PAIN AND GAIN
PUSHING YOUR CLIENTS TO THE
LIMIT SAFELY AND RESPONSIBLY
How, asks PT and performance coach Susy Natal, do we balance our duty
of care to clients with our responsibility to help them achieve their goals?
ain – vital, yet so often interfering
with the progress of our clients.
Pain is one of the most primal
signals that our body sends to alert us that
something is happening, and its discomfort
prompts us to take the action necessary
to make it stop. In most scenarios this
is adaptive, as the pain is signalling the
presence of harm and the risk of further
injury. In training, although this can also
be the case, it is often not, which can
make it challenging to push clients that are
either highly risk averse or have a very low
tolerance of pain.
P
No pain…
Then there are the clients at the other end
of the spectrum who subscribe to the old-
school saying of ‘no pain, no gain’ – a mantra that can get people into
trouble if taken too literally, as not all pain is sending the same signal
and so cannot be addressed with the same approach. As personal
trainers we have a duty of care to ensure the safety of our clients, but
we are also being hired to facilitate results, so this is a grey area that
requires constant attention when dealing with the clients that have a
tendency to push beyond what is sustainable and safe.
Identifying the pain
If your client reports that they are experiencing pain, your immediate
priority should be to obtain as much information as possible about it. If
the client mentions it while in the middle of an exercise, you should make
them pause and explain – if it is safe for them to do so. If it is not safe, or
if they cannot easily describe it in a sentence or so, make the client stop
performing the exercise first and then begin a line of questioning. If they
appear to be in distress or significant amounts of pain, you should make
them stop exercising immediately and, where possible, assist them in
terminating to ensure that they do not cause further injury.
NETWORK SUMMER 2018 | 41