Give Trainers a Role in Rehab
By: Ulrik Larsen
Weakness
Personal trainers, however, increasingly face three challenges in this context of injury, challenges that I believe will require them to evolve in order to hold their own beyond the short term.
Firstly, far too many clients seem to get injured, and with injuries come complications. Some clients bring injuries with them into the gym; these will test the developing relationship between clients and trainer at an early stage. Others sustain their injuries through their gym activities, and there seem to be very few who can be trained consistently over many months without getting injured.
My impression is that people do not seem to stay injured for as long as they used to (most injuries I see associated with personal training regimes could not be described as persistent or severe), but it is striking how easily gym goers seem to get injured, particularly in the first few months, as bodies are pushed to their limits, forced to adapt and remodel.
Could it be that as a greater proportion of the populations seek out a healthier lifestyle, the newcomers to the gym are more high-risk to start with – people who would in the past never have dreamt of acquiring a regular exercise habit but who are now seeking direction and advice to back up their best efforts? As a personal trainer do you immediately send all your keen new recruits off to a physiotherapist or chiropractor for remedial work, and risk never seeing them again?
Secondly, there’s is usually an implicit expectation among gym-goers that their minor ongoing injuries are going to get better simply as a result of their getting into a routine, becoming fitter and working with a personal trainer. Put another way, it seems that people increasingly expect personal trainers to be able to sort out their grumpy lower back or niggling knee injury. Are personal trainers aware of this? And are they qualified for this challenge?
Unfortunately the current baseline standard of training for personal trainers makes it truly a gamble as to whether the client’s injury will improve, stay the same or even deteriorate as they get into their new fitness regime.
Many personal trainers are unaware of the key fact that physical training in the context of pain changes everything. Much higher levels of specificity, caution and biomechanical understanding are necessary if the trainer is to have a beneficial rather than a detrimental effect.
Thirdly, while no research has yet confirmed this, it is highly likely that injury plays a part in the drop-out rate of clients from regular gm-going. They get frustrated, lose their exercise momentum, and either stop seeing the personal trainer because they have lost confidence on them, or probably more commonly, stop going to the gym altogether.
Opportunities
Winning client loyalty
With years of experience and continuing advanced professional development, personal trainers become more confident and competent at knowing what to do about injuries. This in turn attracts longer-term loyalty from clients, especially where the trainer has played a positive part in their rehabilitation injury. Greater client satisfaction is the key to the sustainability of personal training businesses.
This is the direction in which the whole personal training industry needs to move, not just those trainers who opt to specialize more in rehab work. Why? Because the general public is asking for it, and because I believe, it is the right way to go: it is better that members are steady users of gyms and personal trainers than of allied health services. I know in one sense I am talking myself out of a job!
Greater work satisfaction
To be an active part of helping to free people from pain is rewarding work: much more so than slaving solely to amass money in the bank, or, for that matter, just handing out the latest ‘rehab drill’ without understanding what the purpose is. With new competence will come new confidence in what the trainer is doing with an injured body part.
Alongside greater skill acquisition comes greater intellectual stimulation for the trainer, as they come to understand how injuries are created, what movement patterns need to be corrected, and how to work with referrers. And personal trainers will be able to help create a virtuous circle. Their training approach will be safe and more geared to prevention as they understand the details of which movement patterns predispose to injury.