Instructor Spotlight: Let’s Mix It Up

Last year, my friend Liz (yes, Liz McKee of LSF Pilates in Wayne) came to me and said, “I want to try CrossFit, but wouldn’t it be fun if the CrossFit instructor then came to my studio and did Pilates.” Yessssss, Liz! You know I love this shit. And Liz was really onto something. So months later, I held her to it when I took her little idea and turned it into a really fun and enlightening fitness project! Enter the Instructor Swap to spice up your (and their) January.

This is Liz with her CrossFit Coach, Chelsey, right after her first CrossFit class.

For this project, I found four local instructors who are all killing it at their game. I then took them out of their cozy, comfy fitness boxes and put them into very different types of workouts, most for the first time. The results were entertaining, educational, eye opening and in my opinion, magical!

Read on to find out what happens when a yoga teacher takes a boxing class.

I started planning for this project a few months back by putting it out on Instagram. I was looking for adventurous fitness professionals who didn’t care about being on camera and were willing to mix it up with me. With my rolodex of instructors and the fit pros who jumped up to the plate from my IG request, I put together a group of stellar instructors who shine in their space: Liz McKee (Pilates), Chelsey Winland (CrossFit), Nikki Rowinski (yoga) and Korina Hanna (boxing). So let’s meet the players in this little fitness game.

Liz McKee, Pilates Instructor and Owner of LSF Pilates in Wayne.

Liz has been teaching Pilates for nearly 18 years. I know, she doesn’t look old enough to have that kind of experience! And her well known Pilates reformer studio has been in Wayne for 11 years! She is a Main Line staple for Pilates. At LSF Pilates, Liz offers three main types of classes on the Balanced Body reformers: a more slow and stretchy class; an athletic strength building class; and something in between those two. She also offers private and semi private sessions downstairs in her studio.

You may expect that fitness instructors work out all of the time. But actually they are not exercising themselves when they are teaching you. So if they want to exercise, they need to be a student in a class. And I quickly realized that many fit pros, like Liz, just don’t do that enough. Liz is consumed right now with running a successful small business and raising two very young kids. She doesn’t do nearly as much exercising herself as one would think. This project was eye opening for Liz. It gave her a little push to make her own fitness a priority again. She used to be the girl after my own heart, trying it all. And she is ready to branch out again beyond her beautiful Pilates studio. So I was there to accompany her to CrossFit, and I had the perfect instructor in mind to teach her.

Chelsey Winland, CrossFit Coach and Manager at CrossFit Main Line in Ardmore.

Chelsey has been a well known and beloved CrossFit coach for 14 years. And she truly shines in this role. I’ve taken her class before, and while I am not a CrossFitter in any sense of the word, I found her guidance and instruction to be very helpful while I was in this unfamiliar environment. Chelsey is a religious CrossFitter herself, taking a class every single day. So she already does a really good job at being both a teacher and a student.

CrossFit Main Line, which has three locations (Wayne, Ardmore and Plymouth Meeting), may be best known for their strong community. In that same regard, owners, Merrilee and Daniel Davidson, have long been doing consistent instructor mix ups with their CrossFit coaches. These “WOD Bombs” as they like to call them, are a way for their team to grow as coaches all while supporting other local gyms. Studio owners should take note! Every quarter, the team at CrossFit Main Line “steps outside their four walls and explores different approaches.” Not only does the CrossFit team show up (and pay) for a class, they support the other gym by purchasing their apparel and treating them to lunch after class. The WOD Bombs give the CrossFit coaches a different gym experience while also providing that gym with invaluable feedback from seasoned fitness professionals. In 2023, the WOD Bombs included visits to SPENGA, Rumble Boxing, Black Ops and Stretch Zone. This year, the CFML team plans to explore different formats at LifeTime. After learning about the WOD Bombs, I knew Chelsey and the CFML team would love my idea of an instructor swap. And did they ever. They filled every reformer at LSF Pilates and nearly all of them had never been on a reformer before! It was a beautiful thing to see.

Korina Hanna, Boxing Coach and Manager at Jabz Boxing in Drexel Hill.

Korina Hanna has been a boxing coach for two years and is the manager of the Jabz Boxing studio in Drexel Hill. Korina may be the greenest instructor in this group, but you can’t tell when you are in her class. She is clearly an expert boxer but also has great control of a very busy room. Jabz is a challenging environment to teach in. A room of what could be 24 people are all doing different exercises for a majority of the class. Not only does Korina need to track the workout time blocks and all 12 exercises, Korina needs to teach a skill, boxing! Anyone with any level of boxing experience can come in to take a class at Jabz. And it’s Korina’s job to make sure they get a good workout, don’t get discouraged with the punches and have fun. And she does this all beautifully and with enough motivating energy to keep everyone in the room engaged for 60 minutes.

So here’s a challenge instructors face during each class that I wasn’t aware of before the Instructor Swap: The teacher must manage the number of corrections he or she makes on one particular person. Kind of like how I “pick my battles” with my kids. You can’t fight them on everything without triggering counteractive bad behaviors. And the same is true with fitness. Beyond keeping a client safe, correcting every single mistake isn’t the goal of a good fitness instructor. The instructor wants to make enough corrections to teach them without killing their spirit, which results in the abandonment of their fitness goals. And that’s a fine line for an instructor to walk. Lucky for Korina, the fit pro I gave her in the swap happened to know a thing or two about boxing.

Nikki Rowinski, Yoga Instructor and Manager at Bulldog Yoga in Villanova.

Nikki has been a yoga instructor for almost ten years, teaching at Bulldog exclusively since 2018. And she is not your traditional yoga instructor, which is why I love going to her class. I’ve heard her refer to her class as a “party on the mat” and I am not upset about it. She may be best known for her unique music selection, which is anything but expected in a yoga class. She brings me back to my glory days (the late 90’s and early 2000’s) every time I am in her class. Her energy isn’t necessarily the spiritual presence you may expect from your typical yoga instructor. Nikki may use profanity. She’ll definitely make you smile, and I’ve been known to laugh out loud in her class. I promise you’ll have a blast, sweat more than you’re used to and get a killer workout at the same time.

Another surprise that came out of this project is that yoga instructors don’t just do yoga. Nikki is extremely active and does way more than the genre she teaches. She spins, runs, lifts weights, rows and yup, I learned that Nikki even shadow boxes. She couldn’t hide her mad boxing skills during her swap class at Jabz Boxing. And Nikki brings something from these various workouts to her yoga classes. For example, she will use strength training techniques in her yoga sculpt class. And she’ll add some of the dynamic movements from other formats to her traditional yoga classes. How freakin rad! And yet another example of why this Instructor Swap has been so insightful for me, a student of fitness!

The Mix Up.

Obviously, I wanted to take pretty opposing fitness formats and pair them together. Could two very different workouts actually compliment each other? After this swap, our fit pros all think so!

First, we got the CrossFit women on the Pilates reformers to slow it down and lengthen those strong muscles.

These women had never been on a reformer before, so Liz started them with some full body, feel good stretches and foot warmups to get used to the springs of resistance of the machine. Then Liz took the class through a full body workout with lots of time spent focusing on the core muscles. The only exercise that Chelsey was used to were the lunges. But lunging on the reformer requires more core engagement and balance. Chelsey acknowledges that she is always on the move and her workouts follow suit. So taking the time for more intentional stretching was really nice for her and probably felt great on her overworked muscles.

After teaching a room full of CrossFitters, Liz thinks all CrossFitters need Pilates in their lives. So do I see a more formal WOD BOMB at LSF Pilates in the future? Definitely!

Next, it was Liz’s turn for CrossFit. She’ll admit that she was nervous and somewhat intimidated. CrossFit is still one of the only formats that makes me nervous, and I have used a barbell many times before. Liz had never used a barbell or even lifted heavy. This was going to be interesting.

Fortunately for Liz, Chelsey took a lot of time to instruct the class (even the veteran CrossFitters) on proper form first using a pipe. And when the group was practicing their plate loaded “cleans”, Chelsey was right there to guide Liz.

Liz also had the support of other seasoned CrossFitters in the room who were looking out for this newbie in class. The heart of the workout was only 20 minutes, but it left Liz’s heart rate soaring and she was definitely humbled by this new way to sweat. Liz used the Pilates breath to help push that bar above her head. She did great and held her own in class. And she’ll be the first to tell you it’s all because of that Pilates strength!

For the next Instructor Swap, Korina, along with the Jabz Boxing Drexel Hill studio owner, Shannon Crowley, came to Bulldog for their first ever hot yoga class there.

I know both women were not expecting such an upbeat and athletic class. I told them that yoga at Bulldog is different, but they had to experience it themselves to truly get it. And I think both women were shocked when Nikki started class with a rap song. But that’s normal Nikki.

Admittedly, both women do not do yoga regularly and struggled through the balancing poses while dripping sweat. Nikki was there to adjust them into proper form, and Korina really appreciated that. As strong as Korina is, her body isn’t used to holding poses, especially under heat. But I could tell that Korina loved Bulldog. She felt strong and powerful in Nikki’s class, just like how she feels when she boxes. But after Nikki’s “challenging” class, Korina did decide to kick it up a notch for when Nikki visited her studio later that week.

Next it was Nikki’s turn to step into the ring at Jabz Boxing. But boxing isn’t exactly new to Nikki, so this last part of the Instructor Swap was a little different. Nikki regularly shadow boxes virtually at home. Other than the fact that this yoga instructor immediately removed her shoes when she entered the studio, you could tell Nikki knew what she was doing once the bell dinged.

Nikki welcomed the intensity of the workout at Jabz. When Nikki takes the time to exercise herself, she wants to make it worth it. She wants to sweat. She wants her heart to pound through her chest. She wants to feel it the next day. So this class was the perfect all out, full body workout for Nikki.

Nikki brought Ali Jackson, her friend and fellow yoga instructor at Bulldog. Ali wasn’t quite as experienced a boxer as Nikki, but Korina was right there to assist Ali with the punches on the bags.

Both women got their sweat on and had lots of laughs together doing something completely different than their normal yoga poses. But boxing and yoga can have similar anxiety reducing results — Punching it out on the bag is just another way to “let something go.”

Wow, I got so much more from this project than I ever imagined and this is why:

The obvious one is that this project highlights not only the studio, but the talented instructors who teach the classes there. And it does so in a nontraditional and fun way. It promotes a business without saying, come workout here. It shows the viewers first hand that fit pros are real people. It demonstrates how instructors of all different genres can support one another and that local studio owners are all part of the same community. I actually had a studio who wouldn’t let one of their instructors participate in this project because the studio offers the format the instructor would have been switching with. Unfortunately, this studio missed the entire point of the project because they feared their competition. But every other gym and studio that I approached with this project accepted it with open arms, and then some. That makes me proud to be part of the Main Line fitness community. And I hope to be able to do something similar again in the future.

This group of fit pros embraced the project and had so much fun together, including me, who spent more time behind the camera than getting sweaty for this research. None of the instructors who were paired up knew each other before this project, but I know friendships were formed from it. Everyone respected one another. They valued their time in a new class and learning a new skill. I also love that no one in this group took themselves too seriously. They weren’t bothered by the fact that they appeared as novice students instead of experts in every damn thing, which is how clients may view their favorite fit pro. But I hope this project showed everyone that fitness professionals are real people and their imperfections in other types of classes make them honest and relatable. The four instructors in this project laughed and learned from their mistakes and applauded their small wins. And the instructors leading the class were their biggest cheerleaders. This group embraced this experience and appreciated each other’s work. And for that, this fitness blogger is grateful!