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How to Win at Injury Prevention in 60 seconds or Less? Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and I’m here with another “Mobility Matters: Simple Injury Prevention for Fitness Coaches” episode for every fitness coach who is trying to help their clients get better results and avoid injury at the same time. So how can we get better at injury prevention in such a short space of time? Well, in a word language, why? Because coaches rely on client feedback to help prevent injury. And if they can’t tell you what the problem is, then we have less ability to help. So the biggest reason that clients can’t give you this feedback is because they can’t feel it in their bodies. Okay. This is a disconnect between them and their bodies and partly coaches are the problem. And the reason for that is because of the language that we use and the actions that we take.
And what I mean by that is that when we are taught to be fitness coaches, we’re taught that we know the correct technique. We know how to keep people safe and all that kind of stuff. And because we believe that when we go out into the world and we’re coaching out people, we say things like “poor technique”, “wrong”, “dysfunctional movement”, things like that. And even if we don’t use those particular words, we focus on improving technique. And when we focus on improving something, we’re implying that it’s not good enough. Okay. So we are helping to propel this feeling in our clients that they don’t know enough, or that their movement isn’t good enough. And that means they start relying on us to tell them when they’re moving right. And that means they’ve lost that feeling. And when they lose that feeling, it means I can’t tell you about it.
So how can we fix this in a really, really short space of time? Well, there’s three particular ways and I’ve just popped into my studio here so I can show you what I mean, as we’re talking. Okay. So I’m just going to have to stand up. One of the easiest ways to get people to connect with their bodies is to help them have an emotional connection to it or to use mental imagery. Okay. So for me, a split stance position is a very, very common position that I used because it’s very, very easy, but people often feel like they’re gonna fall over, or they just don’t feel stable in this position, especially when they’re kneeling down. So I will say things like, imagine somebody’s going to push you over. Okay. So if they don’t feel particularly stable in this position, it may well be that they need to hold onto a wall or a chair or something like that.
It may mean that they need to adjust their feet. But when we ask them to imagine something, are we asking them to have a feeling like if they’ve got a slumped chest, for example, if we say something like, imagine you’re just, you’ve done something and you’re really proud of yourself. When, when you feel really proud of yourself, the chest comes up. And it’s things like that, that we can use very, very quickly to change our client’s body position without having to bog them down with lift your chest, squeeze this, engage that an a whole list of 15 different teaching points that we tend to bombard our clients with every time they do something. The second thing is to encourage exploration of when they feel the problems. So if I’m in this position, I want them to feel a stretch around here, or maybe down the inside of the thigh.
Then I would ask them to tell me what position they need to be in. So it feels at its worst. Okay. It might be that they need to rotate through here. It might be that they need to lean away like this. If I do that, I can feel that right down the inside of my thigh. That feels the worst point of the stretch. It feels it feels the most stretch. Okay. But if I go this way, it doesn’t feel like a stretch at all. Okay. But if we explore these different positions, like if I rotate here, I lean back this way. Now I can feel it in the front of my hip here. And that feels like quite a big stretch too. But this experience of being in these different places allows our clients to feel the difference. And when they can start feeling the difference in these big situations that can start to identify the smaller differences.
And that’s when they can start to tell us about it earlier than when it becomes painful or becomes a problem. And that is the whole point of asking them to connect with their bodies more so that we can get the information out of them earlier on. It helps us to help them. So the third thing, the third way that we can help our clients do this better, very quickly is to remove the word should. Now it’s very, very common and I’ve used it myself a lot, lots and lots of coaches use it all the time. Clients will ask us, where should I be feeling this? Okay. And if I am in this position and got my hips pushed forward, my front leg might be slightly bent. It’s my intention that they feel in the front of the hip, but sometimes the word should comes out and we say, we, you should be feeling it here.
And when our clients don’t feel it, that could be for whatever reason, they might be feeling in the ankle. For example, when we say the word, should it makes them feel like they are wrong when they don’t feel it there. What we can do is say things like it’s my intention that you feel it through here, position yourself so that you feel it there. And it might be, they need to rotate a bit and push out this way. Oh, now I can feel it there. So these things are very, very simple. That allows us to get much better feedback from our clients. And that helps us win with injury prevention in a very short space of time, because we are asking our clients to connect with their bodies. Again, they can detect those small changes and they can feel the difference. And when they can feel it, they can say it.
Or at least they’ve got a better chance of being able to say it anyway. Okay. So if you have had experience in this area, or you’ve tried this with your clients, just put your comments in the, in the comments box below. Okay. Tell us, share with your experience. If you haven’t tried it, go and try it now. And if you want to join us live on this show, you can always join us in the SMARTT® Folks Facebook group. I’ll give you a really cool free gift just for saying hi. So go to smarttfolks.com. That’s S M A R T T F O L K S.com. I’ll see you on the inside. Thanks for watching. And I’ll see you again. Next time.