| Exercise Equipment | Sound System | Choice of Music | Transportation |
The following high quality exercise equipment was used in our classes:
Many alternatives are available, as follows:
Whilst some smaller accessories are available from Fitness Professionals, you will need to find specialist suppliers for the larger items. These advertise in the fitness press and some also trade via the internet (for example, ProActive Health).
Our sound system consisted of the following specialist items, all of which are marketed for use in aerobics classes and similar public events:
Many alternatives are available, as follows:
If you construct your own tapes from commercial recordings you will need to face a heavy bill for licensing and copyright or you will be breaking the law. Also you will have difficulty maintaining a regular beat between tracks which will add difficulty in designing routines as you will need to take account of the breaks in continuity of your music. However, tapes and CDs are available from specialised suppliers which help in overcoming these problems. They will merge tracks into each other at a constant tempo without any interruption and will also avoid occasional 4-beat passages in tracks that are based on 8-beat phrasing. They will also help in keeping down the costs of meeting licensing and copyright requirements. This last is a complicated subject, but put as simply as possible you have to pay the performers, the composers or owners of the music and the venues in which you use it. Each of these is protected by an authority: Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) for the performers; the Music Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) for the music; and the Performing Rights Society (PRS) for the venues.
In the case of Fitness Professionals' music tapes (nowadays CDs), the music consists of cover versions by performers who have waived their right to any PPL fees, and also a proportion of the cost you pay is passed on to the MCPS on your behalf. This means that you only pay once for the tapes or CDs you want and you do not have to make any longer term commitment to PPL or MCPS. Some other suppliers of music handle this differently, requiring you to pay a fairly high membership fee and committing you to buying a certain number of tapes or CDs over a given period of time. In both these cases, however, your obligations to PPL and MCPS are met. But the PRS works differently and they will approach and charge whomever you are hiring your halls from, who in turn will want to pass this on to you. In my experience this means that an extra £1 is added to the nightly charge for the hall.
Having got all that covered, you still have to choose music that suits you and your classes. This can be a trial and error process unless you happen to know someone who already owns a range of such music and will allow you to borrow their tapes or CDs to try them out. We tried several suppliers and found the most consistently satisfactory for us (but not necessarily for you) were those from Fitness Professionals, although there were one or two tapes that we did not get on with and returned for exchange. When choosing music you need to consider the tempo as well as the style: this will be set at what the supplier believes to be appropriate for each class element (warm up, step workout, aerobics workout, MSE, etc.), but you may not always agree with their choice which is where your variable speed deck will come into its own.
If you are planning to run your own classes using the routines given here, you are going to have a lot of equipment to move about. If all your classes will be at the same venue then you may be able to arrange storage there, otherwise you will need to take it to each class, bring it back with you and store it securely. The items that will take up the most space will be your steps. Other bulky items will include your sound system, hand weights, mats, etc.. You will also need space for personal items, including your booking folder, cash box, and so on.
For our classes we had 22 original steps, which means 22 platforms and 88 risers, plus the other equipment described above. A small van would have had adequate capacity, but we already had available a large estate car into which we managed to squeeze everything except 22 of the risers. We were able to get away with this, with very rare exceptions, as most people used only one pair of risers.
Note that the terms of your equipment insurance are likely to specify that it must all be kept in a locked building, so if you are not going to unload the vehicle every time you return and load it up again before going out, you will need a garage to keep it in. Clearly your costs are mounting up now (see Establishing Classes for a brief discussion of costs).
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