“Practicing What You Teach”, an obvious “play on words” of the common phrase “Practicing What You Preach”, has two primary meanings to me.
On one hand, fitness professionals should “walk the walk” and engage in the activities that they are promoting. It always concerns me when I see people making their living in the fitness field who obviously don’t live the fitness lifestyle.
Surely it must make their clients wonder “If they are telling me this is so great, why aren’t THEY doing it?” or “If they ARE doing it, why isn’t it WORKING for them?”
The other meaning is “Making sure you have personally practiced and attained a high level of mastery over the modalities you are teaching to your clients”.
It can be very tempting for trainers to jump on the bandwagon of whatever is the latest popular training fad in an attempt to be current. This also goes for new ideas you may learn from your CEC courses as well.
You may be so excited by this new information that you’re tempted to start using it right away with clients. However, if you haven’t taken the time to practice and master something new, you certainly aren’t ready to teach it.
You not only see this in personal training but in the way fitness products are marketed commercially.
A recent example is the controversy surrounding a celebrity fitness personality who recently released Kettlebell workouts on DVD. The resulting “firestorm” that occurred after the DVD release is based on the fact that, according to Kettlebell experts, this person obviously hasn’t had proper training nor do they display adequate execution skills.
Apparently they haven’t let a “little thing like lack of knowledge or ability” get in the way of trying to cash-in on the growing popularity of Kettlebells. Evidently they also aren’t concerned about the fact that a lot of people may get injured trying to use this product either.
As mentioned above, trainers may often feel pressured to implement a new training technique in order to “keep up with the competition” and/or to appear cutting edge.
But, in the same way, you wouldn’t want a surgeon “practicing” a new surgical technique on you, you shouldn’t be “practicing” new fitness techniques on your clients.
World famous strength and conditioning coach Michael Boyle often talks about how he will never use something on his clients or athletes that he hasn’t worked with on himself first. He wants to make sure he has developed a high degree of familiarity as well as technical mastery that would enable him to teach it safely.
In a radio interview, I heard well known Canadian strength coach Christian Thibaudeau describe “how he never uses a routine with his athletes that he has not first tried out on himself. He said “I am a lab rat for my own methods, there’s no method that I use with my athletes that I have not tried on myself first”.
I definitely feel the same way as these two gentlemen of whom I have a great deal of respect for. I will not use a new method or modality with a client until I have both “mastered” it’s performance as well as figured out how to “break-it-down” from a teaching standpoint to ensure the maximum safety and effectiveness for my clients.
In summary. If you find yourself in a situation where you want to implement a new tool or technique in order to stay competitive in the field, I strongly advise using these steps.
- Make sure you FIRST take the time to thoroughly understand the proper technique(s).
- Practice long enough to achieve a high level of personal mastery in terms of its execution.
- Develop a systematic approach to teaching it using appropriate progressions.
- Make it available to your clients.
Scott Fishkind is an ACE certified personal trainer and the founder of Time4You Fitness which is a company specializing exclusively in In-Home and Workplace Fitness in Franklin, TN. At his website you can also read Scott’s Blog too. Scott has also been a private teacher since 1981. Scott can also be reached via email at info@time4youfitness.com. Check him out on Facebook and Linkedin also.
Leave a Reply