Fitness First Group Exercise held our first quarterly workshop of the year (we have two) at Fitness First Megamall last Saturday. It’s my third quarterly since I began instructing back in second quarter 2007. While I’ve had to cut back on participating in master classes of other programs (I used to attend BODYCOMBAT), that doesn’t mean I was less excited about the whole thing. It just means that instructing eight classes a week takes its toll on my body and I didn’t want to push myself too hard. I just wanted to kick around with my fellow instructors and experience the upcoming releases as a participant.

BODYBALANCE is once again innovating, and while I don’t want to go too much into detail, we have a lot of emphasis on spinal mobility and moving with the breath. The mat’s also horizontal for the entire class, so at least for this release no more messy mat transitions and people can simply focus on body part, direction, and intensity. Presenters Ben Tang, Jacqueline Wong, and our very own Peewee Sanchez led the BODYBALANCE team through the class, and though we’ve all been teaching for a year or more, we still felt strongly challenged. Watch out! Ü

BODYJAM instructors: aren’t we stylin’?

The weekend’s highlight was, however, the BODYJAM master class. Jam is one of our flagship programs at Fitness First and it’s eye-catching, so instead of the class being held inside the club, we Jammers were herded into a cordoned-off space at the Megamall Central Atrium.

Basically, it was a massive demo for Fitness First, with over 50 instructors seeing release 45 for the first time. Presented by Clark Amaba and Tania Sibon, the musical and dance genres in this release are as varied as the styles of clothing we all wore to class. (That’s me in the front row, by the way.) It felt like a massive dance party all throughout, and that Butterfly Jump is going to torture me all through our practice sessions leading up to the launches in July.

We all returned to the club, and some of us were signed up to do BODYVIVE. It’s a very new program from Les Mills and Fitness First Philippines is projected to launch it sometime in the last quarter of the year, so we got a taste of it. Combining cardio fitness, resistance training (with ball and band), and groovy retro music, it’s a light and fun workout. But after Balance and Jam, it left me pretty much knackered.

Now comes the hard part — learning the choreography!

To learn more about BODYJAM and BODYBALANCE, check out the official Les Mills website.

Tags: Fitness First Philippines, Les Mills, Group Exercise, BODYJAM, BODYBALANCE