“Where do you feel it?” The Question I Ask Most Frequently as a Personal Trainer
By the 4D Personal Trainer in Putney
This question gets used 5 or 6 times every session of every day! And it’s one of the most important questions a personal trainer should ask. When you first train as a personal trainer, you learn that movements and muscles are predictable, uniform and straight forward. For example: a bench press uses the pectoral and tricep muscles; a cable row uses the lats and bicep muscles. But the more you work with clients, the more you realise that every human body works differently, and every set of biomechanics presents its own problems and solutions. So in a bench press exercise, a human body can learn to put more load through the triceps, or more load through the pectorals…or most of the load through a completely different set of muscles that shouldn’t be loaded at all in this movement!
So for a personal trainer working with a unique and individual human body, the fact that the textbooks say a particular movement should load a particular muscle doesn’t matter too much. What really matters is, “where do you feel it?”. Most people have to be taught, and most bodies retrained to feel any particular movement in the right place. And as long as modern westernised lifestyles continue to corrode and mutate correct musculoskeletal function, one of the most important questions a personal trainer can ask will continue to be, “where do you feel it?”.
By the 4D Personal Trainer in Putney
