STOP Making your personal training clients sore – Tips for online Fitness Coaches
To watch the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/nFxQcGfjyEA
Ever gotten a virtual massage? I’m guessing no. And if you’ve been lucky enough to experience an in person massage, then you know how hands on it is and how physical it is. Now with everything these days moving online, for us trainers who use massage therapy techniques to help our clients, the big question is how do I use those hands on techniques through a screen. We’re going to cover that today.
Hey, coaches and athletes. I’m Michael Hughes movement specialist and co founder of Gymnazo Edu. I’m going to be talking about restoration, the tools you need and how to coach restoration practices virtually, as I go through this video and you find value that you can take to your practice in your personal fitness. Please hit the like and subscribe button it really helps out the channel and lets others see this kind of content and spread the word. So what is restoration? What does it mean? What is happening physiologically, when we restore our muscles and connective tissue? Well, restoration is referring to the normal state of health, and is the action or process of regaining growth control of the body’s biological capacity after it has been stress. What this means is it takes time, effort and action to rebuild the body’s tissues so they can come back bigger, faster, stronger. For the next workout. Check out this graph to get a visual on the different physiological sequential stages the bodies go through when in recovery mode. The example that I’m going to be using here is for the recovery mode is kind of after a hard intense workout, right? Okay, the first stage is acute inflammation. Now, inflammation happens no matter what. But we tend to think about inflammation as when we’re in a serious injury, but also happens at a smaller level post every workout. It’s ours after a workout and the white blood cells, Neutrophils are peaking to support the immune system. And they’re like first responders on the scene stabilizing the micro damage, then there is chronic inflammation that happens next, it hits days after depending on the severity of the workout. And other types of white blood cells come in those are macrophages and they are mobilizing to consume the dead or destroy tissue cells, or the micro damage from the workout and act like the cleanup crew to get the area ready for growth. Then our bodies hit this proliferation stage or massive growth or grow backstage. This comes on several days after the workout fibroblasts are starting to peak. And they are the foundational construction crew that bust out proteins and collagen, which formed the framework or the foundation for new connective tissue to be built on. Then our bodies finished with this matrix remodeling or rebuilding time. This phase is a few days after the workout. And this is where the vascularity is built or where new connective tissue has been built in and gets its plumbing turned on and is ready to contribute to the muscle system as a whole. What I really hope you take away from all that is if your clients or yourself do a super hard workout on Monday, the body can take up to a few days or a week or more in some cases to fully recover. What this means that if there’s any other super hard workout, like on a Tuesday or Wednesday or any other day, that same week, the body will need to take the same amount of time to recover from that workout, let alone the workout it just did a few days ago, what ends up happening is we start to get into this recovery deficit. And the body is always trying to catch up from the intense stressors. And it really never gets the opportunity to use its new growth potential in the following workouts. While this leads to amazing calorie burn, because the body has to work even harder and harder to get to the next hard workout and get to complete it actually starts to destroy the body’s tissues and subsequent movement patterns. Because it can never really catch up. Here’s another way to think about it. So you have $100 to invest but it takes two weeks, get your money back with interest. And every day you give 10 bucks to an investment where you end up running out of money by day 10 before we ever even get your original money back. So what happens on day 1112 13 You have to go and borrow money from other biological systems or muscle groups. We call this downward spiral the beginning of a movement training dysfunction. The bad part about this cycle is that it’s super common among general fitness goers and in their training process. And this downward spiral is what causes the vast majority of fitness injuries and therefore the challenge is a consistent into a workout program. So then we go to a physical therapy provider chiropractor, orthopedist, podiatrist, to try to get this fix, just get back to start the whole process all over again because nothing really changed and how we go about our fitness process. So if you look at the top professionals or even amateur athletes who have been playing their game for the longest time, they all say the same thing. The most important thing they focus on in their training and conditioning is the recovery process. They understand how much training is too much and how long When they should push it hard, or most importantly, when not to All right, you’re ready for the brain explosion. We at Gymnazo Edu believe athletes should avoid getting sore as much as controllable for the training setting they’re in. Because soreness is excessive overload to the connective tissue system. However, since it is extremely hard to figure out when too much is actually too much, we advise to start light then progress and always incorporate restoration as an insurance or as an intentional investment to ensure your clients growth and to avoid picking up overuse or negative movement compensations that always seem to come from well, nowhere right. Now we created a general scale to measure when our programming for small group functional fitness is too much for any given client. And here it is. When it musculoskeletal soreness post workout lasts for less than 24 hours, we say the programming and the client workout threshold was generally acceptable. When the muscular skeletal soreness post workout lasts for more than 24 hours up to 48 hours. It trigger us to make an adjustment to the programming and to better manage the client’s workout threshold. Now when the musculoskeletal soreness post workout lasts for more than 72 hours. This is when we think it’s unacceptable. And major shifts the programming and the client intensity control should be understood, addressed and educated on. So with all that. Now let’s talk about how we take some commonly used restorative techniques and tools that can be used for virtual training. Here are the tools that we use for soft tissue work with our virtual clients. We’ve got a foam ball, foam roller, massage gun, and a cane. We use these in our practice virtually because a they are very versatile in what they can do. And they also have kind of different price budgets that certain members can afford or some members say gosh, that’s something I want on my on my Christmas list. So for the foam ball, a tight zoned area to get into armpits, ribcage, hip flexors, groins, rollers for the broad surface, the quads, the hamstrings, the glutes, lateral core, and then this amazing cane that can get kind of wrapped around behind the body a lie to get into tighter niche areas that like a lacrosse ball or tennis ball could. But you can use this by not needing to be on the ground or against a wall, you can be sitting standing and control the addressable tissue with your hands versus with your bodyweight. We love these tools. And here’s some tools that we use for stretching with our virtual training. MOBE stick chair kinda is like a coffee table sofa and a doorway, right. When working with any client including virtual training, we look for multiple connection points for stability. And we’re very intention about keeping our bodies integrated with gravity and ground reaction forces as possible. This strategy trains the proprioception is for or the movement nears right to understand and align with the mobility that we are creating with our clients. Now, I’m not saying that open chain stretching, like lying on your back with a strap on your heel is bad, but I am saying is limited. Now after considering all that we’ve covered. How can all this be integrated and coached in a virtual training session, we’d like to follow a particular formula for active intentional recovery. For our virtual group training. We’ve got this from the gray suit, and it’s called melt, mold move or soft tissue work stretching and light exercise. And we follow this formula step by step. However, before I go into exactly what we do, we have to consider who are athletes and their homes and their setup would be like, because we want them to have top shelf recovery experience from a virtual session. Our primary strategy was they need to have access to affordable and versatile equipment. This came out to be the MOBE stick and the trigger point tools and you get that for about 100 bucks. However, you can really get any one of these things just like a PVC pipe and lacrosse ball or tennis ball, you get that for about 10 bucks. What I recommend for any trainer is that you do anything you can deliver quality and greater margins for your business. This can help out a client get amazing equipment based on your recommendations and you can make a percentage on it. Well, that’s a win win.
All you have to do is set up a wholesale account with each company or a seller’s account on Amazon. This does take a bit of your work, but your business is worth it and your clients will need to get some products from somewhere might as well be from their trusted movement coach. Okay, I want to show you exactly how we offer a virtual restorative service. We start with a 45 minute session so you can easily fit into anybody’s day or work schedule. Then we break it up into three chunks, a 20 minute soft tissue work, a 20 minute dynamic stretching and then a five minute movement or Restabilization time. Let me show you exactly what we do. So we’ll start with soft tissue and we have a strategy and a time technique that we follow. And it’s basically saying, we ask what that particular group wants, even though we already have a predetermined set of tissues that we’re going to go through. And we have five tissues that we cover kind of no matter what, because these are the primary tissues that get involved with pretty much sitting or a desk job, which is the vast majority of our athletes as they leave their work and come to us. And those five particular muscle groups are going to be the adductors, the hamstrings, the hip flexors, the chest, and then the lateral core, and will literally be with them on the ground working with them as they do with us. So getting down on the ground laying down, let’s say we’re going after the hamstrings, we’ll talk about the hamstrings talk about the tools, talk about the placement, and interchange, which tools we need, for them to have the most success will stay focused, will stay grounded, we’ll put on some light music, just to kind of keep the kind of the mood relaxed, and engaging. After that 20 minutes of hitting those particular groups, we’ll grab on to the most. And we’ll set ourselves up, let’s say we follow the same exact muscle groups, we’re going to start to stretch them out in three planes of motion. Let’s say we’re going out for the abductors, we want to stand up, right, we want to stand up. And we want to kind of create that proprioceptive authenticity, by using gravity and ground reaction forces to allow our body to move in and see how I have four points of contact 123, and four, that allows my body to really get the most out of my mobility training because it feels confident and comfortable. They don’t have a stick, we can use a doorway, right, a door would be the same way I’m use the cage as an example. But I can use the same thing for like, let’s say lateral core, I got two points grabbing on. And I can start to move and start to progress my body through ranges of motion, that again on the ground, certainly gives me the ability to do but not what’s the capacity of confidence that my body can actually give me, because I have to worry about balancing. If I’m using a chair, I can go after hamstring work very, very easily by producing that stability, that point of confidence. And then I can have a stick or doorway to manage off that. If I’m using a couch. Or if I’m using a coffee table, find something nice to kneel down on, I have my my connection point, like go after glutes by crossing over. And really getting that twist in that turn and that three dimensional drive that we look for in our dynamic stretching. So we’ll just hit those exact same muscle groups, we’d like to follow through planes of motion stretching the muscle out in the sagittal plane, and the frontal plane and the transverse plane using another appropriate driver, our hands our hips, or even our leg or foot to get that motion dialed in to get the maximum effect. That is the second process. The third process, we go into his light movement. And that light movement. Again, we can use any tool we want to provide some stability. But the key is we want to reengage that tissue in a way that is appropriate, and therefore teaches how to control the newfound mobility that we just had. So let’s say it was the calf, well, we’re going to want to say let’s not just give it a full kind of jump pattern, we’re gonna want to control it and say, well, let’s have the calf restabilized through forward and backwards balance control through lateral lateral balance control through rotational balance control, then we can get rid of that six. Let’s do that again, through a little bit more of less of like a toe tap, we can get some toe taps going open up then as we take to the next level, say let’s do it again, with no toe tap, balancing, controlling through that pattern. Now the calf has had a level experience of allowing to say okay, I see what motion you want to control. I see how you can make it a little bit harder for me and see how you can make it ultimately a full control integration with the body and no other support needed. And you can really play with the many different ways to do that. It all comes down to your programming your imagination, and your clients feedback. I want to share a case study real life of how we use virtual training and this methodology of restoration. Because we had a group training client of ours not that long ago was on vacation in the mountains. Her family on this epic mountain bike trip and they hit it hard for two days in a row. And previously she has been working from home during the pandemic desk job high stress computer focused and they just needed to get out and blossom steam. And after the long car drive comfortable two days back to back of trail riding. Hello, we’re back said I’ve pretty much had enough and seized on her But I’m proud of her because she reached out and schedule a virtual one on one session with me. She let me know what she was doing and what’s going on. And we jumped into a restorative analysis, she had a hard time with side to side and rotational motions like rotating to put her bike on the rack, and even movements around the cabins kitchen counter, I assess her movement capacity, and saw that her hip abduction and external rotation were gunky or limited in range of motion. And that triggered acute lower back pain. So we grabbed a foam roller, she packed it with her actually. And I said, Hey, let’s go ahead and let’s see if we can control those motions with lateral motion and rotational motion. And I moved with her just to show her how I wanted it to be done. So I said lay on the ground for me. And that was okay for her to do took her time and we put that foam roller just on her inside thigh. And I talked her through where I wanted to place how long will I wanted it to be moved and how I wanted her to stick on that soft tissue and just let it melt and to get that connective tissue to open up. Then we used a chair and a wall to stretch out her abductors. Basically how to pull up a chair with a wall next to her stabilizing and we started to get into that abduction. And that AB duction in a sense to open up that hip. We had our support letter drive forward and back a little bit of rotational and slowly loosen up the abductors not moving so quick and so fast that her lower back would get triggered then we restabilize the abductors with some isometrics driving the heel into the chair and some very light balance where can we use the upside foot to really kind of control the motion, easy does it grabbing onto a chair in front of her and easy read control of that adduction. So they take the job, and the lower back didn’t take the job. The end result was after for five minutes, she had a subjective 80% reduction in her lower back discomfort and she later told me that after taking the next day off and repeating what we covered in our virtual training session, she was able to get back on the trail for her last day of vacation. Having the ability to meet your clients or be able to be on call for help virtually is massive advantage for your business and for your clients tend to be out of reach when a need is something that must be taken advantage of forever. And 2020 certainly did not put the fitness industry in a good place but also forced us to look outside the box to create ways to meet our class athletes in ways that we may not have been practicing. If you haven’t taken advantage of online training yet, check out the description below we have a mini course on how to take your training online. We’ll cover how to do it all the equipment you’ll need how to get started in even systems and checklists to follow to eventually take it to the next level and offer virtual Small Group Training. Hope you got a lot of value out of this video and be sure to subscribe to this channel. If you want to continue to get more content like this. See the next time and enjoy.
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