Friday, December 24, 2010

ViPR in my group-ex class

I brought my lighter ViPRs to my Friday morning hi/lo aerobics class.  I'm sort of known for springing crazy exercises on them and they like the variety, so they were enthused about trying something hip and new.  In January, I'll be launching this on my Friday morning schedule as a new class (ViPR) right after my hi/lo class.

Planning / patterning / teaching information is below.



In planning the exercise that I would bring to class (their first time), I wanted to give them something that was fun, challenging, and that was totally different from what we do with traditional weights or with body-weight functional training.  I picked the lateral tilt with frontal plane shuffle, but for brevity I call it the "ViPR side shuffle" or "ViPR slide" in class because it's quicker to say and still descriptive.

Before handing out ViPRs, we pre-patterned the movements we were going to do.  I taught frontal plane shuffles, cuing posture, feet, core, and heads up.  We practiced two types of shuffles, one that was more of a "basketball" shuffle where they had to decelerate, stop, and accelerate in the other direction quickly, and one that was more of a deep lunge to the side (same arm same leg) wth slower deceleration and more of a flexibility component.

Next, we patterned the one-leg balanced lunge with several options - both legs on floor, one leg with small lunge, and progressively larger lunges with reach to floor, shoulder blades depressed and retracted, hearts up, long spine, core engaged.

Then, we got into pairs.  We did 45 seconds on, 15 seconds off, 2 sets of ViPR shuffles and 2 sets of balance lunges - one set each leg. 4 minutes total work, 2-3 minutes preparation, made for a good higher-intensity interval component in a hi/lo class.

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