Be Fit With Biray

As group fitness instructors, we sometimes find ourselves needing a little inspiration to jumpstart our creativity. Fortunately, the web continues to be a great resource for our community.

In 1996, many instructors began turning to Turnstep.com for class ideas. It was perhaps the first popular forum for instructors to post and share class designs, exercise ideas, and (of course) step choreography routines with industry peers. Other sites, such as Fit Moves and Pedal-On, have also evolved since then. And the idea of utilizing the internet as a free platform to work collaboratively among each other continues to be exciting.

The chart below shows the statistics for the number of “patterns” or choreography that have been posted on Turnstep.com since 1996. Notice how the numbers begin decreasing significantly by 2004.

As an instructor who often defaults to Turnstep for ideas, I started wondering why contributions had started to decline. Was there somewhere else people were getting their ideas? Or more importantly, where were instructors posting their combos?

Fortunately, thanks to YouTube, an online destination where users upload and share their videos on the web (launched in early 2005), I didn’t have to go far to find my inspiration. Instructors were not just posting their routines online - but they were coupling them with VIDEO! (I don’t know about you, but trying to interpret text-based choreography was often my biggest frustration on Turnstep - I’m such a visual learner).

Let me introduce to “Lethal Leslie” and “Step Junkie” - by far amongst the coolest, most creative steppers on YouTube. These instructors not only offer great ideas for choreography, but individually break down each combo on their blogs. Below I’ve included one of my favorites from Step Junkie.

Good job ladies!! Thanks for the ideas and keep up the awesome work!