Wow!
Over 130 shares, over 230 comments and almost 700 likes.
This post sparked a bigger conversation than I expected.
If you didn’t read my article, When Performance Replaced Teaching – A Manifesto to the Fitness Industry, go ahead and read it here within the FB group or go straight to my blog here.
I’ve read through the comments, the stories, the agreement, and the pushback, and here’s what I’m hearing underneath all of it.
But first, I want to acknowledge something honestly.
Yes, the way I wrote the original post was a bit spicy. That was intentional. I’ve written about this topic before in gentler ways, and those posts were often overlooked because they weren’t jarring enough. I’m glad this one finally got people to stop their scroll.
Now that I have your attention, I want to be clear about what my stance is and what it isn’t.
This isn’t an attack on any specific format, program, or genre.
It’s not anti-performance, anti-music, or anti-creativity.
And it’s definitely not about shaming instructors who love what they do. I am genuinely grateful that formats of all kinds have helped get people off the sofa and moving.
What this is about, is the priority of actually teaching, so that performance can be balanced with instruction.
And what concerns me since posting the article, is that about 95% of the comments were in agreement, and the article was shared over 130 times, with over 230 comments and almost 700 likes. That tells me this isn’t an isolated opinion! Many people have been feeling the same thing but haven’t felt safe saying it publicly.
What I have been noticing is that when performance, choreography, or hitting musical moments becomes the primary focus, (not with all instructors, there instructors who have a great balance) I see students not understanding or falling behind. And the students most affected are usually the ones we never hear from. They don’t comment or complain. They just stop coming.
I also want to name something important here. Many instructors entered the industry after song-structure teaching became the norm. They may not know there are other ways to teach classes – and it’s not their fault. If anything, it raises a bigger question – that somewhere along the line, the industry failed to offer instructors a fuller set of teaching tools.
I also feel strongly that formats should place more emphasis on making sure instructors truly understand how to teach their own format, not just how to perform or memorize choreography. Certifying large numbers of instructors quickly may be efficient, but it doesn’t always serve the long-term success of instructors or students. It’s worth asking whether certifications should go deeper and have their certification sessions last longer than a single day or weekend. For context, my own certification academy takes four months for instructors to complete. Personally, I would rather have a few hundred instructors teaching impeccably than a few hundred thousand teaching mediocrity.
I also understand that social media shows only 60-second clips, not full classes. But those clips matter because they are often the first impression a potential student sees. For someone new to movement, seeing a clip where the instructor is performing advanced choreography can be intimidating. That content may excite other instructors, but it may quietly turn away the very people we say we want to serve.
So I think it’s worth asking – who these clips are for?
Are they meant to show other instructors how cool the choreography is or how you perform it?
Or are they meant to help a new student feel, “I can do this”?
Now, I noticed that the quiet majority showed up loudly in this thread, with instructors saying, “I’ve felt this.”
That tells me something important. The industry isn’t broken, but parts of it may have failed to fully support instructors in how to teach, not just what to teach.
For transparency, this perspective comes from the work I do inside the SharQui Instructor Academy, where I train instructors to teach with clarity, safety, and structure using a beat-based approach. The focus is not on memorizing choreography, but on understanding how to build, cue, and progress movement so students can follow, succeed, and stay.
I’m also currently developing The SharQui Beat System™, an expanded, teaching framework for instructors of ALL modalities and formats. This work is rooted in pedagogy first, so creativity and performance can be layered on top without sacrificing the student experience.
So I’d love for us to move forward with a different question:
How do we keep the magic and also make sure more people feel successful in the room?
Because when students succeed, they stay.
When they stay, communities grow.
And when teaching improves, everyone wins.
Let’s talk about it. And yes, this includes Aqua, Pilates, Barre, Yoga, and beyond.
Instruct & Inspire,
Oreet
rather than the song structure. This work is rooted in pedagogy first, so creativity and performance can be layered on top without sacrificing the student experience.