Saturday, October 30, 2010

Fourth week of Virtuosity.

So it's the fourth installment of Virtuosity, and I'm super excited about it. We're working on Deadlifts and double-unders. Deadlifts proved to be interesting, people got the basic lift, but the devil's in the details. There were only two people lifting at a time, but because I might miss something I wanted to involve everyone, trying get everyone in the class learn what to look for and to help each other. I got really positive responses, people started to feel like they were using their legs instead of their back. I know for a fact some one upped her deadlift from 85# to 135#.

Double unders were fun. One thing I really, really like about teaching this class is it requires me to go back and learn about the fundamentals, to go and really focus on the movement. As I've expected, looking at this stuff with the mindset of teaching is, in itself, a great teacher. If I have to be able to teach everything from pull ups to the clean I have to be able to do everything well. But I digress, back to teaching the double unders.

I had everyone go through the progression, save for the double under - single - double under. I've been told people get stuck in that phase and are reluctant to move on, so we just avoided that step altogether. As everyone worked on them I took turns working one on one with each person. I was surprised how much I was able to help, figuring out what was wrong even though I had never even thought of the problem before (e.g. picking up on an uneven cadence by listening to the sounds of the rope hitting the ground). Everything seemed to go really well, I'm very, very happy with how it worked out.

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