The Dance

Anatomical terminology: when it’s proximal to client’s needs, distal to their traumas …

One of my clients gave me some extremely validating feedback recently. At the time I didn’t say a lot about it, because we were focusing on his exercise routine. But I’ve been turning it over in my mind since then. I think it might provide some useful insight into the crucial dance that trainers and clients sometimes have to do with each other, not only about exercise itself, but the experiences and emotional needs that each of us brings to the interactions.

Basically, I had given him a new exercise and was demonstrating how he should do it over our usual video call. Of course, you won’t be surprised to hear that demonstrating over video is not always ideal, in comparison to the ability to show a client something in person using our own body, or even better: being able to illustrate by positioning their own body, with consent from them as needed. So although my body was probably in frame in the video camera, I won’t swear that what I was doing was clear enough, just in visual terms. But it’s also the case that not everybody learns best by watching video, and absolutely the case that some people learn better with verbal or written materials.

So as it became clear that the video wasn’t helping him conceptualize what I was asking him to do, I also explained in words. I happened to pick an explanation that meant something very clear to me, while being opaque to him. I told him to point his toes back towards his body. I may also have mumbled something about pointing his toes toward his shin bone, but if so, it still wasn’t quite clear enough.

He had to ask me to clarify. More than once.

We both kept at it, him asking me to clarify further, me searching for better ways of expressing what I wanted him to do.

If you’ve taken a little bit of basic anatomy, or kinesiology, you may recognize the terms I’m about to use. But you may also understand why they weren’t terms I would have chosen to use with my client. Basically, I wanted him to dorsiflex his foot, and he initially misunderstood me to be saying I wanted him to plantarflex it.

The important thing, however, was the feedback he gave me. He remarked offhandedly that he appreciated my patience in continuing to explain what I meant, while performing a very small (and, I think you’ll agree, unnecessary) apology for his inability to ‘get it’ faster.

Here’s the thing: I do not see myself as one of the more patient people I know. I am well aware of how often I am experiencing impatience on the inside. But I do make it a point to behave as patiently as possible with other people.

I also know exactly why this is important to me. It isn’t just that I believe it’s a useful way of interacting with other people, particularly in a coaching situation like that; it’s that I spent formative years with a mentor who was rather short on patience when teaching physical skills: my father.

(Anyone reading along who may have experienced my father as a fairly patient and eloquent teacher and coach later in his life is encouraged to trust your own experience: I think it was different for him when he was younger, and when the people he was coaching were his own kin.)

This particular client happens to be someone I’ve known personally for many years already. So I know that an impatient parent is something we share. That’s one reason I was so happy to hear him say that my patience was helpful. We’ve had many a conversation over the years about our Difficult Dads, and how often something happening right now in our fifties, that we struggle with, has roots in those old experiences.

But even without Difficult Dads, I also understand how genuinely tough it sometimes is to convey subtleties like the one I was trying to get across about pointing one’s toes in a particular direction. Technical terms like plantarflex and dorsiflex exist precisely because there are contexts in which it’s really important to be specific. But we also can’t guarantee that anybody knows those terms. We have to fumble along with ordinary words and do our best.

At the end of our session, I told my client about a misunderstanding I labored under for a couple of decades, based on no more than five or so interactions with my father in my tweens and teens. Dad would occasionally lament about the way that I sat in chairs, or on the living room floor where we often clustered to watch television, with “rounded shoulders”.

Teenage me was a bit too afraid of my father to ask him exactly what he meant. I suppose I worried that revealing my ignorance would merely draw further criticism. And whatever was going on in my father’s mind, it apparently didn’t occur to him to demonstrate the shoulder position he thought I was in, or the one he thought would be better for me. (On mature reflection, I also understand that he may not have explained further because he knew he was already impatient with me, or that I was already tuning out because I found talking with him about such things very stressful.)

With adult training in personal coaching, I understand that he meant that my shoulder blades were protracted. Imagine the way you probably sit at a desk, with your arms reaching forward to type or write. Your shoulder blades are probably pulled slightly (or a lot) away from your spine. It’s a position many of us spend a great deal of time in, probably more than our bodies “are made to.” We type, we drive, we protract to grip the handlebars of our bikes on long rides (anyway, I do all that).

Dad was trying to tell me that my shoulders were “rounded” forward. There are definite postural problems associated with not keeping the shoulder blades more neutral, and with not also RETRACTING them more often, to maintain a reasonable level of strength in the muscles that hold that position.

But here’s why this matters: I didn’t just not-understand what my father was telling me. I quite honestly remember misunderstanding in a particular way, which may have set me up for a different set of problems.

One can also shrug one’s shoulders up towards one’s ears. The related term for that is “elevation“, whereas relaxing or pulling one’s shoulders downward, away from the skull, can be called “depression“ of the shoulders and shoulder blades.

I thought dad was telling me that my shoulders were rounded downward too much: that they were “depressed“. I recall making some efforts to elevate them more, so that he wouldn’t keep pointing out my bad posture.

I won’t swear to it, but as an adult in late middle age, boy do I have problems with unconsciously shrugging my shoulders upwards, elevating them and over-tiring the muscles that perform that work, and I sometimes wonder if misunderstanding what my father was telling me set a pattern that I am still trying to break.

If my metaphor of a trainer and client ‘dancing’ with each other, as we work at understanding how we position our bodies during exercise, or in any other situation requiring exchanges of information and insight, is a metaphor that resonates for you, then all I can say is: as teacher and student dancing together, my father and I had four left feet.

Here’s the thing: it happens. Sometimes client and trainer really are not suited to each other. When the trainer is also the parent, it can be difficult to realize that that’s a problem, and even harder to know what to do about it. Indeed, I suspect that some of my fathers gifts in later life, of being a more thorough and patient coach, probably resulted from his own learning process, having not been able to teach or coach his sons as well as he might have wanted to.

But parenthood isn’t the only possible gotcha. Human communication to prey to all kinds of misunderstandings.

For any of us as adults: we can still find that the people we are seeking guidance or coaching from do not have the skills we need most. Ideally, if we like them for other reasons, we can give them feedback on what’s working and what isn’t, and they can seek ways to adapt to our needs.

I had a conversation with the owner of my gym recently, in which we talked about the value of continuing to take classes as students, albeit as students who intend to teach what we learn, because we never know when some other coach has a way of explaining or demonstrating something that we have never heard before, or have never used in our own coaching. Jeff told me that he has sometimes spent an entire weekend learning a skill he already teaches, but that one or two little tidbits of ‘how someone else teaches it’ wind up paying off with the next client who walks in the door, who can’t understand Jeff’s usual ‘Twenty Ways To Think About A Kettlebell Swing’ but totally gets it when he hauls out #21 and #22 that he just picked up recently.

We never ever know what a client understands, or needs us to tell them, until we do that back and forth. That dance.

I was glad to hear that I danced well enough with my client that I at least didn’t awaken old frustrations that get in the way of learning. I can be a pretty terrible student when those kinds of feelings come up for me … terrible at understanding, and sometimes pretty rough on coaches who haven’t found the key to teaching me something. I’m prone to working out some of those ‘things I wish I’d said to my father’ in such situations. I’m glad my client and I steered ourselves clear of that kind of interaction.

I keep trying to think of a cute way to summarize this post, to make it pithier, but I suppose any difficulty I’m having reflects something about how nuanced I honestly believe these situations can be.

Oh, maybe this is the point: as coach or client, keep at that dance.

© 2021 Grampa Fitness

Disclaimer: Ideas expressed in this blog post should not be construed as official advice on how to safely perform fitness activities. Always consult with your doctor and other medical professionals as necessary, before engaging in exercise.