Clients Must Push, Pull, Lunge, Squat, Bend, Rotate and Brace in Every Training Session
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By Sal | July 14, 2010
At Vern Gambetta’s GAIN 2010 apprentorship program extra-ordinary athletic development coach Kelvin Giles provided us with a simple seven-step rule that should guide every fitness development and athletic development coach when it comes to program and workout design. You can visit Kelvin and enjoy his genius yourself by visiting his web site www.movementdynamics.com.
In every workout, every client must push, pull, squat, lunge, bend, rotate and brace. Simple. Elegant. Effective. And when said with a full-on classic Australian accent, powerful. These seven actions are a part of everyone’s daily existence, athlete and non-athlete alike, so they should be included in everyone’s workout. It really does make perfect sense.
However, many in our field get seduced by the latest, hottest, greatest. Some fitness development coaches and personal trainers, with the best of intentions, get so hung up teaching individual techniques that they lose sight of the big picture and ignore the fundamentals.
Regular visitors to PersonalTrainerCoach.com know that I’m not a fan of machine-based exercises and this rule really points out the short-comings of this mode of exercise. I know there are some who will make the case that you can bend and rotate and squat and lunge in a machine, but when you performing these movements in a machine are you really performing them? You aren’t.
Certainly you don’t have to perform multiple exercises and sets to address each of these seven movement needs. Every workout should have a different emphasis, but you should always make allowances to include this variety of movements in every workout for every client. The dynamic warm-up/preparation phase of the workout provides a great opportunity to work on these fundamental movement skills.
Remember, these moves do not have to be performed with external resistance, especially for beginner clients or clients with poor mechanics. Clients at all ability and fitness levels can derive tremendous benefits from performing body-weight ground-based, compound movements.
Keep this rule in mind as you design and implement workouts for your clients and have them push, pull, squat, lunge, bend, rotate and brace in every session.
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Topics: Personal Trainer Coaching, Training Education, Training Philosophy | 2 Comments »
2 Responses to “Clients Must Push, Pull, Lunge, Squat, Bend, Rotate and Brace in Every Training Session”
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9:40 pm on July 15th, 2010
Great post! This is how I train all my clients and agree with you 100%. Thanks for the great info.
7:50 am on July 22nd, 2010
Thanks Sal, I couldn’t agree with you more! I start clients with bodyweight compound exercises first, and then move into hybrid exercises using upper and lower body movements. I am a small shop so I do not have the access to machines. I believe that moving clients in all planes of motion is more beneficial for the client in a functional way. Why not take advantage of moving as many muscles as you can for your client? Machines take away that benefit, there are so many important stabilizer muscles that do not get utilized when using machines.