A personal experience of mine was in the early days of running my personal training business. I was excited about applying some of my brand new knowledge and skills to help prescribe exercises for both sports specific training & exercise rehabilitation.

I clearly remember the first time I did a postural analysis on a new client. I was quite ‘chuffed’ at myself and all my findings. The terms kyphosis, lordosis, anterior tilt of the pelvis and so on, ran through my mind as I observed them standing behind a plumb line. Unfortunately, those words also came out of my mouth at the same time! I thought it might sound like I knew what I was talking about, but little did I realise, it was freaking my client out!

That night I had a conversation on the phone to a family member about my day and what I had done. They very promptly said “I hope you didn’t diagnose them with those terms!” I couldn’t understand why they used the word ‘diagnose’…it’s not a disease!

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that to a client who knows little about posture and exercise, they might feel like there was something majorly wrong with them.

The moral of the story is that as a trainer, we are not here to ‘diagnose’ movement faults. Our job is to make observations to help us prescribe appropriate exercises and determine a safe starting point. It takes time to develop the skill of assessing posture & movement patterns while at the same time taking notes and chatting to the client about their day. We need to make our client feel comfortable and explain why we are getting them to do these basic movement tests, and NOT use fancy words.