400 hundred. That’s the number sitting on the graphic above, and it’s taken 2 years to get there.
I qualified as a Les Mills BODYCOMBAT instructor in August 2024, after roughly two years as a participant before that. Looking back, the class count was never really the goal. It’s just what happens when you keep showing up, week after week, across whichever gym happens to need you that day.
11 Venues – That number probably says more about the last 2 years than the 400 does. I haven’t taught from one home studio with a settled rota. I’ve taught at multiple venues in London, Kent and more, picking up wherever there was a room and a group waiting. And 115 of those 400 classes were covers, meaning someone else’s class, someone else’s regulars, walking in without knowing exactly who would be in the room or what they’d need from me that day.
That’s the part I’d want anyone reading this to take from it, more than the headline number. Reliability isn’t glamorous. It’s turning up to a cover class at a gym you don’t usually teach at, reading the room quickly, and making sure the people in front of you get a good class regardless. Over 2 years, that adds up to something, even if no single one of those 115 covers felt like a milestone at the time.
This project has always been about nutrition first. The 127kg to 82kg transformation happened before any of this, and I don’t want teaching BODYCOMBAT to get credit for work that food and consistency did. But BODYCOMBAT is what turned fitness into something I actually love, rather than something I do because I should. Going from someone standing in the back row 2 years before qualifying, to someone teaching cover classes at gyms I’d never set foot in before, is its own kind of proof that consistency beats intensity over the long run.
It also hasn’t been a straight line. There was a rotator cuff tear and surgery that forced a break from teaching, and classes I had to hand over during that time. Recovery is as much a part of this number as the classes themselves. 2 years of teaching includes the weeks I couldn’t.
If you’re earlier in your own journey, whatever that looks like, the number that matters isn’t 400. It’s whatever your equivalent is of showing up somewhere you didn’t expect to, for people you didn’t know yet, and doing it well anyway.
This is my journey. Yours will be unique.