Give Trainers a Role in Rehab
By: Ulrik Larsen
New Skills
Personal trainers must continue to develop their skills of exercise prescription, functional muscle training, postural assessment, and their repertoire of flexibility and fitness modalities. But there is a separate and different stream of knowledge which will upskill them toward safer training of the injured client. It is a small movement toward the physiotherapy skill-set, but should not alarm physios who know that they are good at (see below).
Remember that I am not addressing here those trainers who specialize in elite level sports, or those who undertake strength and conditioning work with the kinds of clients who are already responsible athletes (with very good baselines of strength and coordination).
Rather my concern is with general personal trainers running their businesses in gyms across the world – specifically they need more of the following skills in order to manage injuries:
Greater Competence and confidence in screening a client’s injury into ‘low injury risk’ or ‘high injury risk’ profiles (through specific questions and tests) for the purpose of knowing the priority and direction of referral.
Greater knowledge of functional anatomy, injury/pain behavior and how patho-mechanics and bad technique create injury. All clinical therapists, from physiotherapists to Alexander technicians, chiropractors, massage therapists and osteopaths, must have some understanding of patho-mechanics, in order to re-educate and retain clients successfully for long-term recovery. But what about the trainers on the front line? They, as much as any on the allied health spectrum, need a good grounding in how to pick up the often subtle indicators of poor muscle control.
Enhanced analytical skills to detect poor or pathological movement patterns. While some trainers have a vague sense of this skill, the vast majority hardly even understanding the concept, reflecting primarily the priorities of the institutions that educated them. Yet this is the critical observational skill-set, which will ensure that a personal trainer isn’t training their client towards an injury. Without it, they cannot meaningfully contribute to the rehabilitative process of any overuse injury.
New training principals that are safe and effective in the context injury. These would emphasize quality of movement for an injured body part as well as performance enhancement.
How to use these principals (with support from a physiotherapist) to design customized rehab strategies and exercises using equipment readily available in the gym.