Creating Chaos - For Fitness & Sport Professionals

Knowing how your clients are motivated is absolutely paramount. It's very difficult to motivate someone without knowing the true things that actually drive them. Some people are motivated by achievement and reaching goals, others are driven by having recognition and approval from others. Read more on these. The reality is that we all show different elements of each in different environments. Understanding how your clients are driven in terms of health and fitness could make your life a million times easier when keeping them going.

As trainers, we have dozens of tools in our toolbox to draw upon. Which ones do you draw upon to assist your clients? Here's just a few ways in which you can offer continued purpose and drive to your client's journeys:

• Applause - regular recognition and encouragement for their efforts
• Training - not just the work load of exercise in their programme but also the process of learning. Be it about exercise, nutrition or lifestyle choices. After all, in an ideal world, your clients wouldn't need you would they?
• Milestones - marking significant points in their journey with rewards (these don't need to cost)
• Enjoyable environment - making sure sessions are enjoyable. If sessions are just hard work and not enjoyable, your client will attach un-enjoyment and possibly even suffering to their perception of exercise. Not a great idea and unlikely to increase the likelihood of clients exercising without you there
• Themed sessions - To mark achievement, allow your client to decide on the content of a session (within reason) based on what they most enjoy
• Social gatherings - ideal for group fitness environments. Getting clients together can forge new friendships and help boost confidence levels
• Train the trainer day - Let your client train you. (Only if you're confident being having the roles reversed) This can be a really powerful tool. Not only will it let them get their own back, it will build huge rapport, show them that exercise can be just as hard for others as it is for them, build confidence, highlight how much they've learnt...the list goes on!!

Paul Swainson, Master Personal Trainer

Functional training does not exist. For some that may be a controversial statement, for others it may be something you’ve heard before. By way of explanation, the specificity principle would suggest that to be truly functional, an exercise must match the actual function (let’s say a tennis serve for example) in terms of movement patterns, energy systems, environmental conditions, etc. Therefore by definition the only ‘true’ functional exercise is the sport or activity itself, e.g. an actual tennis serve. Indeed if you are training for something, it is necessarily different in quality to the actual function - any exercise that simply tries to replicate the movements or environment in a given sport is training for function. Even practicing the sport itself may not be classed as true function if we take psychological influences into account – the effects of motivation and state of mind on performing a tennis serve will no doubt be very different on a practice court behind closed doors compared to centre court at Wimbledon in front of thousands of spectators. 

So functional training is to a large extent a contradiction in terms, although the term persists as it is commonly used to describe training for function which is the next best thing to actual competition and so is arguably the best practical form of training for sports. All we can do is try to make the gap between training and actual function as small as possible, all the while making sure we are enhancing that function more than we would by simply playing the sport.

So how do we do that? We need to replicate the physiological, psychological and environmental conditions of an activity or sport as closely as possible. However we have established that the psychological conditions of competition are as yet impossible to recreate because if you’re not competing, you’re not competing! Environmental conditions can be replicated by, for example, training indoors or outdoors depending on the sport, on the same surfaces (grass/tarmac, etc) or in the same climate.

This leaves us with mimicking physiological conditions which the fitness industry has made leaps and bounds in over recent years with for example, the increasing use of whole body, integrated multi-planar movements.

What is interesting then, is that one of the most easily replicable physical aspects of sports is typically not factored into training. Almost all programmes will feature a series of individual exercises (even if they are integrated multi-plane ones), performed for a set number of repetitions. Yet in everyday life and sports the same movement pattern is not repeated 8, 10, 12 or 20 times in succession (e.g. a tennis serve is not performed more than twice consecutively unless the player is double faulting continually – and why would you want to get good at that?!). Granted there a few activities (e.g. walking, running and cycling) where a single movement pattern is repeated continuously, but what actually happens in most sports and activities is a variety of movements, in multiple planes, occurring in sequence. In tennis, a serve could be followed by two or three fast side steps, followed by a forehand, then perhaps a two or three step forward sprint. Would there be some functional benefit therefore, in recreating these biomechanical and metabolic demands on the body as closely as possible in training?

In Part 2 of this article, we will look at how we can incorporate such an approach into training to add a new dimension to function.

Functional training does not exist – Part Two

In part one of this article, we looked at how training, by definition, can never be truly functional as we can never perfectly recreate the physiological, psychological  and environmental conditions of, for example, a sport without performing or playing that sport itself. The best we can achieve is training for function.

We also identified that almost all sports involve a complex sequence of varying movements in multiple planes and so the traditional sets and reps training format may not be the most relevant approach.

Primal Flow^TM aims to tackle this aspect of functionality, by linking together multiple patterns of movement over set time periods, rather than doing multiple repetitions of single patterns. The patterns reflect the vast range of movements the human body is capable of, from the simple (e.g. pushing, pulling, flexing) to the more complex (crawling, rotating, rolling).

Exposing the body to the endless possibilities of movement available allows it to move out of its comfort zone which in turn promotes adaptation and improvement in strength, endurance, injury resistance and conditioning.

This means Primal Flow ^TM not only has huge potential within sports performance, but also offers a unique new method of training for general fitness. The use of sequenced movements reduces the likelihood of pattern overload associated with traditional training methods, and as the system means that just body weight is a sufficient load for even experienced exercisers (just ask the Leeds Rhinos rugby league team how they felt after a Primal Flow^TM session!), it’s a practical and free system for anyone to use. In addition, the use of multiple movement patterns recruits more muscle mass, leading to greater metabolic demands, which means accelerated fat loss and increased muscle tone.

Borne from a simple concept, Primal Flow^TM is the most revolutionary training approach to hit the fitness industry for years. Once you learn the philosophy behind the system, the number of original exercises and programmes you can design will be limited only by your imagination.

For more information, contact Creating Chaos, keep an eye out for taster workshops or get ahead of the game and book onto the next Primal Pattern and Functional Movement Specialist course – be one the first trainers in the world to be certified in the next generation of training technology.