Traning Injuries

Implementing A Standard Screening Process

- Dr. John Rusin

Do you screen for injury risk in training?

The first tenet of training is to do no harm to your client. While most coaches and trainers shrug off this golden rule of fitness, many professionals in our industry truly don’t fully understand nor appreciate the depth of importance of the “do no harm” credo.

Just because your clients aren’t herniating discs with ugly rounded back deadlifts or tearing their rotator cuffs to shreds on the bench press while under your professional supervision doesn’t mean that your programming and coaching isn’t predisposing them to aches, pains and injuries down the line.

Sure, it’s easy to self-justify “safe and effective” training practices when your clients aren’t dropping like flies to the gym floor with acute traumatic training induced injuries. But the question remains, is your coaching, programming and management helping your clients achieve physical resilience and longevity?

This is absolutely a loaded question, and one of the most difficult for coaches in our industry to answer definitively. Step back, put your ego aside and honestly ask yourself this question; is your training doing more harm than good? But here’s the more important question; how do you even know?

Instead of just hoping and praying that your clients stay healthy in training and throughout their other physical endeavors in sport and life, we need to start placing some objective measures on training risk management. We screen and assess our clients in order to identify red flag issues, set baseline levels of function and create professional standards and goals to work towards in training.