Fitness Instructor Journey, Part 1: Rejection and rejection, the road to Fitness Connection and BODYPUMP
Rejection and rejection, the road to Fitness Connection and BODYPUMP
This past weekend was Les Mills Live and it got me thinking about my journey to this point and why I drove eight hours each way to do five workouts on a Saturday. In a way, I thought about it like a race, but I didn’t actually train for it. I mean, nothing other than my usual workouts. I did think about my nutrition and hydration and paced myself so that was similar. And it was definitely a destination “race” so it had that aspect.
I thought it might be nice to step back and reflect. How did I get here? Well, no, not New Orleans on a Saturday morning, but how did I wind up on this instructor journey in the first place? I actually started teaching classes in the early 2000s when I was working for Apple. I want to say it was maybe around 2005 or 2006. It sort of happened accidentally and organically. I was just taking some indoor cycling at the Apple gym and the instructor was going on vacation and asked me to fill in. For some reason I agreed and then one thing led to another and suddenly I was teaching my own cycle class. I didn’t really have any formal education or certification. I just stuck a bunch of songs together on my iPod and our little group of Apple employees got after it.
When I left Apple, I also left that behind and while I continued riding my bike outside and doing various multisport endurance events, I didn’t attend any sort of group fitness at a gym. In fact, before Apple I never had and after I left Apple I didn’t either. I jumped back into group fitness quite by accident a few years ago, probably in 2017 or so when a friend of a friend was starting to train Camp Gladiator bootcamps at a park nearby. I thought I might give it a try for a different type of cross training and I went. I really liked the workout and the trainer and I ended up signing up for a membership.
About a year in, Emmaline was getting older and I was looking for a productive way to spend my time so I thought I might like some kind of part-time job and I pondered what I wanted to do with my life. I really loved my workouts and I remembered how much I loved teaching cycling so I talked to my CG trainer about maybe training for Camp Gladiator. She told me I needed to get a certification as a personal trainer and recommended I get it through NASM. She said to do that and then we could talk about the next steps.
So in January of 2018 I started a self-paced training course to become a Certified Personal Trainer (CPT). I actually really enjoyed it and the course came easily to me. I passed my certification test in April 2018 and was ready to move on with CG.
I did a phone interview and audition and jumped through a bunch of hoops like selling a certain number of memberships and attending a bunch of workouts with various trainers. I was working really hard to do everything they wanted of me when one night in July the guy who was my manager called me for a meeting. He had been super hard on me, making me change up workouts at the last minute, making me go all over the place. Telling me I needed to “hustle more” and just generally making my life incredibly challenging. At the meeting, he told me I didn’t have what it took. I wasn’t what they were looking for and I would “never be a trainer for Camp Gladiator.”
I was devastated. I had worked so hard and put all my eggs in this one basket. I had become a CPT just for these people (it wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t easy) and I had spent so much time selling all those memberships and writing workouts and attending workouts and co-training workouts with other instructors. It was terrible. I look back now and realize how horribly they treated me and what a terrible process the whole thing is.
So there I was, depressed and unhappy. I felt really let down by something that I had really loved and was a big part of my life. But I continued subbing in for some of the instructors I had met along the way. Despite apparently not being up to snuff, lots of trainers called me to sub in and I did it for quite a while after I was kicked to the curb, which is sort of amusing looking back. But the bitter taste in my mouth wouldn’t leave and eventually I started turning down more and more offers and the calls stopped coming and I canceled my membership.
So now what? A little before I had quit coming to workout, I overheard someone ask someone else, “have you ever tried Soul Cycle?” And I didn’t know what that was but it sounded like she was talking about indoor cycling. It was, but not like what I used to teach. Back in the day at Apple we didn’t necessarily ride to the beat of the music (which sounds crazy now, and it may have sometimes happened but I never intentionally planned it). So I went to this crazy expensive indoor cycling class and while Soul Cycle wasn’t necessarily for me, it reignited those feelings I had about riding a bike that goes nowhere with music. So I contacted the person from the gym at Apple that I used to work for and she passed my info on to the new person handling that and he said I needed to get myself a cycle certification and a group fitness instructor certification. Though they didn’t have a class for me, I could be on the sub list. Good enough for now.
Okay, back to self-paced fitness school. I got those things knocked out in just a couple of weeks and had two shiny new certs. I decided to hit the online job listings and I found one at Fitness Connection for a cycle instructor. I went in for an interview and an audition and in August 2018 was offered two cycle classes per week.
People started attending and I started to dial in how I wanted my classes to be and the intention and feeling behind them. Now up until this point, bootcamp and indoor cycling were literally the only group fitness classes I had ever attended. I once attended a step class at Apple, but I was terrible at it and nearly broke my neck so that was out. I had never heard of Les Mills or BODYPUMP or anything like that, but my boss invited me to attend her BODYPUMP class.
I spent the whole class with a big grin on my face. I was hooked. The music, the strength with a cardio kick, it was everything. I loved it. I came away feeling like I had done something. That I had accomplished something really hard. And been part of something bigger than myself. It was the same way I felt the first time I took an indoor cycling class.
I thought about if that was something I wanted to teach and stored it in the back of my brain. At that point I was happy just teaching cycle and in October 2018 I did a training to add one of the in-house classes Fitness Connection has called FC HIIT/Core, which I loved. Later that month went on to add SilverSneakers, which I also unexpectedly loved, and eventually added a bootcamp at FC as well.
In February 2019 I got an old job alert that popped up from when I had applied at FC. It was for an indoor cycling instructor position at CycleBar, a boutique cycling franchise. I only had a couple cycle classes at FC at that point so I went for an audition and was offered a position with them. They told me I would need to attend their internal two day training camp and then we’d go from there in terms of class schedule. I attended day one and it seemed from the outset that the trainer from CycleBar corporate didn’t like me one bit. During the course of a nearly 12 hour day, I only taught one song which he picked apart mercilessly. I remember him saying, “you look like you hate this” which was so crazy because I love indoor cycling, but the whole thing was so weird and he was so hyper critical that I was really nervous and by the end of the day I was exhausted from riding hard all day long and came home to a voicemail from the owner asking me to call her. I called her and she said that while she liked me, the corporate trainer had decided that some people “don’t make the cut” and I was one of those. I was shocked. I had no idea there would be any cutting! Once again, I was kicked to the curb. I felt so down on myself. Where did I belong? Was I actually any good at this? Why had I been rejected from two different group fitness organizations where I thought I had belonged?
Meanwhile, I’m still at FC and honestly my boss seems relieved because I think she was worried I was going to step back from my FC classes. And I continued along in 2019 with those classes, but the back of my mind said, “What about BODYPUMP?” and honestly, I was a little worried. What if, once again, I failed? What if it wasn’t what I was supposed to do and someone would knock me down again? But I loved it so much so in August 2019, I signed up for Initial Training.
What a life-changing weekend. It was nothing like the training for CycleBar. This training was positive and empowering. I learned so much about coaching, cuing, and about myself. The things I learned in BODYPUMP Initial Training helped me in my cycling classes and my HIIT classes. But most of all, I learned that Les Mills wanted me to bring myself into my teaching. To really be me in expressing what BODYPUMP was all about. Yeah, there were specific things I needed to say and choreo I needed to follow, but otherwise, it was what I brought to the program. It was a revelation and I came away feeling really energized about teaching.
A month later I submitted my video and then waited for my assessment and a pass or fail. I passed! I was so excited and I got some super great feedback. I got feedback on the things I did well and then I was given a plan on how to work to be even better for the future. I didn’t feel belittled or talked down to. It was really about how I could be amazing and it was super great (and I’m still using a lot of the feedback I got about technique, form, and coaching). Plus, I made an amazing friend along the way in my initial training class.
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