Episode 359
359. How to Train Great Pilates Instructors Fast
Train instructors faster by focusing on “good enough to start”, not perfection.
Most studio owners overwhelm new instructors by trying to teach everything upfront. This slows learning and reduces confidence.
Instead:
- Define the minimum skill set needed to teach one class competently
- Give instructors a clear, repeatable “recipe” (exact class plan)
- Have them practice and teach the same class repeatedly
- Layer in new skills only after mastery
Key ideas:
- Prioritize depth over breadth
- Use real teaching reps + feedback as the main learning driver
- Standardize your class before trying to scale your team
Result: faster ramp, better classes, more consistent client experience
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Welcome to Pilates Elephants, Heath Lander. Hi, Raph. Hi.
::Today, we're going to talk about how to help your instructors in your studio
::learn really fast to be really good.
::So in other words, how you take somebody who's a new beginner or doesn't know
::your studio style yet, or maybe they've been there for ages,
::but they're just not that great, and turn them into somebody who's really great.
::In a relatively short space of time.
::So that's the task before us. And dear listener, if you're not a studio owner,
::if you're an instructor, this is for you too because you can just turn it upon
::yourself and go, okay, that's how I learn stuff really fast.
::I had to be a better instructor even if there's nobody coaching me per se.
::So what's, I mean, Heath, you basically coach instructors for a living And I
::would say at this point, probably you spend more time coaching people who coach
::instructors for a living.
::Like that's, you're now teaching the teachers to teach the teachers.
::And so what's- Or teach studio owners to teach their teachers.
::Right. And so, and you teach our trainers to teach our students.
::Yep. Yeah. And you write the curriculum for all of the above.
::So what would you say is the number one biggest misconception or mistake that
::people make when trying to ramp up a new or train a new instructor?
::I think it's probably, I think a lot about this, I'm going to try and say it concisely.
::I think the way it makes sense when I say it to a studio owner is you have to
::be clear on what good enough to get going is, right?
::Like it's a, yeah, there you go. You've got to be really clear on what you need
::your new person to be good enough at that your clients will get enough of the
::essence of what they expect from you as the archetype or the lead instructor,
::that they'll be happy with it and also accept that they're working with someone who's a beginner.
::Okay. And the mistake people make, you could call is the curse of knowledge,
::is that they forget what they've learned over 1, 2, 3, 10, 15 years of experience.
::Micro skills and macro skills that all collapse into a homogenous bundle of excellence.
::And they don't really, we, I'm guilty of it too, forget to think what it's like
::to chop a carrot when you've never chopped a carrot before.
::Yeah we made this mistake when when we
::first started our pilates certification
::way way way back decade and
::a half almost two decades ago now we were like okay we want to teach people
::just a basic pilates skill set okay well in order to teach them that we've got
::to teach them anatomy okay well and we've also got to teach them injuries and
::we've also got to teach them prenatal and we've also got to teach them about
::the principles but in order to understand that they've got to understand the
::history of pilates and then they've got to understand the advanced modifications
::and I'm not going to understand regressions.
::And it's like, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and now it's like,
::okay, you have to learn everything in the universe before you can teach your first mat work class.
::And then guess what? People got overwhelmed. They didn't learn very effectively
::because I was trying to learn 77 things all at the same time.
::Beginner, intermediate, advanced concept all mushed in together.
::And yeah, that didn't work. And so we've moved to now a really simple model,
::which is learn, well, it's like, okay, if you were going to step into a mat
::work class or a reformer class, let's say,
::you know, what is the bare minimum skills that you would need to teach one class
::competently, not brilliantly,
::not like a genius level, but like adequately, where you can lead people through
::a sequence of moves, you know, in synchrony and, you know, basically everybody gets it right.
::You know, what's the bare minimum? Like how many exercises do you need to know?
::How many cues do you need to know?
::How many corrections do you need to know? Okay, we don't, we don't,
::we don't, and then we just teach them just that stuff.
::And then they teach their first class and then we go, okay, great. Now let's master that.
::And then when you really master that, okay, what's the next thing that you might
::need If you like teach those people for a while and they start getting sick
::of the same 12 exercises, the only ones you know, it's like,
::okay, when do we need more exercises?
::When do we need more advanced queuing skills? When do we need more advanced
::programming skills, injury, prenatal, anatomy, blah, blah, blah.
::We can layer that on, but day one, it's just like, what's the absolute bare
::minimum they need to do an adequate job at this one very specific task.
::And we call that, you and I, when we're talking, the Battle of Britain skill set.
::Please explain yeah uh yep so
::the battle of britain yep that's well that's that's a pithier
::way of saying getting the person who's going
::to do the thing good enough at the fundamentals
::they need to be good enough at it to be able to do it well
::enough that they can do a good enough job that the
::wheels don't fall off and then and what
::you and what we tend to forget as studio owners
::as as managers as as
::parents is that things happen there
::were two things that we forget one is that learning via the feedback of the
::actual thing that you're doing is exponentially more powerful than being told
::what it's going to be like so getting someone in with enough skills that they're
::not going to freak out and fall over so that they can get feedback from the actual skill,
::and also that things happen, uh, simultaneously.
::So you don't have to have everything done when you start, you just have to have enough.
::And then those skills will develop as you learn other skills,
::you know, that there's a, it doesn't all have to be done at the beginning.
::And when, when you were talking, the way I think about it, I know we've talked
::about this, uh, this was, I was taught this at teachers college.
::And I talk about it with studio owners all the time is, is that the idea of
::breadth and depth, you know, you have to have enough breadth.
::And in our case, that would be enough content that you can run the class.
::And you could scale that to say the first week, but let's say it's just for
::one class is our model, enough breadth of content that you can run the class
::and enough depth of understanding.
::So, you know, across and then down, if you're going to think in sort of visuals,
::across for content down for understanding enough
::that you can deliver it that people get what
::they came for maybe not the you know minutely
::managed challenge for individuals that the
::manager can do but that's because they've got more depth of
::knowledge on the same breadth of content and the
::big thing that the big thing that unlocked scalability
::for us and for the studios that i work with and
::certainly for me as an instructor in my studio was this
::that transformational piece of information that is still somehow
::uh contentious in pilates land that knowing
::anatomy and form and the way a movement looks are not the things that predict
::the safety for the customer for the client because it goes without saying that
::one of the fundamentals of what we want is that these new trainers deliver a
::safe and effective and enjoyable class.
::If the way you look when you do a movement and which muscles you're thinking
::about when you do it are the things that make it safe to do the movement,
::then all of a sudden you've got to teach some anatomy and you've got to teach all these other things.
::But breaking news here, folks, if you still haven't caught it,
::is that load is the thing that you've got to be mindful of and not falling over
::while you do the movement. So you do stable, scalable movements that are simple
::enough that people understand them.
::And you apply an appropriate amount of load that they can do X number of reps.
::And then you apply a little bit more load to make them look a bit challenged.
::And that's the sort of absolute battle of Britain's skill.
::Don't give me too much content. Give me just enough content.
::Give me exactly what spring tensions and football settings to do it on.
::And maybe one notch of challenge up on that.
::And that's what you do for week one. And then let's talk about what you learned and what you saw.
::I love that metaphor. or I haven't thought about it that way before,
::of breadth versus depth.
::And I think that applies so beautifully to other contexts as well,
::that the more you've got a certain people, we all have a certain capacity to learn.
::It might be a little bit different for each of us, but we all have our own capacity to learn.
::And if we learn more breadth, like more exercises, more cues,
::more anatomy, et cetera,
::well, then that's taking up bandwidth in our brain that could be used to learn depth,
::which is like being better at cueing this one
::exercise or noticing people's form in this one exercise because
::you've taught it a thousand times you know what it's meant to look like you
::know the 50 different ways people get it wrong because you've seen
::it so many times whereas if you're learning a lot of breadth
::then you've seen you know what did bruce lee say i don't fear the man who's
::practiced 10 000 kicks i fear the man who's practiced one kick 10 000 times
::and that's really that illustrates the juxtaposition between breadth and depth.
::And of course, you need, like you say, enough breadth.
::If you just know one exercise, that's not enough to teach a class.
::You need some amount of breadth.
::And I dare say the man who only literally knows one kick and doesn't know how
::to punch or grapple is probably not going to be very successful against Bruce Lee.
::But but you need if if you know a certain minimum amount of breadth then the benefit that the.
::The impact in your teaching comes more from depth and being really,
::really good at, you know, teaching that, that minimal skill set.
::And I think that is, you know, and the Battle of Britain scenario comes from,
::uh, you know, the analogy that comes from like in the Battle of Britain in 1940,
::when the Royal Air Force didn't have enough pilots and they needed to train pilots in a real hurry.
::And it's like, okay, we don't have, it normally takes 12 months to train a pilot,
::but we've got to get them up there in six weeks. So it's like,
::what's the absolute bare minimum we need to teach them that will just get them
::airborne? It's like, okay, don't worry about landing.
::Don't worry about, you know, what are the things they don't need to know?
::What can we cross off the list? There's just get them up there, you know?
::And so, and another analogy I think would be if you wanted to teach someone
::to bake a really good cake, right?
::Well, you could start by teaching about the theory of like flour and ingredients
::and baking and have, you know, fruit changes when a heat's applied to it and
::different flavors and the way you can combine them in.
::Or you could just say, here's the recipe, follow this recipe and this will turn out good, right?
::Which way is going to give you a more predictable result in the shortest period of time?
::And if you just give them a recipe, sure, they don't have a great like depth
::of understanding, but it's like day one, you don't care about the depth of understanding.
::You just want them to bake a decent cake and your clients go, oh, good cake.
::That was a fine cake. Nothing wrong with that cake, right? Whereas if,
::if you go through this deep, like theory about eggs and flour,
::it's like they're going to be,
::they're going to teach, they're going to cook like 50 shit cakes before they
::figure out how to do a really good one. Right.
::And so, yeah, we want battle of Britain pilots. We want people who's like,
::okay, they're not amazing, but they can get up there.
::You know, they can, they can do it. They can do the basics.
::I love that. Breath versus depth. Same when you go and get a massage,
::right? You think, oh, I'll get a whole body massage. That's all good.
::But then you got like two minutes on every body part.
::Versus the depth. It's like, okay, I've actually got a sore shoulder or back
::or neck or whatever. It's like I'd rather have an hour on that part.
::So how do you, what do you define as, so just say I'm coaching somebody up, right?
::Say I'm a studio owner and I've got a new instructor. Maybe they just started
::working for me. They're just qualified.
::Or maybe it's somebody I'm coaching up who's been on my team for a while,
::but their class numbers aren't that flash and I want to upskill them, right? Same scenario.
::Where do you start? What's the basic process?
::Um if you came to me with that question it would
::be regardless of whether you were it was an incumbent instructor or
::an incoming instructor my question would be are you clear like braff you know
::person i'm talking to are you clear on what uh content slash repertoire slash
::programming what what what it is that you would want delivered in a class that you would teach.
::Not at your absolute fandangling best
::but just on a day when you're doing your meat and potatoes you've
::got a spread of beginners to reasonably advanced people and
::you're going to give them all a good workout are you really clear on what that
::looks like and if your answer is yes it's great film that or at least write
::that down and then that is what we have to make understandable We have to make
::digestible for the person that we're coaching.
::Then, you know, if it was an incumbent instructor, there's a conversation that
::you'd have to frame that.
::And if it's an incoming instructor, slightly different conversation,
::but fundamentally you're going to, we're going to together, we're going to create
::the class plan, the version of you that captures the.
::You know, the bell curve of your skill set so that the bell curve of your clients
::get a class that exactly as you said in that last example,
::they will come out of and say, yeah, it wasn't RAF, but I recognized it as RAF
::and it was good enough that I'm not going to complain and I'll come back and
::give it another shot because this is the time in the week that suits me.
::It was good enough. And then next week you will be one increment better and
::the week after you will be one increment better.
::Right. And I think that the cake analogy really is a good one.
::And like you said, with the recipe there, I think a lot of studio owners.
::A lot of instructors too, don't, they don't use a recipe or they don't think they use a recipe.
::And they just like, if they were baking a cake, it'd be like,
::oh yeah, just add a good amount of sugar, not too much, not too little.
::Then you put some flour in. How much? I don't know. It's, you know,
::you just kind of guesstimate it. That looks about right to me.
::You know, and so they don't have like a specific checklist, you know,
::literal written checklist that they follow.
::It's kind of like just this kind of taste it oh no i think it needs a
::bit more sugar you know whatever i mean and then
::when they go to train somebody up they're like well you just
::add sugar until it tastes good and then you know but the but the but the in
::new instructors like i don't fucking know they don't know what what it's meant
::to taste like and so they just make some random shit up and it doesn't turn
::out the way it's meant to right and so what you need to do like what he just
::said is basically you film yourself doing your like you know good enough class,
::the simple class, not the super advanced highfalutin class that is your best ever work.
::It's like just this, the one you'd teach, the plain vanilla one you'd teach
::on a Wednesday night, and that is your recipe.
::And you don't teach them to teach something similar to that.
::That becomes like, no, teach exactly that. Same spring setting,
::same exercise order, same cues, same progression, same regression.
::Just literally, that is your recipe.
::Teach that. And then you just have them practice that, teaching that specific class.
::Over and over and over and then they teach it and
::then they come back again next week and teach it again and that's why they're that like you
::said one increment better because they've literally just
::doing practicing like they've now baked this same chocolate cake
::like 17 times and they're like oh i think i start
::to get it now like my daughter has been really into baking sourdough bread which
::is so awesome dear listener like if you've got kids when they become adults
::all of a sudden oh my god it's so awesome my daughter's 19 and she's just really
::into baking sourdough and so She bakes this amazing sourdough for us like three times a week.
::And she's got into baking like fruit bread sourdough and like,
::it's really, really good.
::But just watching her do it. And every time she does it, she basically bakes
::the same recipe over and over.
::Sometimes she puts, you know, dried fruits in it, but other times she doesn't.
::But it's basically, it's exactly the same loaf that she makes every time.
::And sometimes it's a little bit too flat and sometimes it rises a bit too much.
::Sometimes a little bit too moist. Sometimes she overcooks it.
::Sometimes she undercooks it.
::It's never like, sometimes she lets it prove a little bit too long.
::And so every time she does another loaf, she just gets that little bit better
::and she corrects those mistakes just a little bit more precisely.
::And each loaf gets a little bit more consistent and there's less up and down
::and fewer errors every time as she goes.
::And just watching her do the same thing again and again and again and again
::and again and again, she's taking delight in that learning process.
::Even though she's literally following the exact same recipe for now like the
::40th time in a row like she's still learning how to do it she's going deeper she's not going broader.
::You know, she's not learning new recipes. She's just really mastering like,
::oh, if I leave it in the fridge an extra hour, that really fucked it up.
::So maybe an extra half hour was right, you know?
::And then she tries half an hour and it's like, oh, that wasn't quite right.
::Maybe 45 minutes is about right.
::And then, so she just gets fine-tuned more and more and more with it.
::And I think that's the process that, you know, I think we typically beginning
::teachers, and you and I were the same when we started teaching this Pilates
::course decades ago, we go straight it for breadth.
::You know, we're like, you've got an, I know all of these really cool things
::and I want you to know them right now.
::So how do you, how do you, I guess, you know, so you've got your,
::your sequence, you know, or your class that you film yourself doing, right?
::Like, how do they, how do you kind of judge them teaching that class if you
::want them to teach it like a bread recipe rather than like a Monet painting
::where it's a little bit different and there's the light reflecting on the water.
::You know, you just more want like, okay, just like colour in between the lines
::for a start. That'd be a good start.
::Well, you've...
::Let's say it's an incoming instructor you build this out as far into the into
::the into your previous self as you possibly can so this class plan is your is the content of the uh,
::audition that your incoming instructor does in their interview so you know hi
::rap you want to you've responded to the ad that i've put out you're a qualified
::instructor great here's a link to a 15-minute block of content,
::me teaching in class with a written plan that I've extracted by my transcript extractor,
::and tidied up.
::Your job when we meet in a week, because we've aligned on values,
::is you're going to teach me verbatim this 15 minutes.
::And if you deviate from what I teach, I probably won't be interested in hiring you.
::And then you come in going, I could do the best I can, blah, blah, blah, blah.
::And what I see in you, I think we talked about this the other week,
::What I see in you then is not your ability to juggle chainsaws with a blindfold on.
::In your current method of teaching, it's your ability to pivot and align yourself
::with a particular way of doing things.
::And if you do a great job, and you're only ever going to do a 60 to 70% great
::job because you're a beginner at a new thing, even though you're an expert at
::another thing, I'll be great.
::You're willing to be a beginner. You're willing to pivot. You're willing to suck.
::You're willing to take feedback. Great. Let's get you in a class.
::And and that would that's said a bit brutally but it's fundamentally
::the same for a graduate from a course they've come out of
::a course that you didn't put them through great you
::know what a reformer is you know what springs are you know a bunch of moves awesome
::i need to see that you can teach the things that
::i need taught in my studio and that you're willing to lean into that so if you
::can build it into the interview process all's the better yeah um and then once
::you're in and and so if you don't build it in so if you're having that conversation
::with someone that you've hired and they're doing their own thing and not like,
::you know, they're just, their thing might be awesome.
::It's if it's just not your thing and you're creating asynchrony in your studio,
::well then you're going to.
::Have the same conversation. Here's this piece of content. I recorded it the other week.
::Your numbers tell us we've got a problem. Are we agreed we've got a problem? Great.
::The coaching situation is this. You're going to teach this.
::You're going to practice it this week. You're going to teach me in 72 hours.
::We're going to start delivering on Monday. And then let's see how we go.
::And then it's the same process. And then once it's being delivered,
::best case would be that it's a video recording of the teaching.
::And then you can sit, you can give feedback and so you just fucking nailed
::that moment there if we could just do that the whole time that
::would be great this bit fell over because you were looking in the
::wrong direction when you did blah blah blah and you used to that would
::be best practice stepping one back
::from that would be you attend because that takes time more time than watching
::a video that one step back from that would be the instructor self-reports yeah
::uh it's not the instructors you know i'm not being cynical It's just that they're
::too busy teaching to really know what they're doing.
::And often they don't know what they don't know.
::Exactly. They don't know how to give... I actually think self-reporting is highly unreliable.
::And not to say you shouldn't ask how it felt, but you're just not going to get
::an accurate read on what you need to do next time.
::I think the one situation where I do back self-reporting is if they film themselves,
::and then they watch themselves with an objective list of criteria of,
::did you do this thing? Did you do this thing?
::Did you do this thing? and they can just check it off and go,
::fuck, I didn't do any of those things. Yeah.
::Yeah. Yeah. And then the other one would be to talk to clients.
::Presumably you've got some clients or you could. I mean, I've been using the
::video thing long enough now when I do it that I've sort of forgotten how you
::make the other stuff work because the video is so exponentially better than anything else.
::Yeah. But talking to a client that you've said, you know, I'll give you a free
::class if you go along and I need you to actually really pay attention,
::but it's, you know, you're asking your client. It's way better to just get them
::to film it and then you watch the video.
::Yeah. And if you're worried about filming folks, something that,
::you know, often people haven't done or thought of is you just put it in your member.
::As soon as people sign up to say they're going to attend your studio,
::you just put a one sentence line down the bottom saying classes may be recorded
::for internal training and quality processes and will not be made public.
::And then it's signed off on when everyone's saying they understand that exercise
::can be dangerous. Yeah. So then you just,
::Yeah. Yeah. So that's, I think that's, there's, I mean,
::we talk as many podcasts on this as possible because there's so much embedded
::in this that so many people I talk to are trying to recreate.
::Themselves as the advanced person. And they're doing that inadvertently.
::They're doing it with the best. they're not trying to set their
::beginner instructor up for failure they're doing it with the absolute best intention
::but they're forgetting what they know yeah and and to be fair too i think i'm
::i was blindly lucky that i came out of a couple of decades of education and,
::reasonable education education that i
::had some head start in thinking about this stuff like
::a lot of people i talk to have no no history
::or experience in pedagogy in breaking a piece
::of information down into chunks that someone can make sense
::of so you know it's it's it's a new skill for most people who are running studios
::yeah yeah i think it's a very very important skill to develop because it's what
::is going to set your studio apart is having superior classes,
::and the way you get that is by this process
::and i think you know you know where a
::lot of studio owners kind of struggle with this idea is they don't want to kind
::of dictate to people you should teach this exact sequence verbatim the way i
::teach it you know they want people to be free to be creative and a lot of pilates
::instructors you know enjoy being creative and stuff but the thing is that.
::Well, I think the two things are, number one, if your product needs to be defined,
::you need to have a product in your studio and that needs to be that you're teaching style.
::And that needs to be, you know, based on levels and intensity and pace and,
::you know, the objectives of the class need to be very consistent between different instructors.
::So just giving people free reign, letting them be creative doesn't achieve that.
::And the second thing is that just in terms of
::how people learn like when humans learn
::a new skill we actually need at the
::beginning to be given just a very directive step-by-step guide
::on here's exactly how you do it like if you want to go and learn dancing
::they say put your left foot here put your right foot here put
::your hand here step this way bend your knee a bit more like
::they tell you exactly what to do same when you're teaching someone pilates right you don't
::just say hey the reformers over there go figure out how to do the hundred like
::you tell them you know put your leg here put your arm here curl up you know
::press your leg back down to the mat whatever it is like you give them specific
::instructions and so you should do that exact same process with your new and
::developing instructors is as they're just learning something like give them,
::the guidance that they need and crave as that you know that early stage in the learning process.
::The final thought, I think I would have this, I just, this, this, this, yeah, I can't, so.
::When, when you've built up your business on your survival instincts and skills,
::you assimilate information so quickly and adjust what you're doing in real time,
::that by the time you need to hire someone,
::you have zero chance of remembering what the fundamentals of your brand are
::because you haven't actually thought about that because you've been thinking
::about all the other things that you've got to do to build your numbers,
::to build your business, to pay your rent.
::And then, well, without going into the thing of just being grateful for someone
::who's going to come and work for you and take some classes, let's assume that
::you do take the time to think, okay,
::I want to make sure you're doing
::what I want, and I'm going to take some time to work out what I want.
::The time that you would take to record yourself teaching your basic class,
::as we've said, rather than your...
::Best self and, and breaking that into dimensions, like we're ever just saying
::smallest little bits and then the better off it's all going to be.
::And the catch with our world is the skills that we talk about,
::the skills necessary to be good at group mat work or reformer teaching in and
::of themselves are not highly complex, you know, like, but they stack.
::So once you've got to say how to get in the start position and the basic movement
::when Sally in the back corner is facing the wrong way.
::All of a sudden you've got soft skills of moving around the room and not standing on someone's head,
::coupled with finding new words for the start position, coupled with a bunch
::of other stuff, coupled with turning the son-off on because some cracker turned
::off the Wi-Fi by mistake.
::So they're all simple things to do, but doing them all at once is the skill.
::So our job is to layer them in and try and control the variables.
::And so like teach less things better and don't add on until you're good enough at those first things.
::And remember that those first things, if you keep them in the recipe.
::Like Bintu's time in the fridge, will continue to improve while the other skills improve.
::If you keep adding new stuff in, it overloads and gets messy real quick.
::Right, and if you add in the new stuff and that means you have to drop off the
::old stuff, then you actually never get good at that.
::Anything because you practice it until you just like mediocre at
::it then you move on to the next thing and become mediocre at that in turn right right
::which comes back to bruce lee what do you want from your
::six what do you want from your new instructor in six months
::time that they are kick ass at two
::class plans which are actually built out of the same content switched around
::or really freaking average at 10 class plans and they're creating their own
::shit to try and make up for feeling like they're overwhelmed and don't know
::what they're doing not sure you can you can you can let me know what the correct
::answer is next time good talk
