THE QUICK READ
• The huge challenge of COVID-19 has
also provided an opportunity for fitness
professionals to assess, adapt and
innovate
• Having a forced period of rest or detraining
followed by a return to fitness
can be beneficial for both your career
and your clients
• Injury, illness or pre/post-natal periods
for trainers can compel you try new
forms of exercise and put you in the
shoes of clients by reminding you how
a lower level of fitness feels
• Benefits include strengthened
relationships with other health
professionals, more effective
programming and fresh ideas
• Use of RPE and fitness checks are
beneficial in programming to better
understand a client’s exertion and
training progress.
reasons may cause de-training and loss of
physical strength and fitness throughout a
trainer’s career, including:
• injury, surgery and/or rehab relating to a
given injury
• major illness
• pregnancy, post-natal recovery and
transition to motherhood
• extended travel or time abroad.
As a trainer, while the training downtime
caused by these situations may be
frustrating and disheartening, the process of
returning to training – both yourself and your
clients or participants – can be beneficial to
your career. Here’s why:
BENEFIT 1: You get to feel what
it’s like to be ‘new’ to fitness
This can give you a better understanding
of how a new client feels when starting
their training journey. The shortness of
breath, poor recovery between sets, feeling
heavy on your feet, the lack of strength
and endurance, the delayed onset muscle
soreness that lasts for days and the mental
battle that comes with it. All these things can
be forgotten or greatly lessened when you’ve become a well-adapted
athlete. You should also be mindful of this in the coming months as
you start seeing clients and members return – ease them into their
sessions to help avoid injury and use the principle of progressive
overload.
The benefit of returning to training after time away is that it can
help you program more effectively and thoughtfully, because you
have an increased awareness of how clients and members may be
feeling physically during exercise.
Your programming can be improved by:
• appropriate use of progressive overload and planning of
periodisation: ensure you apply this to all clients and members
coming back from COVID closures.
• starting simpler and smarter: focusing on building sound
foundational movement patterns, before progressing to more
advanced moves that take strength and control to safely execute,
lighter loads, more rest and offering more suitable modifications
specific to your client that you may not have previously prescribed.
• better monitoring of your client’s rate of perceived exertion to
gauge if you need to modify their sessions, increase rest or make
them work a little harder. I recommend using a combination of a
heart rate monitor if they have one, as well as the Rate of Perceived
Exertion (Borg scale) – check what their number is a couple of
times each session.
BENEFIT 2: You’re likely to experience different
forms of exercise
Whether your experience has been due to COVID, pregnancy, injury,
or travel, it is likely that your training has altered. If you’re a trainer
who has experienced an injury, rehabilitation programs may see you
spending more time in the pool swimming or water walking, cycling
instead of running or focusing more on mobility and flexibility rather
than strength. If you’ve gone through pregnancy and your own
subsequent post-natal return to exercise, you’ll be aware of the need
38 | NETWORK WINTER 2020