MEDICAL MATTERS Looking and

listening Personal Trainer Dr John Searle looks at this month’s topic

T

wo things were drummed into me when I was a medical student. First, look at a patient before you do anything

else. “What is your overall impression of this patient?” we were often asked. Secondly,

listen to what they say and you will quickly pick up clues about what is the matter with them. Two recent experiences reminded me of these and how vital they are in working with clients.

A 70-year-old lady asked me to go and see her at home. She had had a knee replacement a year ago but was having great difficulty mobilising and was still using elbow crutches. She was very fed up. The surgeon had told her that there was nothing wrong with her new knee. The physio was happy that she was doing all the right exercises. So why was she having so much trouble getting about? The answer was obvious. She was very over-weight and at a guess had a BMI in the mid-30s. While the health professionals had done a first class technical job they were so focused on the new knee that they had missed the obvious. But she herself had already realised what the problem was. When I asked her, “Do you think your difficulty getting mobilised might have something to do with your weight?” she replied, “I thought you would ask me that.” We were then able to talk about working towards a healthy weight and how she could do that.

A few weeks ago I was working out in the gym when I noticed an instructor really ‘beasting’ a client. “Come on, just do it. You have done better than this.” The client was clearly struggling to focus and just could not do what was being asked and was not doing as well as he had a couple of weeks before. But the instructor did not seem to be asking the question why? My guess was that something had happened since the last session. Maybe he was short of sleep because the kids had been up a lot at night. Maybe he was about to lose his job. Perhaps he’d had a bereavement or had just got over a bout of ‘flu.

It reminded me of the importance of the warm up. There was a time when I got established clients to warm up on their own before I started the session. But I quickly learnt that I missed things. Warm up is the listening time when we find out what has been going on in a client’s life and thinking how that is going to affect the session; how it might need to be modified and what we can do to enable them to focus on the training. We are definitely not counsellors or therapists but good listening skills are important if we are to enable our clients to get the maximum benefit from each training session.

26 The REPs Journal 2012;24(May):26