My Article in the Mencap Newletter

Bio

I am a fully qualified Yoga teacher with British Wheel of Yoga, level 4 with over 500 hrs.

I am fully insured with fitpro and a member of Cimpsa.

I can provide my certificates please contact me for more details.

My name is Esther Shortt. I was born in 1965. I am of mixed English, Nigerian heritage.
I was brought up by my mum, who divorced my dad when I was 2 years old. I always, knew about my dad, my mum mentioned, he had gone back to Nigeria and had opened a Medical centre as he was a Doctor.

I tried to find him over the years, with no success.
To cut a long story short, I finally rediscovered my dads location by accident through a colleague of my daughter, who happen to live in the same town in Nigerian as my dad’s medical centre.
I made contact to medical centre only to find my dad had sadly passed away 6 years ago.
I was informed that he had other children from his new marriage whilst he lived in Nigeria. I was delighted to discover that I had an extended side to the family, 4 half brothers, and a sister.
I was an only child, and dreamt about having siblings, and wished I had 4 little brothers, when I was a child. So here I was with a new extended family. My sister, has glaucoma and is visually impaired, and my youngest brother has downs syndrome.

I flew out to Nigerian and met my family in 2005. The initial meeting was an experience as I felt like I was being interrogated. This was obviously so that they can validate that I am the legitimate child from the same father and am not a fraudster.
They hid the little brother with down syndrome from me until the last day. I loved him and spent the last day in Nigerian talking to him.

When I left school, I worked in a travel agents and slowly trained as a fitness instructor. I needed a job that fitted around my young family, which is my 4 children

My family has grown and to date I now have 10 grandchildren.

I initially taught aerobics and extended that with diet, step and a variety of exercise classes, boxercise, yoga, pilates, aqua, Zumba, dance fit, body conditioning, legs bums and tums and many more over the 30 years. I am fully qualified and hold several certifications and teacher levels including a level 4 Yoga teacher BWY. I am fully insured to teach. (with lots of experience).

I have taught in health clubs and run my own community classes, in school, businesses, gyms, church halls and on my spa break fitness holidays.
I am very passionate about my job and have a lot of dedication to it and the lessons that I teach to the members.
My work has taken me into teaching classes, either one-to-one or in large groups, from able bodied to the not so abled bodied. I also had a visually impaired group and a deaf member, which I loved too as this really helped me build my verbal skills and the additional teaching considerations that I trained in to teach them effectively.

Going back to my brother; one day in class a young lady attended, she had Downs, I loved the smile on her face. The following week, a group of people attended the class from a day care centre along with my (normal) members. After the class I found that some of the normal class members were uncomfortable with the mixed class, so I had to simply tell them to find another class as everyone should have the opportunity to exercise.

My exercise classes branched out into working with the additional needs group, working for Mencap, which has been extensive during covid with the online classes.

Over this year, I have built up and and have been running a full timetable of classes online.
The transition to using the online technology was seamless for me, having previously built my own websites and generated 1000’s of videos from my own fitness platform. It took a little getting used to for my members, but over the time they have adapted really well to the ‘new normal’.

For the last 12 months, I have been running a full programme of online classes, accessible via the social media and private platforms;
Zoom, Vimeo, Facebook and Youtube. Range of classes; from Yoga, pilates, dance , LBT (Legs, Bums and Tums), Zumba and much more, depending on the demand.

I miss live sessions as the interaction, physical expressions and atmosphere was easy to drive and visually teach the class, but I do love the interaction, extra fun times and the positive smiles, including the discussions at the beginning and end of class between everyone participating on the online Zoom.

Recently I have been nominated for The Fit & Well Award Fitness Trainer of the year, and am currently in the top 4

My Online site is: https://www.myfitune.io/shorttfitness I can also be found on;
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shorttety/ Twitter
https://twitter.com/shorttety
Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/user