a warm-up that progressed into a great cardio workout for 15 mins that included some travelling up the pool and knee repeaters, down the pool for other leg knee repeaters. Up the pool with high side steps for scoopy arms and high side steps down for scoopy arms ( with white water :)). Up the pool lady leaps (front high steps) and leg curls and then the same down the pool.

After we'd run through this I broke the ladies up into 3 groups - weights for 10 swing arms, 10 bicep curls, noodles for scissor legs and knee tuck and side leg extension, movement for twists across the pool.  The second round - weights for 10 tricep kickbacks, 10 swing arm ankle touch, noodles same as first round, movement for side steps across pool. 20 mins total.

Back into group format and lady leaps down pool for knee repeaters, leg curls and rocking horses, lady leaps up pool for same thing other leg, high side steps down pool for scoopy arms and white water, walk up pool for stretches. 10 mins.

It was a good class today, I feel I got a really good mix of exercises for the whole class and snuck in their core work (abdominals). The problem I have with a large class is that core work is done on the noodles and we don't have enough for this sized class at the mo, so a bit of lateral thinking was called for. I also found that 3 groups is WAY better for me to teach in circuit format than the normal 4 groups. I will stick to this in future - it worked.

Have an amazing day :)
Cath.

Friday Aqua

Well I survived Friday :))

It started with an early bird class at a retirement village that Amazing Boss Lady usually does, however she is enjoying an exotic holiday in China this week (lucky isn't she ), so I kept the class lite and easy-ish.

Class 1 done for Friday, then scoot quickly to the other side of town to set up for the 11am aqua class, teach swimming to littlies until 11am, jump out of one little, warm pool, press play on cd player and jump in big pool to teach 2nd aqua class of the day.

I'll admit I was a bit nervous waking up on Friday morning as i'd never A) taught 2 classes in one day, B) combined swim teaching with aqua immediatly after (can't run late with either), C) taken a super lite class.

Anyhoos I did it and lived to tell the tale!!!! YAY WOOT WOOT 

The rest of the weekend was a combo of busy-ish work and gardening.....I had a great weekend to top off a great week.

Next time amazing boss lady goes out of town I won't be so nervous about teaching her classes :)

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.

Life Changes

Well since I last blogged all sorts of things have happened in my life.

The biggest is that I qualified as a group and aqua fitness instructor, AND, I picked up an awesome job teaching aqua aerobics to the loveliest bunch of ladies in a small swim centre where I also teach the young 'uns how to swim.

If someone told me 12 months ago that this is where I would be now ..... well lets just say my answer could have resembled  #!!*#> 

Not for a moment would I have imagined that I would be confident enough to teach a class, let alone one with 25+ ladies in it, and love teaching it so much.

Finally I've found a job where I can talk til I'm hoarse, use up some XSNRG and still come home and go for a jog and gym session.

Don't get me wrong though, this life change was one of the hardest things I've ever done! It was scary and confronting, many times I felt like I was in melt down mode. I hadn't simply stepped out of my comfy zone, I'd launched out of it. I had no comfy zone left, so it was sink or swim. Sinking wasn't an option so I just plodded on through one step at a time and when it all seemed to much I just tried to remember that it wasn't rocket science.

So in the end I just pulled up my big girl panties and flew by the seat of my pants, no plans. Best thing I've done in a very long time :)

So if you ever want something in life, and you've thought it through and scared yourself off, we've all been there, but sometimes you just have to fly by the seat of your pants and have no plan, just a very basic direction may help.

Routeburn Track, NZ Day 1

The Routeburn is a gorgeous track that I highly recommend if you want a do-able and beautiful experience. If you're into extreme then I guess you could run it but we were happy to take the slow road up, down and round about.

Ready to start from the Glenorchy end of the track.
 

 

5 mins into the walk and we were in love with the place!!

One of the MANY swing bridges that we crossed...one of us loved these and the other hated them

We climbed higher and higher

The scenery was truly breathtaking, the water was turquoise...gorgeous.
 

So day 1, we travelled from Queenstown to the Glenorchy end of the Routeburn, which is located in the Mt Aspiring National Park in New Zealand, and we walked up to the Routeburn Falls Hut which is ironically close to the Routeburn Falls...go figure! We walked past the Routeburn Flats hut which was about 3 hours walk in and from there it's a fairly stiff climb upto the Routeburn Falls Hut located a couple of k's away. We thought, pah...easy-ish walk. Oh HELL NO !! I personally LOVE walking but I'd had about enough by the time we seen the hut through the trees. I let out a squeal of delight when I saw the hut..truly a sight for tired legs.

One thing I learnt quickly on day 1 was that one walkers idea of not far is my idea of far. Every person we'd meet going in the opposite direction would ask - a) how far to their exit (our entrance) and b) tell us that the hut wasn't far.

Not far meant 3 hours still.

We had a few stops along the way and had pre-agreed to take our time and enjoy the journey...which we did. Hence the track notes had a walking time of 3-4 hours for this leg of the journey and we took 5-6 hours.

The first non-swing bridge and Miss 16 loved it

Lunch time, this was the only part of the track that looked like this, the rest was all rainforest or ferns.

OMG guess what that is between the trees...YIP the Routeburn Falls Hut.



This was the uber comfy bunk bed inside the sleeping quaters. We loved these beds.
 

2 Glorious Weeks In N.Z.

I was stocked !! In January 2012 I ran away to N.Z. with Miss 16 to go hike 'n' bike for 2 weeks.

We had a FAT time !!

This is the view from the plane going across from Brisbane to Christchurch. This is sunset as we had an evening flight. The sunset was incredible and to say I felt like a kid in a candy store is a HUGE understatement. I snapped away mid flight but really the orange horison line was more burgundy, it was the best sunset I've seen yet.

NEVER EVER SELF PORTRAIT (guess who took the photo)

We slept-ish in Christchurh airport as we only had 6 hours between landing and getting picked up by bus, it just happened to be between the hours of 1:30am and 7:30 am. Sleeping wasn't really possible as we were so cold and an airport floor isn't really the most comfortable. At 4:30am security came around and woke everyone up so the cleaners could vacuum (we were part of about 60 people staying in the airport that night), so we moved across to the departures terminal where, much to our delight, it was heated with lots of food (and noise) so we wandered around for a couple of hours enjoying the warmth before heading to the cold, windy bus-stop.

We went up to Queenstown on the Newmans Coach Service which we booked online and were easy to deal with. The driver was fantastic and the bus had a pick-up in Christchurch city also so we drove around in a large circle to avoid the city centre, which is still closed due to their devastating earthquake, and arrived at the pick-up point. It was sad to see all of the earthquake damage, it must have been a terrible event.

Anyhoos, after leaving Christchurch we stopped in a town called Geraldine, and holy cow it was cold!! Pretty but freakin cold. We were glad it was only a 10 min quick stop then we went up non-stop to Lake Tekapo for lunch.

See how good a photo can be when one DOESN"T self-portrait.

This place is seriously amazing. The colours of the lake were a quilters/painters dream. There isn't much here that we could see except the lake and some accomodation, oh yeah, acres of lupin flowers.

These flowers were gorgeous,

From here we then headed up to Queenstown but I'll blog that next time.

Shh...

I'm sneeking onto the computer instead of doing housework so don't tell ANYONE or else it'll be back to the salt mine for me.

Finished day 1 workout (on day 3 but that's due to international time delay and life being busy with farm duties on day 2 when the workout came through)

THESE ARE NOT MY EXERCISES, I TAKE NO CREDIT FOR THEM. CLICK ON THIS LINK TO ACCESS THEM http://www.sixpackfactory.com/

I'm keeping score of the exercise repititions so I can see any improvements:

Day 1 - weight training, all exercises are performed for 5 rounds of  30 secs exercising & 30 secs rest.

After warm up:

Double arm snatch 13 12 12 12 12

Renegade rows + close grip push-up 5.5 5 4 4 5

Squat & press ups 10 12 12 13 13

Inch worm + wide push up 5 4 4 4 4

Reverse lunge + bicep curl 14 15 16 16 16

Gorilla swings 40 42 44 44 44