Personal trainers are becoming an integral part of the health care team, allowing for people to stay healthy and get healthier faster than ever before. This means the responsibility for fitness professionals to know more about a wider array of injuries, illnesses and medical conditions is at a greater level than ever before.
Trainers are also doing more to hang on to their current clients by educating themselves further to be able to roll with the punches and adapt to whatever their clients throw at them. We could call this Darwin’s theory in the fitness industry: Those who can work with everything will continue to work with everything. Those who don’t will find their clients stuck in physiotherapy and unable to train.
My name’s Dean Somerset. I’ve been a personal trainer for nearly a decade, and over 80% of my personal clientele come directly from medical referrals (physiotherapists, chiropractors, general practitioners, surgeons) in order to help their patients get continuing results when they leave their clinics. I initially started off looking to become great at helping people lose weight and gain muscle, but quickly found that almost everyone coming into me had a shoulder, back, knee or hip problem that was holding them back.
I’ve taken a lot of certifications from different organizations, and came to realize that none of them would touch on the type of issues that would help someone get back in shape following something like a rotator cuff tear, ACL reconstruction, or even simply low back pain. These are conditions that affect a large portion of the population, which meant that most certifications fail to address the needs of the majority of the population. The trainer looking to become amazing at what they do has to know how to work with, around or through injuries without making the worse.
This is a workshop that goes through the basics that every trainer should know about injury post-rehab before working with their clients. It covers the most common conditions of the shoulder, hip, knee and spine, and gives directions on what to do and more importantly, what not to do with the specific injuries. Each section goes through pertinent anatomical information, what adaptations occur with each injury, how to assess and determine who can and cannot begin training, and how to train it to get the best results safely and effectively. I’ve also included sample programs for each injury, and how to progress them through various stages.
I’ve taught this course almost a dozen times in live settings, and adapted it multiple times to make sure the participants get the most out of it. I’ve also continuously updated it with new research that will help keep you on the cutting edge of the industry, and allow you to give the absolute best workouts to your clients. There isn’t a more complete resource out there that will give you more information on as wide a variety of injuries and…