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How to Have Confidence in Helping with Clients’ Pain – without fear of looking stupid, or hurting them further. Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and I’m here with another video for every sports and fitness coach who wants to help their clients who have long term pain, chronic pain, nagging little injuries that come and go, but don’t really know how to get involved, don’t want to look stupid in trying to do that.
The first thing we need to know is that the “fake it till you make it” thing really doesn’t work when it comes to injuries, because that can put you in an awful lot of trouble. And obviously, things can go very wrong, if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Things that might make you feel a little bit intimidated about the whole idea, the whole concept of injuries are like the terminology. So people will say things like “itis” and “syndromes”, and it can be quite intimidating if you don’t really know what those mean. But the thing to remember is that it’s just medical shorthand, so that the correct information can be passed very quickly, from medical professional, to medical professional, we don’t necessarily need to know any of that. So if that is putting you off, don’t worry, you don’t need to know it.
The second thing that might be putting you off is the complexity of anatomy. But remember, these are just landmarks inside the body and stuff that if you cut the body open, you could pull or touch, okay? Again, the complexity of that isn’t something necessarily, you need to know. And I’m going to explain that to you in a second.
So the third thing that might be putting you off or creating a little bit of worry for you is a lack of experience, but you’re not expected to know this stuff, because this isn’t your bag! And by that I mean, coaching is your thing. injuries are not. So it’s no wonder that you don’t have experience with that. But don’t let that hold you back.
And the last thing is emotional consequences of pain. Now, this is something that your client will experience and you will see. And of all of those things that I just mentioned, that might put you off getting involved with injuries, emotional pain, or the consequences of pain, are the things that will draw you in to want to help. Everything else might put you off. But when your client is suffering, or they’re not getting the results they want, or they’re not motivated, because they keep getting these aches and pains. That’s the thing that makes you want to get involved. But how can you help if you’ve no idea what you’re doing?
Well, it really is just stop worrying about what you can’t do and just focus on what you can do. And there’s all sorts of stuff that you can do to help and it might seem really tiny, but these things are huge when it comes to preventing injuries and helping with pain, okay, so one of the things that you can do is use your powers of observation.
As a coach, you are watching your clients move all the time, even if it’s in a group, you can start to notice the little subtle signs of somebody being in pain, okay. And that might differ from person to person. An example of this was when my friend hurt her wrist. We went to the hospital, the doctor was checking it out, he was pressing on her wrist, and she was facing me. So she was facing away from him. She was facing me and she was pulling all these faces of me. But not the doctor wasn’t getting any of that information. So I kept having to say, “she says ouch”, because she was holding her breath, bracing herself and pulling funny faces because it was really painful. But she wasn’t giving the information to the doctor. So there’s things that your clients will do, that give you those clues that they are struggling with something because it’s either painful or it didn’t move properly, or, and those observations are things that you can see, okay, those are things those clues are things that you can help with your information gathering. And it can help with the decisions that you make regarding that client and how hard you push them, or what movements you give them. It will help to really consolidate and give you confidence with the decisions that you’re making around what you’re giving your clients to do for the training.
The second, or one of the other things that you can do is a variety of movement. Most sporting injuries, the nonspecific, the gradual onset, the pains that just seem to have come out of nowhere. They are mainly joint restriction problems. The reason that the pain has happened is because the joint doesn’t move. And you can help with this stuff, by giving your clients a variety of directions to move in. As long as all of that movement is pain free. You don’t need to get involved with the pain itself, you can totally stay away from it. But you can help. And especially when it comes to preventing these problems happening in the first place, if you can keep these joint movements open, and they can move in lots of different directions, and this pain is much less likely to happen.
So there’s just two ways that you can help prevent pain and help with your clients existing low level pain, if they have it, okay. And that means that you’re dealing with stuff that you can feel confident with. It avoids you looking stupid, and it avoids hurting your clients more because you’re not dealing with anything that’s going to make them worse.
There’s two things to remember from this video: 1. stop worrying about things that you can’t do, and focus on the things that you can. And the second thing is to never underestimate the power of the subtle things. Okay, so these small things that I’ve suggested that you can do, following this video, are really, really powerful when it comes to helping with pain and preventing it.
So that’s all for today. Social media as most things in life, run on love. So if you like this video, just give us a thumbs up, give us a heart. If you have any thoughts about what was mentioned today, just put your comments in the comment boxes below. And of course, if you think any of your friends would be benefiting from listening to this video, and having that confidence as well, you can either tag them in the comments below or just share the video with them. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you again next time.