WHY YOU NEED TO CARE
By Abdurahmaan Saloojee
Abdurahmaan is a Pre-Script coach from Ottawa who loves reading, traveling, and training.
WHY YOU NEED TO CARE
The coaching field is utterly unique, especially when measured against other fields in the general health industry (see infectious diseases, diabetes, obesity, etc.). Many of those medical fields have been around for much longer than coaching and personal training as we understand it today, so much more research has gone into those fields and a larger amount of data has been collected. From that, many more objective measurements and conclusions have been made in those areas relative to the fitness industry. Their rulebook is more fleshed out, and there are simple equations that can be used to solve the problems. At a surface level, understanding how those illnesses work can be simple, and for many, the process of treatment or medical prescription is a well-established pattern. This is simplifying the problem a lot, and it is not meant to take away from the medical fields in the slightest: they are incredibly difficult positions that come with a well-deserved prestige and respect, and the services that they provide to society are invaluable. However, an issue arises when people view training people from the same lens.
As stated, the field of coaching people specifically is new and many advances are still being made. That said, there are integral aspects of coaching that cannot be quantified or measured. This means that they are largely neglected when it comes to academia, research, and lab studies because if it cannot be quantified, it has little place.
The starkest example of this is stability, something that Pre-Script’s Level 1 goes into in great depth and is expanded on in the robust Level 2. Stability is the body’s ability to resist force. There is no real way to measure this in units or place it on a chart, so no studies can be conducted on it yet. However, it is integral to assessing the baseline of a client and determining where to start and progress them towards in terms of movements and exercise selection.
Understanding stability and its neurological origins is one thing, but experiencing it is another, and it is my firm belief that no coach should prescribe something to a client that they have not tried before. You can only assess stability in a client visually if you know how it feels and what to look for, and you will not know unless you have experimented with it yourself.
This should be a prerequisite to coaching. You should not accept the responsibility of someone’s health and well being without understanding how the human body functions, because you can potentially hurt people if you are careless. Once you have a basic level of knowledge surrounding anatomy, biomechanics, and physiology, and once you have tried enough things yourself to have an experiential understanding of these concepts, the world is your oyster. But for you as a coach to have checked these boxes means that you truly care about the field and your clients, and this is exactly what this post is about. You need to care: about your own dignity and standards, the education you receive, the practice you yourself perform, and the clients that you train. If you do not care, you are in the wrong field. But if you do, then there are countless people waiting that need your help. Pre-Script aims to give you a relentlessly tested method of finding the things worth caring about, and then teaching you how to apply them. Don’t miss out.