A guide to managing pain during gym training without stopping workouts. The speaker covers how trainers can adapt exercises around injuries and keep clients fit while they heal.
Pain by itself is just a symptom. It's just something that you're feeling at that point in time that tells you, okay, something is happening. Does that mean it's necessarily bad? Good, whatever. So typically, I'll go through a process with the clients where I talk to them, okay, what is your pain? Can you describe it? What does it feel like to you? When does it come on? Are there certain movements that you do that make it feel worse and movements that you do that make it feel better? And then we start trying to break down the process by which we can still train. I'm a big believer that no matter what you're going through, there's always something that you can do in the gym. And sometimes that means we avoid certain exercises or movements that might be problematic. You give them a chance to chill, give them a chance to heal, give them a chance to rest. But we can still hammer some others. If you have a sore knee, you probably still have two working shoulders. If you don't, that's a discussion for another time. But we can probably still do core work. We could probably still do conditioner work. We could probably still do something with that sore knee that's not going to irritate it, but it'll still give you a benefit at the end of the day. So while it might not be something where we're trying to turn from a trainer into a rehab professional, we're still trying to train the body that's in front of us. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're trying to be poor, effective trainers. It means we're trying to figure out how do we work with the person giving us the best that they can, but giving them the best that we have available.
