This is the second in a series of Blog posts on choreography. As I mentioned last time, choreography is your lesson plan, and it does not have to be complicated. Writing choreography involves taking your list of exercises and organizing them in the order in which you plan to teach them. Your class will be more successful if you make a plan ahead of time so that you don’t find yourself struggling to come up with exercises to fill the time.
To help you remember your choreography you need to organize the exercises in a way that is logical to you. One way to organize your exercises is linear choreography. See the last Blog post for a sample lesson plan using linear choreography. Another way to organize your exercises is pyramid choreography. In pyramid choreography you perform each exercise a certain number of repetitions and then your repeat those same exercises either reducing or increasing the number of repetitions.
The following is an example of pyramid choreography for a shallow-water class using the same 6 basic exercises used in the previous lesson plan. The 6 exercises are:
- Knee-high jog
- Run tires (like running through tires at football practice)
- Jumping jacks
- Cross-country ski
- Kick forward
- Heel jog
The logic of using the exercises in this order is that it is easy to transition from one to the next. From the knee-high jog you move the legs farther apart to go into running tires. Next you bounce center and apart in jumping jacks. From the center bounce you transition into cross-country ski. Stay in the sagittal plane to go into a kick forward. Finally switch the leg movement from front to back in a heel jog.
- (A set)
- Knee-high jog 16X
- Run tires 16X
- Jumping jacks 16X
- Cross-country ski 16X
- Kick forward 16X
- Heel jog 16X
(B set) Perform each exercise 8X
(C set) Perform each exercise 4X
(D set) Perform each exercise 2X
Now you can reverse the process, going 2X, 4X, 8X and 16X.
Or you can start at the top again but change the impact option. The first time the exercises were performed with rebound. The second time perform them grounded 16X, 8X, 4X, 2X.
- Knee-lift
- Wide knee lift
- Squat
- Alternating lunge
- Leg lift
- Heel lift
A third impact option is the neutral position 16X, 8X, 4X, 2X:
- Knee-high jog neutral position
- Frog jump neutral position
- Jacks tuck neutral position
- Tuck ski neutral position
- Kick forward neutral position
- Donkey kick neutral position
A fourth impact option is performing the exercises suspended 16X, 8X, 4X, 2X:
- Leg press suspended
- Frog suspended
- Jumping jacks suspended
- Cross-country ski suspended
- Kick forward suspended
- Bicycle suspended
Depending on the length of your class time, you may be able to use all 4 impact options in your pyramid choreography. If not, select 2 or 3 options. Be sure to include a warm up at the beginning of class and a cool down at the end, followed by 5 minutes of stretching.
Next Blog post: Add-on Choreography.
See you in the pool!
