Why a New Model of Training Is the Answer
The #1 fitness trend for the past couple years has been HIIT style training. It’s so popular it’s not only a buzz word in the training community, but now clients search for it and want that specific style of training.
As the fitness community becomes more and more obsessed with how to train daily in high intensity workouts, do you know what else has been trending? A 144% increase in workout related injuries. A recent study from J Sports Med Phys Fitness released a study showing the link between HIIT style training and the rise of workout related injuries. Link.
Does this really surprise any of us?
We know if pushed too hard too often the body breaks down because there is no time or support for the body’s natural ability to restore and heal itself. It drove me crazy as a trainer. There is nothing worse to me than having someone strain or pull something in your workout and not know how to help them. I used to get so upset at myself for not knowing how to help them. It fueled me to become OBSESSED with finding a way to stop injuries in the first place.
I went to a 2 day conference that changed everything for me. It gave me what I had been looking for: a way to address pain in workouts AND be able to pinpoint actual causes of pain so I could solve for it in my programming. It opened my eyes to the #1 flaw in the fitness industry I experienced as a trainer. It’s that trainers are only taught how to build strength, skills and fitness with clients who DO NOT have movement dysfunctions.
When is the last time you ever trained ANYONE who was free of movement dysfunction or didn’t have some limitation present that would impact their training in the first 30 days of training with you? It’s not often. And it’s certainly not clients over 40 years old. The years I’d spent in college, certifications all taught me how to train clients who came to me free and clear of pain. There was NO training on what to do if they had consistent pain in movement. It was as though it wasn’t anything I’d deal with or ever be professionally asked how to handle. The assumption I had for years was, “Oh no, you’re in pain? Go see a doctor, that’s above my pay grade.”
Now put yourself in your clients’ shoes for a second. You’re the client, you just did a workout with a coach you trusted, you got hurt and their only response is to send you packing to a medical professional? How does that sound? Kind of like making your problems someone else’s responsibility? Like a professional hand off? To me it sounds like bad customer service. To further complicate the situation, how many clients tweak something in your workout that’s not bad enough to go see a doctor (in their mind) and you know they won’t book an appointment to get checked out? In those cases, what do you most likely to recommend? To rest and ice? To take a week off from training? Have you ever tried to tell a Type A client to recover on their own? It doesn’t go over well in my experience. And even if they do return to you to train, they 9 times out of 10 they decide they are fine to do other forms of activity that often exacerbate the problem.
So I made it my mission to figure out how to help clients of mine who experienced pain AND try to minimize their risk of injury by doing two important things:
1- programming in restoration with my performance exercises
2- making warm ups and cool downs a non-negotiable part of any workout
I now stand firmly behind this statement: “If your body got there with bad movement, it can fix itself with good movement.” Since then I’ve build a new model of training that has been tested, refined and reviewed by over 500 of my clients and I know it works. If it works for me, it can work for you.
I’ve made it my mission to bring this to the industry to help raise the professional standards of all fitness coaches and personal trainers. We can offer a much higher degree of service and keep our clients from becoming another statistic of workout related injuries. MultiDimensional Movement members just went through the first module that reveals:
- The secret to success in this industry and in life
- The formula that is the metric for how I can predict a coach’s success
- How to master and retain the science I’m going to condense from a decade of learning into weeks of education
- The tactical breakdown on how together we can change the fitness industry and raise the bar
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