Staying Positive as a Personal Trainer
As a personal trainer, it is so important to be positive about your craft and about your clients. Otherwise, your clients will more likely leave you and go to another trainer ,or, complain to other people about you. This may impact gaining future clients.
When working with adults and children with special needs it is paramount to be positive. Why? Its your job to and also this community does not need a ” Trainer downer”.
Staying positive doesn’t mean that you have to put on a ‘happy, happy, joy, joy’ persona either. It means that you stand firm in confidence, willingness and openness, respect, and aptitude. This will help you deliver effective and boundless trainings.
Having a positive behavior is infectious. Clients and their caretakers will naturally be drawn to you. Like attracts like.
Managing Behaviors
When training your client with a special need or disability, there may be an occurrence when he/she engages in behaviors that appear to come out of the blue, or are repetitive.
Common behaviors that are seen are physical aggression – where a client uses a part of his body to strike or harm another, verbal aggression – offensive and/or violent language towards another, self injurious behaviors – hitting or harming themselves to cause injury or pain, property destruction – throwing and/or breaking items or objects to cause damage, and, non compliance- refusing to perform tasks when asked.
When these behaviors occur , DO NOT BE ALARMED or PANIC. Usually most behaviors have occurred in the past and are not new to that particular client. However, the typography (what the behavior looks like) may not be the same.
What you can do:
Prior to commencing personal training with any client, find out if they have any additional challenges , this includes behaviors of concern. If there are any, find out as much as you can about the behaviors such as the triggers, antecedents to the behaviors, strategies to prevent the behaviors from occurring, and what to do when they occur.
Most clients will have a caregiver or aide present during training. Usually this person will know of the behaviors of that client and strategies to keep him/her calm.
Once you have trained a client for a number of weeks, you will know his/her personality and be aware of (often through experience), their triggers. The key is to not feed triggers but instead to provide an environment where the client can thrive in.
However, if there is a behavior that is problematic and or continuous, contact the caregiver.
Special Needs Fitness Magazine 