Good morning
Once upon a time I thought retiring from the military would slowdown things a bit for me and for a period it did. That period is surely over!
Despite this coming Monday being my last day at the Manchester YMCA, I am now busy training 9 people at the Portsmouth Y. In order to be at the NFLF center, write training plans and develop new training, I squeeze in all my Y-training sessions into two days. Adding to my load, I am also the race director for the 2019 Capital City Classic 10K race this June in Concord. Accepting that challenge seemed sketchy at the time and now even more so! Retirement will have to wait another day!
While my two days as the Portsmouth Y can be quite long, I enjoy the various people I get to train and the variety of challenges each one gives me. Kind of funny, a week or so ago I was chatting with Kathy about how my goal was to work with primarily runners as a personal trainer, and now I am working with runners, autistic individuals, non-runners and older folks. A far greater diverse group than I could have imagined working with. However it has helped to change my prospective and priorities.
Most definitely I am not anti-body building, however as I have been able to work with various populations, I have seen the importance and need to help people who need to improve overall fitness and better long-term functional strength & mobility. While I think it is impressive to have a tone physique as it takes a lot of work, I am observing people sacrificing healthy functioning to attain those physiques. One individual I have observe at one of the Y’s has worked hard to develop his biceps and triceps and all the while he has neglected the range of motion problems in his shoulders and some accompanying pain. We have chatted and in not so many words, he has admitted there is a level of vanity that outweighs his functional health.
Self-admittingly one of my weakest areas as a personal trainer, is in functional assessment screening. As a trainer, before I have my clients so much as lift a weight, I am supposed to assess their functional abilities. This assessment helps me to identify strength weaknesses and range of motion limitations. These factors are important in protecting the individual from injury and help me to determine the areas needing greater stability or mobility.
The challenge comes when the individual has goals which might be contrary to what their assessment indicates as being healthy for them. Thankfully, because I spend much of the first few sessions talking about the importance of functional and core strength, so far, my clients have all accepted a healthy approach to improving their overall fitness goals.
I am currently looking into taking a college class on “Fitness Movement Screening” (FMS) and my former professor has encouraged me to take the online FMS certification. While I am comfortable assessing individuals right now, I believe there is no such thing as being too good at screening and assessing. People put a lot of faith in a personal trainer’s ability to help them and I take that responsibility very serious.
While I am much busier than I thought I would be at this point in my life, I am blessed to still be learning how to help all kinds of folks! For this reason, I am happily busy.
Time to move along. I hope you have a great Friday!
God Bless!
Mike
