Choose Wisely
“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.” - Willie Nelson
The truth of it is, there are more good things happening in your body than bad...or else you would probably be dead. My clients who adopt a gratitude mindset and recognize this simple fact, seem to train harder, recover faster and generally get better results. Why? Because they don’t sweat the small stuff and they put in work on the things they can currently control. Do you have a broken leg? Sounds like an excellent opportunity to work on some upper body strength and single leg work. Working 60 hours per week and can’t make it to the gym? Sounds like an excellent opportunity to re-prioritize the basics like getting adequate sleep, breathing exercises and taking evening walks. Excuses are lame. Injuries and life happen to everyone. Success is most often found in life’s margins and rarely happens without the recognition and gratitude for your current capacity.
This idea of gratitude and working from a place of success applies not only to the client side of the equation but also to the trainer side. My job is to help people move better and I’ve come to realize that one of the most powerful tools at my disposal to effect change in both therapy and training settings is to highlight and train the things that are working well for people. When I get into “fix it” mode trying to correct every nuance of someone’s movement, I’m essentially attempting to mold them into some perfect rendition of an exercise. This is when I bump into problems.
To get out of this problem solving mindset, I often have success by switching perspectives a bit and focusing on a thing that they do well. But not just anything they do well, it has to be something that exists at the margin of where I would like to encourage better movement.
For example, say the client and I note a deficiency in a forward lunge motion that causes a bit of knee pain and a little bit of instability of the knee caving in towards the center. One option is to get super fancy and try to correct the forward lunges by working some reactive neuromuscular training and cue a bunch of esoteric foot and core activation that doesn’t make any sense to a normal person. A second option is to find a close alternative that they do well, like a reverse lunge that takes away some of the ankle dorsiflexion requirement and then work on some ankle mobility stuff during our rest periods. Honestly they are both useful and have their place but I have had much greater success with the second option.
Aches, pains, injury, disease and busy lives are or will be happening to us all. Keep moving and keep celebrating the wins.
