It’s weird how it took until mid-January before I got a chance to try out the new Power Step class that was released back in December. And to sum it up it’s a really fun release, it has lots of energy, good transitions in the choreography and the music is… not terrible.
What surprised me was how unbalanced it felt front-to-back. For the chest track it felt like I could handle another 10kg on the bar while the back track absolutely killed my lower back with the starter weights. I’ve had a bit of a break from my strength training while focusing on Body Pump so that could explain it but I shouldn’t have developed an imbalance of this magnitude this quickly. Could be just lower-back fatigue combined with too much office work this week. Hopefully it’s not an injury about to happen… My technique deteriorated to a point where I simply had to put down the weights.
They included a slow moving Clean & Press movement in the “arms and shoulder” track which I think can be confusing to a lot of people who are used to the more fast-paced Clean & Press in Body Pump class. I’m guessing the idea here is to work the front and side of the deltoids by essentially turning the movement into a sort of Upright Row followed by a grindy Push Press. But that is what makes it weird. Clean and Press for me is a power movement, you are supposed to do it explosively to develop power output. That is why it’s a Push Press at the end where you utilize your legs to power thru the movement and not a regular Press. It’s counter-intuitive to use leg-drive with no real speed or power to actually help push the weights up. When you do it slowly it just becomes a regular Press with a lot of unnecessary movement involved.
Ideally you do the real Clean & Press as early as possible in the program, explosively and with very few repetitions as maintaining good form is crucial. Curls on the other hand are a typical auxiliary exercise for me. Something you throw in at the end of a program to please your macho ego. You can simply grind the curls and fatigue your arms completely as you know you’ll be done with the workout after the curls. So to me these two exercises do not belong together. I realize the idea here is to fatigue the biceps to put more emphasis on the side delts for the Upright Row. But then, in my opinion, it should be simply that, curls plus rows.
It’s odd that we even do curls in Power Step class at all, seeing how little time we spend with the bar in the first place. But of course, if you cut back on arm and ab work people would complain, so I see how this can be tricky to program. They got it right about a year back with the Close Grip Pushups + Upright Row superset. It doesn’t get much more streamlined than that. That is what I want to see more of. Quick transitions, simple, safe and efficient compound exercises. Keep the complexity to the step/cardio parts of the class where it adds to the fun aspect of the class and keep it simple in the strength based parts.