CONSTRAINTS ARE THE CURE

Constraints are the Cure:

Overcoming paralysis by analysis for new trainers.

By Abdurahmaan Saloojee 

Abdurahmaan Saloojee is a personal trainer from Ottawa, Canada. He enjoys traveling, reading, and spending time with cats.

Summary Points:

• One of the best cures for paralysis by analysis is constraints

• Understand programming concepts like frequency, exercise order, and exercise selection makes it a lot easier to program

• Knowing how to ask good questions in order to arrive at what constraints to use is a valuable skill for any coach to have

Everyone has likely experienced some form of paralysis by analysis at some point in their education or career: the sheer plethora of options available for any given task can be daunting, especially when the outcome is largely subjective (ie in coaching, how a person feels). The good news (or part of it) is that if you feel paralysis by analysis, it means that you care enough about the problem and the person to worry about choosing the right answer - which is a good sign. The other good news is that there are ways you can reduce that anxiety when having to program for people.

When you meet a client for the first time and talk about their goals, your brain instantly runs through your mental exercise database and can be frozen by the number of options available. How many leg exercises can you think of? Probably a lot. How do you decide on how to start their leg day and ensure it will be as beneficial as possible? The answer is simple: constraints. Let contextual questions with more or less concrete and objective answers limit the amount of subjectivity so that your options are automatically narrowed down to what fits within the constraints. How do you find the constraints? Ask questions. 

Some of the most effective ones are “How many days a week do you plan to train?” This automatically sets the skeleton of the program because you are constrained by how many days a week you can train, so your possible split combinations are limited. Other questions revolve around training and injury history. Their training experience will dictate whether or not they should start with types of equipment with a higher skill requirement like barbells and their injury history will also indicate certain things to watch that will influence warm-up selection and exercise order (for example, if they have had a recent back injury but have been cleared for exercise, more stabilized work will be prioritized and the day might start with a bent over row variation that allows the spinal erectors to be limiting factor.

Another of the biggest considerations is the most obvious: what does the client enjoy? In fairness, they may not know what they want and may not have a clear answer. Alternatively, you can also ask what they don’t like. It is likely that they have tried something that did not work or that injured them in the past (whether with a trainer or not), and right off the bat there is something for you to use to make their experience more tailored and increase client buy-in.

Constraints are one of the biggest tools that coaches and trainers can use to their advantage when it comes to programming. It is one of the most efficient ways to reduce paralysis by analysis. Using constraints to limit the number of available options you have makes it a lot easier to prescribe and create valuable and applicable workout programs for clients because you can use exclusion criteria to remove what they don’t want and focus on what they do.