Les Mills Choreography Notes

[Pascua Gomer]

Whenyou show up to take a group fitness class, there is a strong chance that the instructor has put in at least a couple of hours to prepare for what you will do that day. As a Les Mills group fitness instructor, preparation is 100 percent part of the job.

Whereas freestyle group fitness classes are designed by the individual instructor, Les Mills group fitness programs are pre-choreographed to set music that is chosen by the Les Mills International company ahead of time. That means the moves are consistent, the music is globally licensed and the quality is verified by teams of professionals, so almost 100,000 instructors across the globe in 15,000 clubs have the tools they need to deliver a world-class work-out, every single time.

I store all of my music, notes and videos not only on my computer, but also on an external hard-drive to ensure that I have them in the event of computer failure. The downloading process is very easy, and the Les Mills instructor portal is self-explanatory.

The best way to learn a new Les Mills group fitness release is through a combination of reviewing the notes, writing a script, watching the class video and listening to the music. Lather, rinse, repeat. You see?

The bar itself weighs 7.5 pounds and comes with a pair of three sizes of weight plates, including the 2.2 pound, 5.5 pound and 11 pound. That means a full set-up bar is a less than my normal squat weight in BODYPUMP, but plenty for every other track.

The best thing about the Les Mills SMARTBAR? No clips required. There is a gator clamp, which keeps the plates in place, and the plates can be used as dumbbells when not on the bar, because they have a handy grip. So smart! That being said, you can use the Les Mills SMARTBAR for a variety of your fitness needs.

And that about does it for choreography prep, my fitness-loving friends. I hope you enjoyed. Believe it or not, today is my only day of the week with no Les Mills classes on the agenda, so I look forward to being back on the mic for BODYATTACK tomorrow.

Great post and super useful!! As you know, I am getting ready to take BODYPUMP instructor training in a few weeks and the thought of learning all the choreography does put me in a mild state of panic. Thanks for sharing so many useful tips about how to fully master new releases.

That smart bar looks like it would be much easier to use in quick transitions between tracks.

Enjoy your day!

Has there ever been a time where you forgot the choreography and had to improvise? What would you have to do if that happened? I doubt it would for how well you prepare, but I can just see myself awkwardly pausing in the middle if I were an instructor :P!

As Les Mills instructors, each quarter we pay for a release kit (one for each program we teach). The kit is a clamshell with an audio CD, DVD of the masterclass and educational videos, and liner notes with the choreography.

The times are changing, and I look forward to how this will play out. Regardless of the outcome, I enjoy teaching these programs and will work around whatever minor inconveniences that manifest themselves.

Brent Mills talks about music, dance, musicality, theatre, choreography, artistry, performance and so much more! Brent shares his thoughts on how music and dance are intertwined, how he approaches choreography differently from hip-hop or contemporary choreographers, and his dance, music and choreography experiences over the last twenty years.

Brent Mills is the owner of BallroomPlaylist and the Music Mills App, providing music content for dancers and studio owners. He has also served as the Music Director for numerous competitions, was the 2x US Cabaret/Theatre Arts Champion, served as a music editor and consultant for 4 seasons of So You Think You Can Dance, and holds a BA in Piano Performance from Berklee School of Music in Boston, and a BFA in Dance from BYU.

Samantha: Welcome back to another episode of Ballroom Chat. I'm your host, Samantha with Love Live Dance. Today I'm joined by Brent Mills, the music man himself. He holds a BA in piano performance from Berklee College of Music, a BFA in dance at BYU. He has been the music director at numerous competitions over the years.

He is a two time US Cabaret Theater Arts Champion. He was the music editor and a consultant for four seasons of So You Think You Can Dance and is the owner and mastermind behind Ballroom Playlist and the Music Mills app. Please help me welcome to the episode Brent Mills.

Brent: Life, is, well, let's say silver lining. It's great. I used to travel over 160,000 miles a year. Now that is stopped. I'm having awesome quality time with my loved ones and actually enjoying home. So that has been the silver lining and, and, and the other thing, just having time, becuase going out on a Wednesday, coming home on a Sunday and then leaving on a Wednesday again, left me two days, typically, maybe three days to kind of reassess my life and get things back and then repack and leave.

So, that has been amazing. and the downfall is, you know, going from. 46 weekends a year to zero. So, everything is been an adjustment, but luckily, people in my circle are very supportive and we were able to literally get home and within two weeks losing, every event up through December, and then trying to reassess and refocus what I can do because.

I never thought it would all just be gone. I was booked like three years in advance. So it has, it's both pluses and minuses. So I think it's a good synergy, yin and yang, whatever you want to call it. And the balances is doing okay. You know?

Samantha: Well, and I think to that point, you are honestly one of the, people in the industry that I kind of looked at as soon as quarantine hit to go, okay. How is he pivoting or what is he shifting his focus on? because I feel like a lot of us are used to that kind of like either lesson structure or competitive cycle structure, you know, vendors are, like you said, going out 46, 50, 52 weekends a year, depending on how many competitions there are.

So when it all just falls out, it's like, okay, well, what do we do now? And pretty much immediately, I feel like there wasn't a beat from when BYU nationals got canceled to when I started seeing, Hey guys, we've got this app. Have you thought about picking up our streaming service? I was like, Oh my gosh, that's brilliant.

He's just pandemic proofed his business. So was it just a matter of, well, I'm not pushing this anymore, so I can really drive traffic and drive eyes to this app that I've had for a while? Or was it more of a conscious no, I want to shift the direction so that I have a lot of people interested in this now and I can just focus on the app and the streaming service?

Brent: Right. Great question. well I've always wanted to push it. but being that the travel schedule, which is what, fueled the popularity, demand, whatever about the music and, you know, being able to, you know, get that trust, I guess, in the dancers after that 20 years, it became.

I couldn't push it, but I was like a team of one. So, you know, traveling, coming home, like I said, like a couple of days, I've always wanted to push it, but I didn't have any staff on, its like a one man band, to start off with like any business. And so, all of a sudden I had time and I, all of a sudden I'm like, well, what do I have now that I can just give. You know, and I've been editing online professionals music, sending it to them. And I thought, well, you know, what? What really spurred it was, everything was closed down the studios, the events. And so I knew immediately that students and teachers and amateurs are, do not have access to that library anymore.

And I'm aware that Spotify is out there, but I know Spotify doesn't, you can't change the tempo, you can't edit the songs. You can't organize in like a dancer's mentality, cause it's not made for dancers. And so I'm like, well, I have the streaming it's already set up. It was already rolling. We were just waiting to do a big launch.

So we're like, well, here's our launch. So we reduced it down to 10 bucks and we just said, Hey, during COVID, if you don't have access to that, all that music in your studio and your teachers, then we're going to give it for $10, which is literally less than cost to at least. Give people access and practice at home.

Cause that, that moment through really the end of June, everyone was still inside and practicing inside, taking lessons inside, all the teachers got online and, and so that's, that's what started it. And then, you know, being home and having eight hours, 10 hours just to, I'm not gonna, I mean, it was so like, I'm not going to just sit here and watch movies and eat bon-bons.

I just need to. You know, now I have that time to like, make it really good posts, you know, have some legitimate like information, thoughtful process of marketing, and getting the word out. So that for me was kind of like, I always wanted to take the plunge and stop traveling and say, I am going to, you know, but my income was, you know, was a big deal about traveling, and, and, and I didn't, I loved going and I w and I liked being out there as part of the whole process. So, this made me take the plunge. Literally I had to jump and, and it's, and it's, it's not like we went from, you know, a hundred users to tens of thousands. You know, it hasn't jumped like that because again, it was still money and no one was making money, but at least I was able to now focus directly on this business that I've been in my head planning and trying to get ready for the dancers. So a little bit of both kinda threw it that way, but I didn't, I just didn't put it together. And a wall went online. It had been going for about a year quietly, like a soft open. And then I guess we get to do the hard open. We had no choice. And so we scrambled and put it together and yeah, we, we, we got about 30 or 40 really, People that just needed that music, studios, teachers and whatnot.

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