Every time I think of a vortex, I think of a swirling mass of light in space, the kinds of which you’d see in a science fiction TV show, but they aren’t the stuff of science fiction, nature creates vortices with tornados. Those towering columns of air, suck everything in their path into the swirling mass causing destruction and devastation wherever they go.
But what does that have to do with sports injuries or coaching?
It’s a common belief that minor sports injury aches and pains go away with exercise because when they’re moving around it doesn’t hurt as much.
Movement is a survival mechanism that’s in our DNA. Without it we couldn’t feed ourselves, procreate or get away from danger. Obviously, in the brain, survival takes priority over minor aches and pains, so the body produces natural painkillers that mask the pain.
This can fool the people we coach into thinking that exercising will help the pain go away, but it doesn’t.
The pain always comes back once we stop moving – and in many cases, the exercise makes the pain worse, it’s just that our people don’t feel it until a few hours after they’ve finished training.
Sometimes, this delay can fool our people into thinking that it wasn’t the exercise that made it worse, so they continue the cycle, dragging them further down mentally and physically in the process, until eventually they must stop training completely.
But this problem doesn’t just affect the people you coach. It drags your coaching value down too.
At the start of the process, when the pain isn’t much more than a minor irritation, your coaching is focused on delivering results and driving your people towards their goals but as they deteriorate, you must switch to managing their motivation and expectations, or even just trying to help them stay active at all.
This does nothing to showcase your true value as a coach.
In fact, if nothing is done to help break this cycle, you’re simply helping them to avoid their issues.
By recognizing that this vortex is happening, you can help the people you coach to get treatment early, which might mean that they don’t have to stop training (which most active people are terrified of).
This simple recognition is enough to break the cycle and moves you from doing nothing to being very helpful – without having to stop coaching or get a degree in anatomy!
If you’re ready to learn more about how injuries can decimate your coaching value… and what you can do instead, then I’d like to invite you to check out pages 8-10 in my Amazon best-selling book “Unlocking Fitness Part 1: Mental & Physical Health Decoded”.
It makes seeing exactly how you can help the people you coach with their injury problems a breeze, without feeling like you’re drowning in the complexities of anatomy.