I had my first day of classes today. The class is some 28 people, which was larger than I expected, and apparently surprised the teacher, too. I don't know if that's like they have at unis - they over-enrol, expecting that a large number will drop out quickly, leaving a decent class size afterwards.
About 2/3 are men, and 1/3 women. About half are young (21 or under), and the other half quite varied. I noticed one Indian or Sri Lankan man, one Asian man, and one Israeli woman, otherwise all pretty whitebread.
Nobody was obese or super-skinny. A couple of people were overweight, and there are at least three smokers - the smoking surprised me. There are about three people with obviously fit and strong physiques, and a couple of men who are obviously just strong. The rest look pretty ordinary.
First classes were pretty bureaucratic stuff. "Risk". You can't just say, "hey, who was the dickhead who put this bench press right in the doorway? Let's move it." Nope, it all has to be written down, what is the hazard, what could happen, how likely is it, get a numerical value for the risk, recommend a response... etc.
But cheffing had HACCP (hazard analysis of critical control points) which was almost exactly the same thing but for cooking - "no, it's a bad idea to defrost the chicken on the bench overnight" etc. In theory everyone is constantly filling out forms and writing out procedures, in practice people just take normal care of things and tick boxes so that if anyone sues you, you can say, "hey look, a piece of paper with boxes ticked, see? Can't blame us." The teacher didn't say that, that was just my HACCP experience
I suppose it is useful to formalise things for people who aren't used to thinking things through in that thorough way.
It seems that the classes are pretty easy-going in that each session or day they want to teach you X, and once they're satisfied you've got the idea, the session is over, bye-bye go home.
Two days a week will be some kind of gym session - learning and coaching - and one day a week, far as I can tell, will be theory - anatomy and the like I suppose.