Optimal Life Fitness, for health, fitness and a new lifestyle outdoors.

Off at gwrymiau at addysga kettlebells
The alarm sounded at 4.30am on Saturday and after grabbing s protein shake I jumped into the truck and off I went to Cardiff. It was a 2 1/2 hour drive down the M4 and as I passed over the Severn Bridge and approached the toll booth I thought "This has been a nice easy drive". However, as I pulled up to the gentleman at the toll booth I got a nasty shock when I handed over my credit card and instead of him taking my £11.90 to drive over a bridge! He took one look at me and said "No cards Sir", to which I replied "Oh Boll*cks". So I had to scratch around the car looking for any spare change I could find. God must have been looking out for me that morning as I found exactly £11.90! So I handed over the shrapnel and carried on my way to Cardiff.
I arrived in Cardiff and met Dave from 'Dave's Gym'. It was a bit of a blast from the past, about 3 years ago we did one of our first national tour dates at Dave's Gym in Cardiff. The course on the weekend was a private course organised by Jeff Webb at Outdoor Fitness Ltd and Dave. They had 10 trainers coming on the course, all of them I'd been told were fit and well trained. So I was looking forward to a hard course and hopefully getting to challenge the guys as much as possible!
After a quick coffee down the road in the local cafe we set up for the course and cracked on with the intros. As Dave's Gym is a very sporty place which specialises in Martial Arts all of the trainers were either rugby lads or martial artists. As it was a private course, the guys had a few early requests to make sure we touched on some specific outdoor training and group session options, this got me thinking that we would probably have some fun on Sunday afternoon!
After getting the guys up to speed on the principles of lifting and the moving body we started with the practical and taught the swing. As all of the lads had used bells before, I was confident that we'd be able to move through the lifts quite quickly and introduce some more challenging options. We ended up spending a long time on the swing and looking at lots of different ways to improve movement patterns and we did a similar thing with all of the other lifts throughout the day. At the end of day 1 I the group had worked really well and were very competent, so at 5pm I packed up my stuff and headed over to a local guest house to relax and sleep!
Day 2 and after a continental breakfast I headed over to the gym to meet the lads who were thankfully all feeling fresh and not hung over! We went straight into the assessments and ploughed through the theory. We managed to get some good in-depth discussions about implementing kettlebells going and also spent some time going over the best ways to teach the lifts. 11am came round and it was time to get back to the training! I had promised the lads a few extra sessions to make sure they didn't feel under worked! So instead of our usual 3 sessions, I added an extra 3 sessions! 2 of which were outdoors, what a great sight it was to see 10 lads farmers walking down the local high street to the park. There were some interesting looks and some more interesting comments! As 4 O'clock came round it was clear to see that everyone was completely done in, which meant that my job was done! With a bit of team work the lads took the bells back to the gym and we said our goodbyes.
I'd just like to say thank you to the whole group for making a great course a fantastic course! It's always a pleasure to work with a group who just want to train and learn as much as possible. Also, thank you to Jeff and Dave for organising the course, I'm looking forward to getting back down to do the advanced course at some point next year.
Great to be back at Dave's Gym in Cardiff, if you are ever down there, go check it out.
http://www.daves-gym.co.uk/
For more information on Outdoor Fitness Ltd, 'group fitness training outdoors' go to http://www.outdoorfitnessltd.com/
For more information on the Extreme Kettlebell Instructor Course, please go to: http://www.optimallifefitness.com/optimal_life_fitness/olf_kettlebell_instructor_course.php
Check out photos from the course: