Finding our voice: Creating an excellent course takes time

On the long train journey back from our first Level 1 course weekend this year, we had many hours to reflect.

We are always nervous before the courses - will we be able to deliver on our promises? Will the group dynamics work? Will everyone come away feeling like they've learned a lot and feeling inspired, rather than overwhelmed at the huge amount of information covered?

This was our 9th time running the course. It's a very different course now. We've had to rethink a lot of the assumptions we started with.

Andrew's background was in Crossfit and teaching Personal Training courses - the content for these is extremely dense with little practical time spent teaching.

His boss used to say, "teach what is needed for the test and not what is fun to teach." Which says it all, really.

There was no impetus for students to really understand how the body worked in real life or why someone might be struggling, as the test was multiple choice. And so, he taught one-week courses with hours and hours of classroom PowerPoint time, to 20% time in the gym figuring stuff out.

For me, I didn't feel that I had the expertise to have a voice in the course development. Teaching has never been my strong point, and I don't have Andrew's 20 years of experience in sports science.

It's taken us the best part of three years to finally step completely away from the lecture format of teaching.

This time, we unpicked everything and asked: What are we trying to do here?

Each module now starts with a practical session. Students take time working out how different movements work, how they look & feel on different bodies, and what the limitations might be.

We mix in a variety of prescriptive teaching (this is how you do a movement) with emergent teaching (while that is one way, play around and see if you can find others and why they might be a better or worse fit).

The former is usually carried out via peer-to-peer coaching, and the latter tends to be via role-playing scenarios (you're a dragon master with two very special eggs that need collecting, or you have a stinky dog that needs picking up and moving) or through games.

What emerged was a really engaging two days that led to tangential conversations around confidence with movement, deeply personal stories about relationships with exercise, mental health, and what it means to flourish in our world.

It suddenly feels like we've found our voice. I think looking back we had to put distance between Andrew's teaching and role as a CrossFit coach, and I had to gain enough confidence and give myself permission to have a voice in this space that we've created. It's a space outside of the traditional fitness industry.

By way of confirmation that we've finally arrived at the course that we wanted to deliver, you just have to look at the list of our current students. They span in age from their 30s to their 60s; 70/30 women to men and a few with a history of regular exercise.

Watching them grapple with new movements or concepts and the conversations that came out of the chats during breaks were magical.

Can't wait for our second weekend together in February!