Fit for purpose
The pandemic lockdown sparked a rise in live-streamed exercise classes and the online sessions are still popular with people who can’t make it to a gym. But a new study has found that the performance and engagement of participants in the classes can suffer because of communication issues.
Researchers examined the differences in verbal and non-verbal communication between in-person and live-streamed yoga classes. They looked at how participants interacted with the instructors and other members of the class and where there were gaps in communication.
The types of interaction were split into four phases: instruction, observation (learning), enactment and observation (assessment). During the in-person classes, the phases repeated without any interruption. However, the online sessions were much more vulnerable to potential interruptions causes by the different environment.
Verbal communication was sorted into three categories – instruction, feedback and social interaction – while forms of non-verbal communication included pose demonstration, physical interaction and observation. Researchers found that the amount of time spent giving individual feedback to class members was significantly lower in the online classes. Instructors also spent 6.6 times longer demonstrating poses in live-streamed sessions than during in-person classes.
The study, published in the journal Ergonomics, said: “We can summarise challenges in the current form of live-streamed exercise programmes as: (1) the limitations of instructors in assessing each participant’s performance; (2) the lack of individual feedback provided by instructors, which might be associated with difficulties in assessing performance; and (3) the absence of hands-on feedback in remote formats.”
