If you’re a sports or fitness coach who wants to find new ways of standing out from the crowd – and help your clients avoid all the aches and pains and nagging little problems that stop them from getting the results they want, then keep reading!
How can injury prevention help you stand out? Well, there are many ways, but here’s three…
1. Get Ahead of the Game
Most coaches will wait for their clients to tell them about their problems before they even try to do anything about it…if they can. But what they don’t realise is that injuries don’t start with pain. They start from a lack of movement somewhere else in the body, which is often pain free, which means that your clients have absolutely no idea it’s there!
If you know what to look for, you can do a simple scan of their body language, their postures and their behaviours which will give you enough information to instantly get right to the heart of the problem…before they can even tell you about it!
So, while all the other coaches are stuck waiting for the pain to happen, you can get in there and do something helpful before the pain even starts!
2. Skip to the Good Bit
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your clients do not like doing mobility. They will do it and tolerate it because they know it’s helpful, but if you give them a choice between getting on with their training and doing the mobility training, 99% of them will choose to get on with their training.
This means that if you spend lots of time making them do mobility training or standing around watching them while they’re stretching, or foam rolling or something like that, they feel like you’re putting obstacles in their way. They feel like you’re delaying them getting on with their training. And that does not make them happy.
Most coaches spend time during the session on mobility training because they know it’s helpful, but when you know how, you can simply blend injury prevention moves into your actual training!
This means that your clients can skip straight to the stuff that they want to be doing, and you can deliver all the mobility training they need at the same time!
So, while other coaches are wasting time on separate mobility training, or spending ages stretching, you can skip past all that and get straight to the training, which your clients will love!
3. Stop Focusing on Your Clients’ Problems.
Everybody’s got problems. Many of your clients will see their training with you as a way of escaping those problems, so the last thing they want to do when they’re with you, is to focus on yet more problems.
Every time we focus on improving technique, movement “dysfunction” or something that we consider to be “incorrect”, we’re reinforcing to our clients that they can’t do something. Which means that we’re focusing on their problems. Nobody likes that.
Don’t forget, pain originates from restricted movement. Restricted movement also causes movement pattern problems and technique problems. This means that if we can find ways of keeping our clients’ joints open and moving freely, and we can start to remove their movement restrictions, their technique and movement problems will go away. As a result, they are also much less likely to be injured.
If you focus on keeping the joints able to move in all the different ways that it’s possible for them to move in, you’ll find superfast ways of improving their technique – without focusing on their problems.
This means that while other coaches are spending time on repetitive, boring, tedious drills that nobody likes doing, you can get faster, more effective results while your clients will feel like they’re playing around with movement instead of focusing on their problems.
These three simple changes will help you to stand out a mile from every other sports or fitness coach out there because you’re looking beyond the obvious, putting your clients’ experience ahead of your own need to be “right” or “correct”, and considering the mental, as well as the physical wellbeing of your clients.
You can learn exactly how to put this approach into practice and much more with my SMARTT® Coach Education Series but explaining all that now would take up far too much of your time, so instead, you’re invited to check out my FREE book “The Coaches Guide to Long-Term Injury Prevention Success”, where you’ll find a whole bunch of tips and tricks to help you get started!