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What Causes Injuries and What Can Every Fitness Coach Do to Help Prevent Them? Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and I’m here with another video for every sports and fitness coach who has ever wondered why some clients seem to suffer from injuries like one after the other, or they seem to suffer from the same injury over and over again. So firstly, before we get into what causes injuries, we need to understand what injuries are and very, very simply they are painful movement. . That means everything from that nagging ache and pain that comes and goes to major incidents like ACL tears and all the way through to long term chronic problems like osteoarthritis. . So that’s what I mean by injuries, painful movement. So what causes them? Well, if you ask anybody a group of coaches, athletes, whoever, they will say things like what they were doing at the time,
the movement they were doing at the time, the thing they did that they felt the pain from, they might say equipment, they might say the terrain that they were on, that might’ve been different to before. So oftentimes it’s changes in things like speed. And while all these might play a role in contributing to these injuries, there’s one thing that’s present in every single problem with every single client. . And that is the joint movement restriction. . Now what does this have to do with you? Well, bodies adapt to movement in the same way that they adapt to fitness. So if we repeat the same movements over and over again, bodies will adapt to that. How do they do that? Well, let’s use the example, the classic example of somebody in the gym who only ever does chest and arms. .
If they only ever train chest and arms, they will end up in a situation that I call. They have a posture change that I call like carrying carpets under your arms. So their elbows stick out when they’re walking and they find it difficult to relax their arms down by the side. And that’s because the arm bone has changed position inside the socket because of the tightness that’s created by that repeated movement. . So it’s the same if you’re a cyclist and you’ve been cycling for decades, your hip flexors get very tight. You end up not being able to stand up straight, all that kind of thing. And that leads to trigger movements. . And it does that by once you have the joint position change. . So let’s say you have been doing the gym. You’ve been doing chest and arms. You’re walking around like you’ve got carpets under your arms.
. This increases the amount of strain that other joints and other muscles have to tolerate. . So let’s use the back of the shoulder, for example. . If my arm is rotated inwards like this, then I have a joint position change in my shoulder. It might feel like it pops forward. I might have rounded shoulders like this. And then the strain on the back of my body is increased. My ability to tolerate changes to this position decreases. And that means if I have any movement that’s other than the usual direction of forwards, you know doing bicep curls, things like that. If I have to do any movement that’s different from this change in my posture, like let’s say my arm has to go backwards. All of a sudden that’s when these injuries do happen. . So if we don’t have these joint position changes, then our bodies have more ability to tolerate changes and movement changes in direction.
. So that’s what I mean by trigger movements. All right. So it might be a change in position. It might be a change in direction. It might be a change in speed. It may be a change in terrain. So oftentimes you get the classic hamstring pull when you’re changing from flat running to Hills sprints or something like that. . These things tend to happen in change when we have a change from the norm. So whether that’s a new tennis racket or new trainers or whatever it is, is always a change in something that you have been doing for a long time. . Now your role as a coach is not to program and plan and have technical knowhow. It’s not. Your role as a coach is to make your client’s life as easy as possible for them to achieve the results they want.
. That does include programming and planning and technical know how, but it’s not all about that. . Now UK Coaching has five pillars of their Duty to Care outline. And one of those pillars is safeguarding. And that means it is your duty to do everything you possibly can to protect your client from harm. And these joint position changes are not painful. . There’s tightness that creates these, these changes. You can see the guys walking around with their chest tight chest and the arms sticking out. This isn’t painful to them. . This is a huge opportunity for you to do something, to help prevent the risk of injury in your clients. . If we can stop the joint position change, we can make it easier for your client move freely. . That means we have better technique. We have more endurance, we have more strength.
We have better recovery, all that kind of thing, benefits your client just because they can move more easily. So how do you make this happen? Well, it would take me ages to explain everything to you right now. So I put it all in my free book. You can grab that hundred page book just by clicking the link in the description, it outlines five steps that you can go through as a fitness coach – even if you don’t know the first thing about injuries, where you can help to get involved and help prevent these problems from happening in the first place. So if you like this video and make sure that you like it, heart it comment below. Tell me your thoughts. And obviously if you think of anybody that you know, that might benefit from this video, don’t forget to share it with them too. So make sure you click the link in the description. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you again. Next time.