Review: Dance Masterclass – Guide to effective training with Luke Abnett
Yesterday I completed a short course on the Dance Masterclass platform (not to be confused with the ‘regular’ Masterclass). I’m not sure if there is any connection between the two businesses, but the aesthetics and structure are almost identical, the only real difference is that Dance Masterclass (naturally) only features professional dancers and related professionals. It was $49 AUD for a month long subscription (which I paid for myself) and this gives me access to the 100+ courses/classes/lessons that are on the platform already. There are LOTS of courses that I want to do, so I’m really excited to have a subscription now.
So yesterday I completed Luke Abnett’s ‘Guide to effective training’, and it was definitely worth doing.
At first I was kind of skeptical about the content because the course was so short that I managed it in one sitting, but the proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and in less than 24 hours I have already put into action everything I learnt and actually finished the course itself – the two most important metrics when assessing the quality/success of online education.
Overall, it was a good course, and the videos were well done (if a little short on the visuals). At only 5 videos totalling less than 30 minutes of watch time, this won’t be their meatiest course, but it was still worth doing. I found the downloadable workbook to be the most valuable thing about it, but the videos did give the course credibility and higher production value.
As with most online education, it helps if you have a real world situation or project that you can immediately apply your recent learning to, and I found this course to be really helpful for my latest work cycle.
The most important things I learnt from this course were: 1. how to safely increase your training load and 2. how to calculate the highest level of training intensity that can safely and sustainably be maintained without burning out or getting injured.
Surprisingly, I also found the warm up and cool down sections helpful too. I say surprisingly because I have many years of dancing and training experience, and I was already doing both things consistently. The revelation I had last night as I was working out, was that I had been doing them both wrong. And if not exactly ‘wrong’, I was certainly not doing them the best way possible – which meant that I wasn’t getting the most out of my training sessions, and I also wasn’t recovering properly.
I used the workbook to map out a 6 week training program for myself. I already had a draft one in place, but this content helped me to refine it and I now feel much more confident about what I’m committing myself to, and it’s taken the guesswork out of what I was doing. I’m not working with a qualified trainer on this training cycle, and so I was just kind of making it up as I went along.
Overall I’d give the course a 7/10 (taking into consideration my needs and situation). It’s a little on the light side content-wise, and you are probably only going to watch it if you have a specific need for this information, but if you’re in the market for this info, this is a good place to start.
As a side note, the user interface on Dance Masterclass is a bit of a pain. It looks pretty but there is no way to easily sort through the courses to quickly see what you’ve completed and what you still want to do. A wishlist/favourites type function would be a welcome addition so I could create a pipeline of courses I want to do and work through each one in order, rather than having to sift through 100 + courses every time.
- Linda ✌🏻
Trailer for Guide to effective training with Luke Abnett
Check out Dance Masterclass here