Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Being a Part-Time ZIN

Today, I find myself feeling a little (gasp) jealous of the ZINs out there who have made a career out of teaching Zumba. I'm just feeling really divided between by 9-5 career and my interest in growing and developing as a fitness instructor. Not to mention, I feel schizophrenic transitioning from my work day to my after-work classes, and am usually way too tired to do anything else when I finally get home.

Things I would like to do if I didn't have a regular 9-5:
  • Get my ACE or AFAA certification
  • Get trained in Zumba Step and add it to my class schedule
  • Start teaching kickboxing classes
  • Teach dance to kids (something I did 10+ years ago and loved!)
  • Choreograph a lot more, so that I could introduce a new song every 7-10 days (currently, I do 1-2 new songs a month)

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my regular job. I work at a non-profit doing important work that I care about, with great colleagues. I'm lucky. I also know that I could, in theory, become a full-time fitness instructor like many of you have. At this point, it's only theoretical because of small things like health insurance and steady income that contributes to slowly trimming my mortgage each month. But, I'm sure you can make sacrifices to make the full-time fitness instructor thing work. I haven't ruled it out as a maybe-someday kind of idea.

To the part-time ZINs, how do you balance it all?
And to the full-time fitness instructors, how do you make it work?

3 comments:

  1. U need to teach 15+ classes a week to be profitable. But 15 Zumba® way too hard on ur body and will end up with overuse injuries. Need a variety of formats to make it work successfully.

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  2. Oh my gosh! Lol you just described my life! 8-5 job and my love Zumba after work. I wish I did Zumba full time!
    How to balance it all, it can be done! I work 8-5 Monday thru Friday. Zumba is Monday -Thursday 6-8pm. After that it's my Daughter Alexus who's 8 1/2 & my loving husband Joe! I try to squeeze in grocery shopping during my 30 minute lunch! I also started doing Zumba Saturday morings! So I leave Saturday evenings and Sunday to Family time & house work. It's a busy go go all the time, but without Zumba I'd be lost, depressed, tired & feeling miserable!

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  3. SCHEDULING and DISCIPLINE.
    As long as Zumba stays that "personal/community growth"/ "fun time- energy relief", then you will only see it as a benefit, especially when you start getting paid more and more for it. But stay true to your life purpose and alter your zumba time to what's truly important, if that's not done already.

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