If you’re ready to improve communications with the medical profession, then this reason list holds the keys you need to succeed if you want to avoid having to make coaches use complex, technical language.
The bottom line of these 3 reasons is that we’re going about communication the wrong way and communication between the medical and health professions needs to improve.
You need to know this because poor communication puts coaches at a serious disadvantage, and if we don’t change how we approach the medical profession, our participants will suffer more.
Reason # 1 – Fear And Misconceptions
When it comes to long standing, recurring or low-level injury problems (including conditions like osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia), many medical professionals are concerned that exercise, guided by a coach who doesn’t understand the condition may irritate the problem, making it worse.
This fear often stems from the fact that medics (including many therapists) have worked hard to try to stabilise the patient’s condition and that bringing someone new in may disrupt that.
Once this fear takes hold, misconceptions can come into play, including the idea that fitness professionals and coaches are still wedded to the ideas of the 70s when “no pain, no gain”, “if it’s not hurting, it’s not working” and “pain is just weakness leaving the body” were more rife.
Of course, there are still coaches who work on these principles, but they are unlikely to be interested in working with people with long-term health problems.
Unfortunately, because these old ideas are still in the marketplace, medics and therapists can be reluctant to work with fitness professionals and coaches as they falsely believe that we all think like that.
Reason # 2 – No Speako The Lingo
Another reason why medical professionals and therapists don’t recognise coaching expertise is that the vast majority of coaches don’t understand the technical language that the medics use.
Medics and therapists think that this is a demonstration of our lack of understanding but in reality, it’s not our job to try to treat any type of condition, so we don’t actually need to understand the lingo!
In fact, in some ways, it’s better if we don’t!
The fitness industry is littered with courses that try to teach fitness professionals about the technicalities of injuries and health problems but it’s simply teaching us a small fraction of what the medics are already trying to do, which can cause repetition of treatment, disagreements with treatment approaches and the feeling that coaches are treading on the toes of the medics.
But when we stop trying to be the SAME as the medics, and embrace our differences, we can actually improve the communication process – even if we don’t understand the technical jargon!
It’s much easier for medics and therapists to communicate with us when they understand that our role is simply to focus on non-painful movement. They can guide us using simple instruction and we can be led by the person living with the condition. This makes it easier for more coaches to be involved in the health of people with underlying issues, regardless of what that might be.
Of course, some level of understanding of the individual condition can be helpful but isn’t actually always necessary since every individual is different.
Reason # 3 – Different Lenses Create Different Views
The last reason why the medical profession will never recognise coaching expertise is because they are looking through their medical lens… which means that they are looking at coaches based on what they know as medics – and that means that they can’t see our unique skills.
Unlike the medical profession, coaches are uniquely positioned to see problems coming BEFORE they happen.
If we stop trying to copy the medics and embrace our differences, we can learn to look for different signposts of problems, rather than waiting for pain – which we then can’t do anything about.
When we know what to look for, we can spot the subtle changes is someone’s existing condition, we can observe the body language and behaviours that indicate emotional or physical stress (which are the leading causes and risk factors for injury) and using our abundant movement skills, we can help to immediately reduce these issues.
When the medical professionals recognise our unique position, they will be more confident that we can actually help the situation, and therefore much more likely to include us in the conversation around long term health conditions and injuries.
But they won’t recognise this positioning on their own – we need to do more to be confident that coaches know EXACTLY where they stand, so we can better communicate this position to others.
At this point we should definitely stop thinking of coaches as “mini-medics” and start to recognise our unique strengths.
Hey, one more thing before I forget, if you want to improve communications with the medical profession and be able to do more to help people with long term health issues to get active and stay active, check out this book at mostmotion.com/book – You’ll love it!