If you’re a sports or fitness coach who wants to be able to help with the persistent injury problems and low-level aches or pains you see in the people you coach, but don’t know where to start or don’t want to specialise, this is a message for you.
This is a quick story about a guy named Paul.
Paul is a triathlete. He loves training, and triathlon helped him overcome a lot of obstacles in his life, and he wanted to help other people just like him. So, he decided to become a triathlon coach.
As an athlete, he thought that his injury problems were just things that were unique to him, and a consequence of getting older. But when he became a coach, he just saw them everywhere and he didn’t really know what to do. He kind of felt a bit helpless.
Over time, he saw the same people suffering with the same kind of nagging injury problems over and over again, and he was just frustrated that he couldn’t seem to do anything, except ask the athlete to do something different, for example if they had a problem with their shoulder, he would just say, “Well, don’t use your arms then” or “just keep an eye on it, see if it gets any worse, if it does stop what you’re doing”.
And he had loads of questions in his head that he just couldn’t seem to get any answers to:
“why do so many athletes get injured in the first place?”
“Why does it take so long to recover?”
“Why do people keep getting the same injury problems over and over again?”
“Why do some people seem to be suffering with one kind of pain after another, and others don’t?”
He also realised that his athletes were kind of expecting him to know what to do about their injury problems, because he had to ask at the beginning of the session, “does anybody have any injuries I need to know about?” This made him feel under pressure to help but he didn’t really know what to do. He felt like he was just guessing. The only advice he could give them was something that he’d heard another coach say, or that he’d seen or read online, or that have helped him personally.
But then he heard about the SMARTT® methods online. He’d heard other coaches talking about it, and his head coach in the club was introducing some cool new ideas that he knew she’d got from the SMARTT® Methods. So, he decided to learn about these methods for himself.
He took the SMARTT® Coach Level One course and in that training, he learned that there are more athletes that don’t mention their pain than those that do (which surprised him because he’d already heard loads of athletes grumbling about their problems). He learned exactly where he stands within his coaching guidelines when it comes to what he can actually do to help when it comes to injuries, and he even learned to identify painful movement before anybody mentioned it.
He could see a whole new world of opportunity available to him when it comes to helping with injuries, even though he knows nothing about the injuries themselves. He realised that he didn’t have to simply sit back and do nothing, or guess – he could help a lot more than he thought.
Paul was so excited by the opportunities he saw that he also completed the SMARTT® Coach Certification (Level 2) and now he can actively recognise potentially painful movement before anybody mentions it. He can plan his warmups and cooldowns around helping with these problems, with simple tweaks to the exercises he was already using, and that means that he can help reduce pain and increase the chances of preventing it from happening in the first place.
He had all his questions answered and feels confident now that he can be more proactive when it comes to helping with injury problems, without overstepping his coaching guidelines, or trying to be something he’s not either.
In fact, this is what he had to say about the whole experience:
“WOW! What an insightful course! It has given me a very different view of the tools I have at my disposal and I’m excited to see where it takes me!”
What I’d like you to take away from this story is that most coaches think that the idea of “do no harm” is the best that they can hope for when it comes to helping with injury problems. And that often means finding alternative movements or exercises, or just asking people to keep an eye on their own pain. But really, that is simply “do no help”. But when we’re curious enough to explore new avenues, we can see that there’s a LOT of opportunity to help in ways that we’ve previously never thought of.
You don’t need to waste time and money on courses that you’ll probably never use just to get the information you want. And you don’t need to become any kind of specialist, nose deep in the details of anatomy either.
So, if you resonate with Paul’s story, you would like to follow in his footsteps, and take the exact same course that he did. I’d like to invite you to check out the SMARTT® Coach Level 1 training called “The Vault of Injury Prevention Secrets”, so you can stop, “do no help” (and worrying about doing more harm) and start feeling confident in your abilities to help people break that injury cycle and achieve the results that they truly deserve – in as little as seven days. Just go to mostmotion.com/level-1 and let’s get started!