I don’t know about anyone else, but after 16 years in TEFL I still find it difficult to fit teaching, lesson planning, CPD, family life and a decent amount of exercise into my week. I’ve therefore come up with some ways of combining physical exertion and TEFL:

 Hang from the ceiling to monitor pairwork.

 Do the splits to get down to the right level to monitor pairwork.

 Bounce up and down when crouching to monitor pairwork to exercise your thighs.

 Crouch to monitor pairwork with a dumbbell on your shoulders.

 Sprint towards students who have misunderstood the instructions or who want to ask questions. (Starting blocks can help with this).

 Fill the hollow legs of the classroom chairs with sand to make them heavier and so better exercise when you move them around.

 Carry students on their chairs when you want them to move to new positions, e.g. when changing pairs.

 Use hardback copies of dictionaries, Swan, etc.

 Throw those hardback books around the room rather than passing them.

 Use a medicine ball rather than a beachball for getting to know you activities.

 Attach the class dictionaries etc to the table at the front of the room by one of those exercise rubber band things so you have to stretch it when you want to show something to a student (also a good way of making sure they don’t get stolen and are returned to the right place at the end of the lesson). Can also do something similar with magnets.

 Attach some vital books to the teachers’ room in the same way.

 Demonstrate word and sentence stress but jumping up and down on a drum.

 Attach the projector remote control to one of those things you squeeze with your hand to exercise your forearms, programmed so that the projector goes off every time you let go.

 Replace the projector remote control with a stepladder up to the buttons on the projector (also a good way of avoiding technical problems).

 Cover the whole room with whiteboards with little hand and foot holds so the teacher can climb up to the ceiling etc to write on them. (Taking away the whiteboard eraser will force them to use the whole room each time).

 Fix the tape recorder to an exercise bike, with cueing and playing of the cassette done by pedaling forwards and backwards at various speeds.

 Etch commonly used pairwork cards from Communication Games etc into steel (rather than just photocopying them onto coloured paper).

 Detach the whiteboard from the wall and move it around the classroom during the lesson, e.g. so that you can clearly mark different parts of the lesson or to put the mistakes straight on there while monitoring pairwork.

Tried any of these? Any more keep fit tips? Have your say below: