Is Online Learning As Good As In Person?
Never in my 30 years of training did I ever think I could accomplish the things I have with online training. When I first started in this field, people weren't really using computers to run their studios. I remember setting up email accounts for my staff in 1990 and teaching them how to use them. Now I'm able to run my entire studio online.
I am not a tech person; I consider myself a slow tech person, slow to adopt. I am also a person of high integrity. Over the years, I have been offered some lucrative business deals. Most of them I turned away because I knew the integrity of the work would suffer.
About a year ago, a client of mine wanted me to help a friend who lived in another state. The friend and I talked on the phone, and I liked her from hello. Before I could say inhale, we were training online 3 times a week. I learned the Zoom program, learned how to make lesson plans for home training, and made a friend. We trained for a few months, then schedules changed, and we stopped. I thought that was the end of my online work.
COVID hit my studio around March 2020, and after two weeks went by, my studio was empty. I cried for two days, hard, and then I got mad. I knew after all my years in business, after teaching with Lyme disease, teaching pregnant, then teaching with a toddler in the studio, and all the other hardships I had faced as a single parent, there was no way I was going to let a virus take down my business. I started texting my clients aggressively to book online. I knew I could do my job; it was just a matter of convincing my clients that I could as well. When all was said and done, I had booked about half my clientele in that first month.
As the weeks went by, I found my clients doing exercises they refused to do in the studio. The challenging exercises, the good ones, really work but take some concentration to execute. I saw my clients gain strength and flexibility fast. In about 2 months, they had more power, more range of motion, and some of their bodies were starting to take new shapes.
Lockdown was opened for a couple of weeks, and a few clients popped into the studio, and I absolutely could not believe the changes. Clients I had trained for years had new muscles in places I hadn't ever seen on them before. A more recent client with severe leg limitations accomplished things on the reformer she could not do several months earlier; I was blown away.
The work I teach has shown me time again that it works. Clients come and go, and so may pandemics, but the work remains. This work will last because it has integrity, and things with integrity hold up over time. As long as people continue to believe in the good they are doing for themselves, I will keep working for them. In this case, in ways I never could have imagined.