Personal trainer tips to be able to QUICKLY modify exercises for ANY client
Hey coaches and athletes. I’m Michael Hughes movement specialist and co founder of Gymnazo EDU. Have you ever benched a client before in a workout? Or have you ever been benched by coach? It’s kind of a bummer, isn’t it? Now as a coach, I made the mistake of doing that to an athlete of mine. She was pretty uncoordinated in not very good with a jump rope. She kept tripping on the rope and wasted so much time getting her cadence dialed in that essentially an entire round of workout was wasted. My heart’s desires to save her from herself and just get her heart rate up and give her a good workout. At the time, I was more traditionally trained and had learned much about behavioral science or trying to get into the mindset of an athlete. I said, Hey, let me take that rope from you. And just how about you just do really fast initial range, your bodyweight squats, this would let her focus on her legs and get the cardio that I was intending. Originally the exercise to give her without running into issues or messing up a good tweak I thought it would be. Well the truth is that people pay to feel important, valued and special. They do not pay to feel embarrassed, uncoordinated. de-conditioned old, like a failure of a workout. My habit of taking them out of a failed exercise attempt made them feel like a failure and invoked a negative emotion in their workout and into my product or my business experience. It was the exact opposite of my intention. Now the truth was that I wasn’t smart enough at the time, to give them the right shift within the exercise to make them feel cared for special and ultimately successful. Today, I’d like to talk to you about the power of making the right micro modification. We call them tweaks which keep an athlete doing an exercise that you designed and keep the workout balanced, but to in a way that an athlete will feel and be truly successful. Let’s dive in. And be sure to hit the thumbs up and subscribe button. It really helps out this channel and helps more people see our content and inspire them to think differently about how we train and condition our bodies. My team and I joke that our clients call our exercise tweaks magic. If you can grasp the concepts in this video, you’re learning the basic ways to tweak an exercise that will help you as a coach or a self directed athlete basically have better gains or muscle shape and movement functionality to have more sustainability in your workouts that enable you to workout more with less joint stresses. Also, you can avoid workout boredom from doing the same things over and over again, with no variety and keep you from hitting physical training plateaus that rob you from progress now to ecology essentially, is the fish the changing of a movement for desired purpose. Now this can be done in many ways. We need you to basically have the best understanding of all the variables that we have at our disposal. So we can enhance our athletes ability or your ability to maximize movement. The question that we must ask ourselves first is is what is the chain reaction what is the process that we want to enhance with our exercises or action. Now a chain reaction is the summation of all the motions of each joint that a movement requires. As an example if we have like a into your lunch, right? We need to be capable to see what each part of the bodies job is until allow those movements to be done at the minimum level of success. With an example like an anterior lunge, let’s kind of break down what’s going on. Now at the ankle joint we essentially have dorsi flexion, the sagittal plane and the funnel transverse plane we have kind of pronation or version at the knee joint. satirically we have flexion frontal plane, we have abduction. Interpretation, the transverse plane hip, also sagittal plane flexion, hip adduction and also transverse plane rotation. And we have to understand how all those motions come together to see what’s actually going on. Now in reference to tweakology, as a coach, I want to enhance motion or movement. Now motion is defined by a specific pattern of a joint as I just described, of movement is all the motions or sequences coming together. Let’s start by talking about kind of eight fundamental movements or actions to have a reference for the fundamental movements that we have access to just kind of talk about them. First, again, as I described, we have a lunge, then what we call a squat coming in next. And then we have this thing called the lift, right, I’ll use like a power block to kind of boom, boom, lift them up. Then from there, instead of a weighted action, we have like a reach, which would be kind of like no weight motion. They have a push thing like a medicine ball pass or benchpress. Then we have a pull, think about like a pull up or grab a viper and do a big rope pattern. Then we have a jump, right? But I can include leaping like glute hopping, and then we have this thing called locomotion. And that’s essentially Running, shuffling, skipping anything that takes us from point A to point B, on our feet or hands. Now, each movement requires a bunch of specific motions throughout the body. Once we understand the movement or the action, and then the chain reaction of that movement, we have the power to create the optimal environment for the athlete or for you to ultimately succeed. But we must ask ourselves, what do I want to facilitate this motion, or the movement for what’s the intention of it. Ultimately, it will depend on your athlete or your personality, your sport, or the job that they are you most commonly do, or the amount of discomfort will move you feeling when the exercise that they are doing isn’t working. Now putting this into a live session or workout, we’ll need to reference our toolbox and knowledge we use 10 observational Central’s to guide the options and the tweaks that we offer. Now, these observational Central’s our environment, position, driver direction, height, distance, action, load, rate, and duration. And I’ll show you detailed examples of each of these later in the video. But before I do if you’re a coach an established brand or franchise or not, or an athlete yourself having the ability to understand tweaking will make you the coach to train with or enable you the athlete to create workouts with much more creativity, sustainability, and enhanced results. If you are a coach, remember, everyone wants to feel important. Thus being that coach provides slight tweaks to each workout throughout this attend will only give them more value and make you much more valuable to them. Again, for coaches or trainers watching this. The most important key for this video is that we hold the mindset that is our job to create a workout environment that enables our athletes to be successful, the more we can understand how the body moves, and what variables we have at our disposal, we’re able to make subtle changes that enhance the body and the mind to create more value. And this is the ultimate win win. Okay, let’s see some application, I’m going to use the exercise a single hand dumbbell clean to overhead press to show you how we can tweak it nine different ways without changing the action or the fundamental movement. The first one I’m going to enhance or tweak is the environment. The environment is a sum of our surroundings, conditions and influences. Let’s talk about how I can do this wait like me, ideally, maybe like a wood wedge, right? If I do that clean overhead press, I put my ankles into much more dorsiflexion much more cab loading. What if I go to this BOSU. And I’m not an unstable environment. Right now I have to control the body much more to do that to do that clean to overhead press. And that makes a big difference. What about position right? Now position is a placement of the body. There are six basic ones prone, supine sideline, sitting upright and kneeling. Let’s show kneeling. If I do a clean, impressive kneeling, what am I changing my alternating? Well, now my lower body doesn’t have a whole lot of motion to move from I have my hips, but I’ve lost a single kind of leg knee ankle complex, right? What about driver now that’s moving the body parts of the body that make the chain reaction? Well, typically when I do a clean, depressing sore with my, my legs, my hips, I drive up and I create momentum through this dumbbell, well, I can change that by maybe doing the arm only and make the driver come through my hand versus through my legs changes the exercise a lot. Another one is direction, this is the angulation or the line of action. So if I do a cleaned overhead press, I can still go overhead. If I maybe go to the side. Or if I maybe do a rotational press, I change my angle of attack. That’s a big, big change in the shoulder, I can also changed my height, that’s the vertical measure relative to the body or the ground, I typically start to clean depress from ankle heights to go overhead.
But what if I start at hip height? Ooh, a lot more of a challenge for my upper body, then I can change distance. This is a horizontal measure relative to the body or the ground. So what if I changed my my leg position what if I go here and kick back? Whoo, I don’t shifted my entire body backwards, had much more extension that I had to decelerate through my hip, core and arm. Then I can change load, right? So simple an overall weight or an implement on the body simply took take the rack out, boom, I got a lighter load. That’s a very simple one, but certainly a powerful one. Then I can do rate perfect. This is the speed or the response of a movement, right? So just go faster through that pattern. Good thing I had a lighter weight, ready to rock and roll. That would definitely change again how the position went. And then of course The ninth one is duration. How long a movement is performed for I know that I did about three or four reps? What if it did 20 reps? What if you did it for two minutes straight. So you can see how those nine different tweaks make a huge change to the same exact action. And again, the action describes the movement, right? This is what I want to tweak if I can’t tweak any of the nine that I showed you before. But remember, the goal is not to make a full action tweak for that as a dramatic change. The goal is to keep the same action, but apply only the other nine options in a workout. From a coaching perspective. This keeps the athletes body and mindset, not really noticing that they’re doing anything different from others, or biasing from the original program intention. From an athletes perspective, it keeps your workout focused on its original purpose, and provides ways to optimize the results lets you finish a workout, fit a hit a painful movement or makes you avoid boredom and plateau in your training. Take note though, if an action or an exercise is very painful than a more dramatic tweak, change is needed to keep your athlete or yourself in a workout at a sustainable level for that day. I always remember that every single athlete walks into our facility or any gym, bringing with them some movement dysfunction, it is only a matter of time when not if they experienced some sort of movement, pain or limitation while training this is whether they are feeling something in a workout or working in their yard and then come to work out the next day already feeling it from a coaching perspective, we are going to have to know how to tweak for it. And the better we are at it the more loyal and trusted we become. This is a huge competitive advantage for you and your business and tweaking is one of the most valuable skills you can have as a trainer or self directed athlete because it allows you to adapt to every situation any client or workout may have. But to really get a good at being tweaking exercises and tweak them with intention and on the fly. first have to understand the biomechanics of the body, how you tweaking exercises up or down or enter in or out dramatically changes how the muscles are being used. And therefore the results of any person this is all stuff we consider and our multi dimensional movement coaching program and our mini courses. So if you’re interested in honing in your ability to tweak exercises and understand the biomechanics behind those tweaks, check out the links in the description below. If you have any questions about anything that I talked about in this video, drop those in the comments below as well. See you next time
Leave a Reply