Network Magazine Summer 2018 | Page 42

We have a duty of care to ensure the safety of our clients, but we are also being hired to facilitate results. Keep calm (but don’t necessarily carry on) When you question your client, it is important to keep yourself together. In the event that a client has a potentially serious injury, your calm manner will assist them and prevent them from becoming further distressed. In the more common but less immediately serious scenarios, it can be helpful to remain composed because some clients may become hesitant to tell you that they are experiencing pain if they suspect that they will be met with an extreme reaction. Many people do not like to have attention drawn to themselves in the gym, so you need to be sensitive to this if you want your clients to trust you to be able to handle these situations well and therefore feel that they can be open with you. The 30-second article • Pain is one of the body’s signals, and in training it can mean many different things • It is your responsibility as the trainer to keep your client safe – you also need to observe and collect information when there is pain present to decide how to manage the situation • Stay calm but be detailed with your line of questioning: the intensity, quality and localisation of the pain can all help ascertain what is going on internally for the client • If you are unsure about what has happened, refer on to a physiotherapist or allied health professional • Provide some guidelines to your clients to help them decide when pain has progressed beyond what is normal for training and is indicating that they should pull back. 42 | NETWORK SUMMER 2018 Reluctant pain admissions There are also clients that may hesitate to tell you that they are experiencing pain if they suspect that you will overreact by disallowing certain movements or otherwise being overly protective and holding them back from reaching their goals. As a trainer your focus should be entirely on your client, so ensure that you monitor not only the execution of each movement but also their reaction to the execution: if their facial expression or physical reaction to an element of an exercise suggests that they are in discomfort, ask them about it, while reassuring them that it doesn’t necessarily mean stopping exercising. Because of its diverse nature, the occurrence of pain does not automatically signify the cessation of the training session or that a movement needs to be removed from the client’s exercise program. In training, the pain experienced by clients can range from the beneficial type that’s getting results, right through to serious danger, so you need to ensure that you gather the relevant information before making any decisions about how to manage the situation. Pain vs burn: knowing the difference Make sure that your client knows how to tell the difference between the normal muscular burn and ache that occurs whenever an exercise becomes difficult and other types of pain. This may sound obvious, but to a complete beginner it may be new territory as they might never have experienced the sensation of ‘good’ pain. It is also important that you pay attention to the client’s history of self-report. If they have a tendency to complain at the slightest onset of discomfort, then a minor complaint would be taken on in a very different way than if you were being told the same thing by a client who generally does not make any comments about the efforts of exercise. Location and sensation There are several important pieces of information that can help you figure out what may be going on for the client. First, you need to find out where they are experiencing the pain, and whether it is localised within the one spot or whether it is radiating anywhere else in the body. Second, the intensity of the pain should be assessed, and this is where ranking scales can come in handy. For example, if a 10 means they are about to pass out from pain and 1 is pain that they can only just detect, ask them to rate the level of pain experienced at the time.