By: Brian Schulte, CSCS, FAFS, and Austin Kitteringham, CSCS, FAFS
How do you track your progress? Is it adding weight to your lifts? Is it cutting time off of your run? Or is it by moving better and feeling better in your day-to-day life?
Progress and tracking your progress are unique to you and your goals, and the Spooner FIT team recognizes and celebrates that. FIT trainers work with you to determine, set, and meet your goals. We talked to Austin Kitteringham and Brian Schulte to see how they motivate, set goals, and achieve goals with their clients:
How do you motivate your clients?
Brian: There is power in focusing more on what a client can do, versus what a client can’t do. Creating success through success can not only be a powerful tool to work around sensitive areas of the body, but psychologically, it can encourage an individual to progress.
From an exercise standpoint, I don’t limit myself to the standard prescription of sets and reps when it comes to all my clients, as I feel numbers tend to hold them back. Often, I’ll do an exercise for distance, time, or set a task they have to accomplish, and they can achieve it at their own pace. Figuring out how the client prefers to be motivated and encouraged is more powerful than any one tactic.
Austin: Establishing what motivates a client from the beginning is essential to understanding what will help them reach their goals. I always tell my clients that their first goal will branch out and change over time. There will be roadblocks that come up, so motivation will look different in those cases. It’s an exciting journey where we can take what we are about to do and pivot to meet their needs to get them back on the right track. My motivation for them is to know that whatever the client is going through or whatever they want to achieve is possible and give them a sense of comfort during a time of change.
How do you set goals with your clients?
Brian: For those that do want or need goals towards a specific activity, I come up with specific exercise tests that correlate to the biomechanics or function of what the client is trying to do. For example, if I have a rotational athlete, some of our tests will rotational movements of the body.
I try to stray clients away from the vague goals of “I want to be stronger.” When I hear that during an initial consult, I’ll often ask “how do you know when you have achieved a place of being stronger?”, and usually the answer to that can lead us to the true goal. Through this, we establish realistic, objective, and functional goals, while still encouraging a client in their journey.
Not every client comes to me with a specific goal. For many, they are there for the experience of movement. Do you do every walk or hike at the fastest possible speed? Or do you just enjoy the hike for what it is, the journey, the experience, and the celebration of what you are able to do? There are many golfers I have met in my career that are more centered on the process of how they play and the enjoyment they derive from their round than the number of strokes they take at the end of the day. Sometimes, we just need to celebrate and appreciate the gift of movement for what it is versus trying to contain it.
Austin: For my clients that are coming out of the rehab process and into the training realm, we keep in mind where they are coming from. For example, if they just had a total knee replacement, we don’t want to necessarily just focus in on the total knee, but, when we set goals, we keep in mind that we are still accomplishing and progressing from the foundation of the rehab.
We have movement assessments to get an ideal of what your body needs, and we start making goals around that and other functional, lifestyle, or sports-specific goals you want to accomplish. Often times clients don’t have a full understanding of how their body functions as a whole and showing them how they can continue to improve starts to open the possibility for goals they would have never realized were possible.
How do you track progress?
Brian: Progress is not always linear, and it’s relative. For some clients, it can be linear. Strength or performance gains with consistent effort can yield expected results. For others, progress can have ups and downs. But, if it is viewed over a long enough time, the results will be there. This is very similar to what many of our physical therapy patients experience after surgery.
Finally, there are those where progress is a relative gain. Some of our geriatric clients, or those with complicated conditions, we recognize aren’t going to turn back the clock or reverse biology as we’d wish it could. For these individuals, sometimes it’s a game of holding on to what they have for as long as they can, and decreasing the level of decline, versus expecting substantial gains.
Austin: Every trainer and every client will approach progress a little differently depending on how they like to analyze movement or give a justification for progress. In my case, progress for someone who is not an athlete is when we see that their functional development outside of training is rolling over into what they want to do in their everyday life. It’s little realizations like, “I can play with my kids in a different way than I’ve ever been able to.” That’s when we start to see progress that we can’t necessarily measure.
From an athlete standpoint, tracking progress is a bit more numbers specific. We want to know a specific volume of workload done over the course of a training cycle to understand how the athlete is responding physically. With this, we also keep in mind how the athlete is performing and feeling mentally. All of these factors play into tracking outcomes for any athlete and many different levels of competition.
How do you help your clients with recovery?
Brian: I ask my clients multiple times a week, “What does your mind and body need today?” Training is not always about pushing the limit, but more respecting it and knowing when to move forward, but also when to take a step back.
Austin: With the app that we are using now, we can really tap in on recovery for our clients. If people like to wear a recovery tracker, that information can go right into our app. This helps us coaching-wise to get a whole picture of health: sleep, hydration, nutrition. Outside of all trackable numbers, I often have crucial conversations with clients to get a true understanding of how they’re feeling. This helps me as a coach make a decision to adjust a workout that day and focus on what is important to them in the moment.
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