EARLY HISTORY
Following the closure of the Les Mills International forums at www.lesmills.com, this left a community of fitness instructors on the internet “stranded”. The abrupt closure resulted in other unofficial forums springing up on the internet. These forums I felt had flaws, and at that point in time I was only a newly trained instructor in BODYCOMBAT (December 2003)
BTSTALK.COM IS BORN – 19TH JANUARY 2004
For some time I had been considering registering domain names and researching forum software. I already had a reliable host due to another website I was running. So on 19th January 2004 I registered www.btstalk.com. Back then the Les Mills programs were also widely known as “Body Training Sytems”, hence the acronym “BTS”.
PERSONAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Not long after the initial launch of this site, I did my BODYBALANCE training in March 2004, as well as sitting the course for Certificate 3 in Fitness, which was a new requirement in Australia. Later in December 2004 I went on to do my BODYPUMP training aswell.
This kept me pretty busy teaching classes plus working a part time job as well……..not to mention running the forum too……phew!!!!
BTSTALK grows
Meanwhile BTSTALK continued to grow. BTSTALK reached 300 members in July 2004, growing to a massive 1,500 members in June 2005. This huge growth in members meant that BTSTALK hit the milestone of 100,000 posts in August 2005.
As BTSTALK grew in size, this revealed the lack of clear rules or clear direction of the forum. This resulted in formal forum rules being drawn up and posted in March 2005, and have thankfully provided a clearer direction and future for the forum.
BTS & LMI IN AMERICA “SPLIT”
In May 2005, the BTS agent in the USA for Les Mills International “split”. At the time this caused quite a stir, and left the name of this website as “btstalk” in doubt. Waiting to see what would eventuate following “the split”, I did nothing. I waited to see how things would turn out and whether there would be a requirement to look into a new name. This has resulted in the birth of this new forum, and new url www.groupfitness.com, to more generically cover the growing field of group fitness classes.