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Frequently Asked Student Questions
What would I need to consider if I am planning to run group fitness classes from a hired hall?
I have an accountant who is guiding me on the financial side of things but I'm curious about insurance, screening and any other requirements I may not have thought of.
What would I need to consider to keep myself and my clients safe?
Very exciting to hear you will be running classes from a hall - as a group exercise junkie myself, I may just have to come and check your classes out!
In terms of insurance, there are a lot of companies that you could go through, and it could end up getting quite costly. REPS (register of exercise professionals - www.reps.org.nz) includes insurance if you register with them at the contractor level, or you can pay extra for it (and it's at a reasonable rate compared to other insurance I have found) if you register at a different level. When you register with them (to say you are a qualified trainer), you would send them your group exercise certificates and they would ask if you want to purchase your insurance cover through them.
REPS is currently producing templates for registered users to use for free, or at a very low price. This will include a screening form template, among other things. They're in the process of this at the moment, and I've seen the templates, but no promises on how long they might take to be complete. You can also go and check out the screening forms at local gyms (it's worth a try - if you ask nicely they might let you look at theirs!). Have a look at the one we use at NZIHF - it may not be necessary to find out all this information for someone coming to your class (that you are not training 1:1), but you definitely need to ask injury and health related questions. You can also see my screening form attached (hope it attached ok!), which is just printed on a double sided A5 card so it doesn't take up too much space. The questions I use on the reverse side come from guidelines from the American College of Sports Medicine, who I qualified through. I don't know that there's specific ways you have to ask the questions, but hopefully this gives you a good idea of what you should ask.
An idea to think about is getting your participants to pay for a block of classes (say 6 or 8 weeks of one particular class for example) in advance, thus aiming to get them into the routine of coming and helping you to get a core group to work with - if people haven't booked in or paid in advance they may be less likely to just show up (well this is what I've found to be the case - especially when the weather outside is nice or something!). Then if you don't get enough people book in advance for the block of classes, you can choose not to run them if you don't want to. This guarantees income for you and can also create good group cohesion if the same people will be at the same class each week. You may be ok just to have drop in sessions to begin with for people to trial the classes, and also once you get established and you know for sure there will always be a core group there.
Hope this helps in getting you started. I look forward to hearing how you get on!
Elly
Previously Mary Griffiths wrote:
Frequently Asked Student Questions
What would I need to consider if I am planning to run group fitness classes from a hired hall?
I have an accountant who is guiding me on the financial side of things but I'm curious about insurance, screening and any other requirements I may not have thought of.
What would I need to consider to keep myself and my clients safe?
