.

Okay, I’ve been on vacation for the last few days so I’m a little late to the party on this one, but if you’ve been following my blog lately you’ll know that I’ve been really excited about the launch of Muscle Imbalances Revealed Upper Body.

.

But let’s backtrack a bit.

.

Last year Rick Kaselj put together a great product covering the many possible muscle imbalances in the lower body featuring some bright fitness minds like Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman, Dean Somerset, Eric Beard, Kevin Yates, and Rick himself.  I was blown away with the quality of the information and since then the product has been purchased by over 1100 fitness professionals all over the world!

.

Fast forward to today and Rick has pulled together yet another all star cast to cover all of the muscle imbalances of the upper body in an 8 part video series.  Check ‘em out!

.

Corrective Exercise Strategies for Athletes (and Meatheads, too) - Tony Gentilcore

.

Avoiding the Top 10 Upper Body Training Bloops and Blunders - Tony Gentilcore

.

Myofascial Training for the Upper Body – Dean Somerset

.

Advanced Core Training & Conditioning - Dean Somerset

.

Linking Breathing with Rehab, Training and Performance - Dr. Jeff Cubos

.

Picking the Right Soft Tissue Tool for the Problem - Dr. Jeff Cubos

.

Unraveling Muscle Imbalances in the Shoulder - Rick Kaselj

.

Neck Exercises for Prevention, Rehabilitation and Strength - Rick Kaselj

.

As of right now I’ve only watch Tony’s first seminar and the presentation by Dr. Jeff Cubos on breathing and I can say in all honesty that I think they were both solid.  Despite all the talk about the effects of breathing on training, I’ve never really taken much of it to heart until now.  Given this new interpretation I’ll definitely be making this a consideration in my programs from here forward.

.

Now that I’m back from vacation I’m going to be digging in to finish watching the rest of the seminars starting with Dean’s mysofascial training lecture which I think should be interesting given the popularity of discussing fascia in the strength and conditioning inudstry these days.

.

Why I Like This Series

.

You might be wondering at this point how I can confidently do a review of a product I have yet to finish watching myself and that is certainly a fair question…to which I have 6 answers.

.

1.  The People Involved

.

I have shared discussions with and followed the work of all of the people featured in this series.  I know what they’re about and I have strong doubts that any one them would ever fail to deliver great content.  Period.

.

2.  The History of the Product

.

Last year’s product was fantastic, very well recieved, and continues to sell even a year later.  The track record of this product speaks for itself.  Fly by night operations that sell crappy products are NOT still selling products over a year later.

.

3.  Two Great Lectures

.

What I do know of THIS year’s product is that I’ve only watched two lectures to date and so far we’re batting 1000.  Even if the rest of the product totally sucked (which I’m pretty damn sure it won’t), I’d feel like I got my money’s worth because I’ve already learned a ton.  Far be it for me to give away what I learned, but you can trust that I’m very pleased with the quality of the lectures so far.

.

4.   The MASSIVE Discount

.

I really didn’t want to delay my review because I didn’t want you to miss out on the introductory price.  If you purchase the product before the end of TOMORROW (Thursday) you can scoop up Muscle Imbalances Revealed – Upper Body for only $77.  After that the price will go up to $147. 

.

5.  There is a 100% Money Back Guarantee

.

If you purchase the program now (and score yourself the aforementioned discount) you can check it out for 60 days and if you don’t absolutely love it you can get your money back with no questions asked.

.

6.  You Can Watch Them At Home

.

In a semi-unrelated point to the rest of those above, I have to say that I don’t like travelling a lot to conferences.   These days I just don’t have much time to be away from my work and my family for extended periods of time and I’m sure many of you can relate.  Compound that with the fact that travelling always ends up costing tons in terms of airfare, hotels, food, and so on.  Whenever I can help it, I learn from home.  Muscle Imbalances Revealed Upper Body allows me to do just that and I very much appreciate it.

.

7.  Lifetime Updates

.

Each time the product is updated you get updates for FREE!  And you have access to the product forever so if you accidentally delete the downloads (or your laptop crashes and you lose everything like I did) you can log in and get access again.

.

8.  Continuing Education Credits

.

If you’re a fitness professional and you need to get CEUs or CECs to maintain your certification you can get those as a result of purchasing MIRU.

.

Get it Now to Save $$$

.

So here’s the deal, if you’re a fitness professional and you want to separate yourself from the rest of the playing field with some top notch information from some very bright minds then you should pick up Muscle Imbalances Revealed Upper Body now!  I’m enjoying it so far and I’m confident you will too.

.

Muscle Imbalances Revealed Upper Body <– Pick it up here!

.

PS: Remember that the price goes up at the end of day TOMORROW.

.

Muscle Imbalances Revealed Upper Body <– Buy Now and Save!

.

.

This afternoon I’m leaving for a vacation to New Jersey to join Jersey Shore visit some family, but I just wanted to drop a couple quick things on you before I take off for the weekend.

.

1.  Swimming Science Interview

.

Last week I did an interview for John over at SwimmingScience.net.  During the interview I answered this question: “How much do you time do you spend on corrective exercises compared to strength?  Does this vary between anaerobic vs. aerobic athletes?”

.

It is a short interview, but I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on it.  If you’d like to check it out, you can do so HERE.

.

2.  Muscle Imbalances Revealed for the Upper Body is coming soon!

.

So far I’ve had a chance to check out Tony Gentilcore’s presentation “Corrective Exercise Strategies for Athletes (and Meatheads, too)” as well as “Linking Breathing with Rehab, Training and Performance” by my man Dr. Jeff Cubos.  Frankly, I’m impressed.  Very impressed.  Once again Rick Kaselj has pulled together a great bunch of really smart guys and I can’t wait to watch the rest of this product.

.

As far as I understand it is going up for sale next week so you’ll finally be able to get your mitts on it.  In the meantime, you can still pick up Rick’s free reports on 8 Steps to Unravelling Your Muscle Imbalances for free!  If you’re into free stuff (as I am) you should definitely pick this up.

.

8 Steps to Unravelling Your Muscle Imabalances <– Get it here for free!

.

So that’s it for me.  One more day of work then off to Joisey for some vacay.  Have a great weekend!

.

A while back I managed to convince my friend and colleague Chi Chiu to write an excellent review on Gary Taubes’ popular book Why We Get Fat.  Today Chi is back and I’m happy to be posting the first of a 4 part series on how to help your clients achieve the absolute best results possible.  If you’re a personal trainer, you’re not going to miss this one (or the rest of the series for that matter).  Chi is droppin’ some knowledge bombs here.  Let’s get at it!

Helping people to change.  Where to start?

People are strange creatures. They want advice, they pay you for it, they listen in awe, compliment you for being such a genius and then they do…nothing. Although I’m sure you’re glad to make ends meet, I suppose it just doesn’t cut it. A Facebook post ‘Have you ever fired a client?’  I came across may be a testimony of this phenomenon. Dealing with those types of clients can be challenging, I know it has been for me and my team.

Are you ready to change?

Anyone who had more than a handful of clients has noticed that the willingness to change can vary. Sometimes you sense it and sometimes it hits you by surprise. Well, if this is the case, you’re not off and it has been researched extensively. In healthcare, the dominant model is the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) from Prochaska et al.

Although not without controversy, it did give healthcare a structured approach to design intakes, inclusion, and exclusion criteria. One of those criteria is the question of when you plan to change. If the answer to that question is not within a period of a month, chances are that you are not ready yet. Although it’s a crude cut-off, it does help to increase chances of success, dramatically.

As a personal trainer however, you may not have the luxury of turning down clients, simply because they are not fully committed. Luckily there are tools and skills you can acquire to increase your chances of success.

The Transtheoretical Model Recognizes 5 Stages of Change

Recognize Willingness

Knowing that people are not always ready to change is one thing, but recognizing it and adjusting appropriately is going to get you through to the next level. Although the TTM recognizes 5 stages of change, I prefer working with the three stage model from Solution Focused Therapy (SFT). There are variations on the naming of those stages, but I choose to work with a shopping metaphor.

1. Window shopper

2. Searcher

3. Customer

As the name implies, the window shopper, is just passing by, with no intent to buy whatsoever. The searcher is actually in the store looking for something he likes. The customer is waiting in the line, knows what he buys and more important, knows what the price is.

It is really important to understand that these are NOT types of people, or just unwilling clients. These are stages in the willingness to change, and they apply as much to you and me, as they apply to your clients. We are in different stages at any given time with different types of problems. People can come in at any stage, move upward towards becoming a “customer” and then dive right back to the stage of “window shopper”. Although the stage usually does not reveal itself during an intake, we need to learn how to recognize it along the line, and more importantly, how to act upon it.

For readers familiar with the TTM, you can consider the window shopper and searcher as two sub phases in the precontemplative stage. The customer is from the contemplative stage and up. The question of when people plan to change is helpful in a medical environment, but may not work in personal training. Instead I watch for other ‘tells’.

But before we cover the three stages in detail, we need to address another important subject and that’s appropriate education.

Motivating or Educating?

Most people know that eating more balanced, exercising a bit more, and stress less is healthy. Most of your clients are also smart enough to come up with money to pay you, so you should consider them to be relatively intelligent. I also noticed that when people just do what they already know to be healthy, their health will skyrocket.  And yes, I’m sure you can tweak it, but the key message here is that people usually already know what is healthy, they just don’t act on it. So do you want to tweak or do you want to make big leaps?

The premise is that the client usually knows the answer, but sometimes they get confused. Who can blame them, I only have to watch two episodes of Oprah to get confused. People know what to do, yet we tend to put an emphasis on education. It is expected from us, it’s where our comfort zone lies. We sometimes measure our success by the fact that we told something the client didn’t already know. It’s human, it’s satisfying, but is it effective?

I can watch any given episode of Dr. Oz and learn something new. Does it make me more effective? No, what makes you and me more effective, is getting the client to do what he or she already knows.

You can get there by posing the right question! Make them think and make them work for it. Don’t let them slide with an ‘I don’t know’, keep pushing and compliment the hell out of them for their effort when they produce the right answer. It turns them into competent clients, in control of their own destiny and when the time comes, you can educate all you want. So for the time being, don’t educate, motivate!

Let’s talk a bit now about the three different stages described earlier.

The Window Shopper

The main feature of a window shopper is that he has no problem. He does not need anything you have to offer and yet they are client. This sounds ridiculous, but it happens quite often. An example is a man who fainted due to hypertension and his physician advised him to exercise. He objects about everything you suggest. He has a bad knee, he does not like this exercise and he is tired after a week of hard work. You are stumped, because you thought that anyone that fainted due to hypertension, would be highly motivated. What’s the problem?

Well, for starters, he does not share your passion for exercise. You may need to take this seriously and empathize. The second thing is that he received great medication. He no longer has uncontrolled hypertension, ergo he has no problem. I can give you numerous examples, but we need to move on.

What a lot of window shoppers share, is that they have been sent. They do not participate willingly. That does not mean that there are any legal consequences when they don’t show up, but it’s more of a social pressure. It can be just to appease their physician, a spouse, friends or even a company. As far as they’re concerned, they don’t have a problem. Is is their spouse or physician that sees the problem. A series of questions may address this and the goal is to let him think.

• How did you come to the idea to contact a personal trainer?

• What do you think that the person who referred you, expects from our relationship?

• How does the person who referred you, expect you to benefit from our relationship?

Of course, you’re not doing this on the training floor. I have a separate intake meeting where I get to know my client a bit, do assessments, negotiate goals, and take an extensive medical history.  A selection of these questions should be part of an intake. They are designed to consider valid arguments. People do a lot of stuff, without thinking it through. They don’t know why they do it. At least let them say it out loud, so you have an understanding. It can turn window shoppers into searchers or even customers in the first session. You can then go on to ask what they think they can get out of this arrangement. All their answers can be become input for a back-up plan in a later stage.

The Searcher

The searcher has a problem, but he does not think of himself as part of the solution. It may be a bad knee, not enough willpower, or whatever they think holds them back. Your first priority is to make them competent. I’m sure you’re an expert on weight loss, you read this blog for crying out loud, but the thing is, so is your client. A thorough history taking will usually reveal that the client was successful in the past, usually without any help. You need to find that moment and chose. Do you want to take the credit, or do you give credit to your client? If you opt for the latter, you’re going to build their confidence and give back control. Think of the following questions:

• When have you ever succeeded before?

• What did you contribute to make this success happen?

• What in this conversation gives you hope, that you’ll succeed again?

Any answer is an excuse to compliment! Notice that the questions are designed to open up the client, make him think, and above all to give hope. Of course you may not like his answers, but that is not the issue at hand. He needs to be convinced that he was a part of the solution and will be again, as of now! When he is open to the fact that may have some control over his destiny, you may actually turn him into a customer.

The Customer

In this stage, the client has a problem and he knows he is part of the solution. Education to clients in a customer’s phase, is actually useful. I can recall an epic post from Mike Boyle titled An Apology Letter to Personal Trainers where he basically states that the personal trainer has a hard time training clients with only half the time and talent of an athlete. I can add that most athletes are in customer mode, while normal clients are in window shopper and searcher mode. With a personal trainer client, you get the best results by motivating instead of educating. With most athletes however, education is motivation. You can become effective with both, IF you recognize stages of change.

Although I have many suggestions of what you can and cannot do with customers, that is not the focus of this post and will be covered in a later post in this series. As a trainer, do whatever that made you successful before with your clients, but add the two additional stages of change. Your numbers will go up!

I do want to spend some time on relapses though.

Relapse

In life there are no guarantees, you can only increase your chances. Learning about stages of change increases your chances. So will preparation for relapse. If somebody makes a decision to change, they are almost in love with butterflies all over the place, supplying all the energy and resilience necessary to succeed. This usually last for about four weeks and when the love is fueled (by you), this period can be extended to about 12 weeks.

Then it all becomes ordinary and they have to work for it, and so do you. A relapse at that point, is an accident waiting to happen. Your clients can easily fall back in another stage. It’s your job to recognize it and adjust. I actually bring this up, on the first day with my clients. You may find this odd, assuming or even setting up for failure. However preparing for relapse, shows me that you are realistic and you care about quality. It’s a backup plan, because people are not computers.

I’m sure your weight loss program is sound, but I can Google thousands of them. You want to be impressive? Show me your backup plan, you’ll be one of very few!  ”Chance favors the prepared mind” – Louis Pasteur!

Alternatives

You may have noticed that I did not mention Motivational Interviewing (MI), a technique to motivate clients and commonly practiced in healthcare (Hettema J 2005). It’s a good technique, like solution focused therapy (Bakker JM 2008). I combined them, submerging them in the principles of Positive Psychology, a research area that is interested in the things that make life, worth living. They complement each other very well. We call it motivational solution-focused coaching (MSC).

Another popular coaching technique is Rational Emotive Training / Therapy (RET), although it’s more about education then motivation. Educational in how irrational you are and how to correct it.

Then you have the infamous Neurolinguistic programming (NLP). To be honest, I don’t even know what it is anymore. Its basics did not hold up against scientific scrutiny and nowadays it seems to be a bucket for all sorts of coaching and counseling related techniques, with different selections per course. I have been trained in all of the previous mentioned techniques including NLP. And I learned something very important from all of them.

Helping people change, is not just a matter of ‘just do it’. It’s not just a matter of leading by example, nor firing inspirational one-liners once in a while. These may spark something, but it usually won’t last. Most techniques that successful people use, work for them, not per se for their clients. The use of positive self-statements for example, only works for the people that don’t need them (Wood JV 2009). The ones who actually need them, are constantly reminded of what they are not.

I see people writing brilliant programs, showing great insights in exercise physiology, and then they counsel their clients with lines you would put on a bumper sticker. It’s sub-optimal.

I have found that embracing the fact that the client is an expert of his own life, will convey respect, and empowers them. Research shows us that the techniques I talked about in the first half of this article, are not necessarily more effective than any of the other scientific-based alternatives I mentioned as alternatives, but they work faster (you win an average of two sessions) and they are less taxing for the coach (Bakker JM 2008). That’s because the client does all the work. MSC is solid and my team has put thousands of clients through it, with hundreds of successful cases on video. This stuff works!

Winding Down

There are some good techniques out there, that have passed scientific scrutiny. If you are new to this, Motivational Solution-focused Coaching is a great start. If you want to expand your coaching skills, you may want take some of the pearls that complement your current skills and apply them to clients.

Recognizing stages of change is the start, adjusting accordingly is a valuable skill to master. I will elaborate on it in detail, in the coming three posts that will be published on Mark’s blog. For now, I would suggest that you monitor your sessions or your conversations the coming weeks. Try to answer the following questions, after each session / conversation.

• Could you recognize stages of change?

• Could you recognize a shift in stage when it occurred?

• When did I educate, when I was supposed to motivate?

• What can I do better in the next session with this client?

If you care about your clients and care about results, you want to master this. That’s why I’ll leave you with this ‘assignment’, that will help you to create a foundation for the coming posts. Coaching is not a spectator sport. Read, apply, reflect, and adjust to master it. You can practice it with every conversation. You want to help your client to change? There you have it, T-minus 0 to take off!

References

Bakker JM (2008), Bannink FP. Solution focused brief therapy in psychiatric practice. Tijdschr Psychiatr. 2008;50(1):55-9. Dutch.

Hettema J (2005), Steele J, Miller WR. Motivational interviewing. Annu Rev Clin Psychol. 2005;1:91-111. Review.

Wood JV (2009), Perunovic EW, Lee J. Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others. Psychol Sci. 2009 May 21

Chi L. Chiu has a master’s degree in nutrition, one in health sciences, and is currently a grad student psychology. He is the owner of Chivo personal training, Chivo physical therapy, Chivo sports performance, and Chivo Continuous Professional Development center for lifestyle professionals. He is a member on various government and non-government funded advisory boards and works with clients on a daily basis.

.