Simon Wellsted - founder of Unity Body MOT - co-hosted with Chris Dabbs

Unity Body MOT Podcast

www.unitybodymot.org

Video Narrator: If you’re an experienced personal trainer, fitness or movement professional, the chances are you chose your profession because you love the buzz of helping your clients maximize their potential. But it is important to stay ahead of the game by constantly expanding your knowledge by learning new skills, if you don’t your competition will, leaving you playing catch up. So don’t get left behind, with Unity Body MOT you can build your existing skills – not simply the latest fitness fads or equipment but in the very latest information and skills to help you and your clients be more successful. We’ll help you learn the relationship between exercise, movement and injury using the very latest science and research. How and why common exercises and movements are not right for many individuals and advise the right exercises to the right people at the right time. Understand how the majority of tightness mobility injury and other issues occur, what you can do about this, and learn how to relay this new information to clients in plain English; keeping them healthier and happier with their bodies and with you. You will learn precisely how your client’s body is working on the inside so you can help them in a much bigger way than before. These are the skills essential to stay ahead in the game and set you apart as an exceptional fitness, movement or exercise professional. And of course, it gives you the edge when it comes to retaining existing customers and attracting new ones. If you’re serious about your profession and your clients, never stop learning. Contact Unity Body MOT to learn more today for a totally free strategy call to discuss your specific situation and how together we can help elevate your career to another level.

Hi there and thank you for joining us for a series of informative, and we hope, useful podcasts for everything a wellness professional needs to know to ensure that their clients are receiving the best training possible, and therefore allowing the trainer to be more successful by having more happy clients. My name’s Chris Dabbs, and as always, I am joined by Simon Wellsted – founder of Unity Body MOT.

Hi Simon, how are you? I hope you’re well.

Simon: I am good Chris, thank you.

Chris: Fantastic, okay. Well really what we’re going to be trying to do today is to acquaint you with what Unity Body MOT are up to and how Unity Body MOT can help you to increase your business. So our podcast is aimed at helping wellness professionals become better acquainted with how to help their clients more by helping them to train effectively while understanding that their clients will gain more when their exercise routines are tailored to meet their clients goals. While taking into account how injuries or infirmities can affect the outcomes. I know that’s a bit long winded Simon but does that sound about right?

Simon: Yeah that sounds great. Thanks Chris, that’s a good summary.

Chris: Okay. So really looking through your website and watching the video, which of course we heard as an intro at the beginning of the podcast, tell me something about how you would explain this to me if I was a wellness professional looking at helping my clients to become, well, fitter I suppose.

Simon: Okay, so I start this by normally saying that a given client will be given a certain set of exercises for a given objective, and those exercises might be fairly typical for a range of clients. But what we are now beginning to understand is that certain exercises are going to be right for some, neither right nor wrong for others and definitely wrong for quite a few. And we reckon that that quite a few is probably 50-60%.

Chris: Really? So you’re saying that more than half of the people, potentially, are doing exercises that are what? Injurious or will injure them?

Simon: Down the line, potentially, yes. We use the phrase ‘laying the foundations for injury’. So they may not have any symptoms today, they may be perfectly correct, they may have no mobility issues, they may not have any obvious tightness; but what we do know is that if there are things going on inside the body, which we teach PTs about and the PT can find those, they can then make changes to their exercise program to get around those so that the client moves forward faster.

Chris. Okay. So you mentioned changes or things going on inside the body perhaps, would the client be aware of these things or is this something that…? Give me an example, if I wanted to do some upper body exercises to try and get rid of my belly, how would your program help my trainer – my PT – to help me to, I guess, achieve my goals?

Simon: Okay, so just taking a little bit of a step back, one of the key learning points from the training that we do with personal trainers and other fitness and movement professionals is to say that what they can see and what their clients can see and the information that the client gives back to the trainer can often give a misleading picture of actually what is going on.

Chris: Okay.

Simon: So they may say, “I’ve got really tight hamstrings”. And one of the key learning points at the very beginning of our training is to say just because somebody has got really tight hamstrings doesn’t mean that you have to work them – stretch them, mobilize them – that tightness of those hamstrings might be coming from somewhere completely different in the body. So we use the phrase ‘a robust and sustainable solution’, if you’re working with somebody and you are giving them exercises and their achieving the objectives in the timeframe that you would expect them to be achieved – fantastic. If they keep on coming back to you week after week and they’ve regressed, and the same problem is appearing, then that’s a really strong indicator that something else is getting in the way – somewhere else in the body is causing that issue – so just progressing with doing that exercise faster, harder, more frequently isn’t necessarily the right answer.

Chris: Right. So, okay if something was ringing a bell for me in terms of, what are they called, you know the insoles that you can buy that are specially tailored to your feet? Orthotics or something like that.

Simon: Yes, orthotics.

Chris: Orthotics. The reason for providing that is because your feet can affect your gait and your stance and how you stand and therefore you can develop back problems or shoulder pain or something like that. So that’s kind of what you’re saying, obviously not to do with orthotics, but that’s kind of what you’re saying. In other words, there may be an issue arising from somewhere else within the body that prevents the exercise from achieving its simplistic goal of, as you were saying with hamstrings, of really sort of loosening up the hamstrings.

Simon: Correct. We’re living in a press-button society, everybody wants a quick result for health or any other area of our lives. So people see that they’ve got an issue so people tend to focus on where that issue is. Orthotics is a wonderful example, I’ve done training for podiatrists and demonstrated that we can completely change the biomechanics of the foot by working on the shoulder.

Chris: Alright, really?

Simon: And that’s not as a manual therapist, that’s as a PT working on the shoulder. So just putting in an orthotic for a runner because they are seen to have a particular gait characteristic, putting in an orthotic to stop that characteristic isn’t necessarily the right answer. And we actually take PT’s through a process – a very simple, quick and safe process – where they can make those determinations for themselves, not just from a ‘should they have an orthotic?’ because obviously PTs are not qualified to put orthotics in. But they are qualified to help somebody achieve mobility through their hamstrings or mobility through their spine, whether that be upper or lower body.

Chris: Yeah, I see what you mean because what you are saying is basically, if someone has a pain in their shoulder that could potentially affect their gait because they’re trying to compensate for that pain in the shoulder.

Simon: Absolutely.

Chris: Whereas the orthotic would mean that they don’t walk in that particular way. What they are doing is transferring, potentially, the issue somewhere else and creating a new one as well as keeping the pain in the shoulder.

Simon: You’ve hit the nail on the head there; it’s creating new ones as well. When we’ve run training for podiatrists we’ve demonstrated, actually using them as models, that they’d come out and screen somebody’s foot and reported back to the audience what they found because their foot specialists. We’ve just then told them how to do something very simple on the shoulder from an exercise perspective, then told them to go back and rescreen the foot, and everything’s changed. So sometimes orthotics are required, but for very good medical reasons, sometimes they’re not. What we’re saying is that we can make a very, very good determination as a fitness and health and movement professional whether somebody should be working on their hamstrings, whether they should be squatting, whether they should be moving their spine in a particular way, whether they should be doing upper body extension of their arms in a particular way and we can then say, if the case in a particular client is no they shouldn’t, they’d know that. They can steer clear of those exercises, but also we teach them how to solve that problem as well, from an exercise perspective.

Chris: Okay. Is there a simple way to explain to us how the PT, you know the personal trainer or the wellness professional, can actually find a way to work with that client to overcome it? Is it as simple as a manual manipulation of the shoulder?

Simon: Yes, we’re not talking about manipulation here, because obviously personal trainers are not typically qualified to put their hands on people in a manual way – that’s a therapy. We’re not crossing over to therapy.

Chris: That makes sense.

Simon: Yeah, we’re not crossing over the therapy threshold, if you like.

Chris: Well no because obviously the osteopaths and all of those people in that world are trained in being able to do that and obviously they need to be able to work alongside professionals. Would that be about right?

Simon: Absolutely. What we’re talking about here is a client who doesn’t necessarily have any obvious issues. We use the term asymptomatic; they don’t have any pain, they don’t have any mobility issues that they are aware of, they’re not injured – because a personal trainer, and as they add additional qualifications to their own skills set, they won’t have the insurance to treat that injury.

Chris: No, or the training of course.

Simon: Indeed. However, we know that if we can help the PT identify that somebody, for example, has a high risk of a knee problem, and that is very simple they can determine that in about ten minutes…

Chris: Well that’s my next question.

Simon: Absolutely, then certainly for the foreseeable future, that PT should not be recommending that they go on a treadmill or go through exercises which put heavy forces down through the knee. We also teach them how to solve that problem through other exercise options. So they’re achieving the same objectives but not actually putting high pressures through the knee because that particular client has a predisposition to a knee problem and we can determine that and say what the risk is of that person sustaining a knee problem which is relatively new science. So it’s all about doing what’s right for the client, not saying, “Don’t exercise, go and lay down because you can’t exercise.” It’s saying, “Exercise is important but let’s exercise, for you, in this way because you have a, for example, predisposition to a knee problem or back problem” – whatever that might be. We will still exercise but we’ll just do these exercises which don’t exacerbate that particular issue that you have. It may not be painful now but, and then this is the difficulty that we have, in that people don’t understand that they have a predisposition to an injury.

Chris: Well exactly there Simon, I mean that’s the thing, if you go and see a personal trainer and you’re undertaking a training regime you may not realize, as you’ve said, that you have an issue with a knee/back problem or anything else. Are you saying that the PT can actually spot that because of compensation or compensatory movements or something?

Simon: We give the PT a toolset, a very simple toolset which takes no more than ten minutes to do once their competent at it, and they will be able to pick out whether somebody has a predisposition to a knee problem, whether they have a back problem, whether they have a predisposition to upper body shoulder issues and if those markers are in place then the exercise professional then has a choice: they can say, “Okay I know that, that is really useful information”, educate the client about it which is absolutely crucial, in plain English.

Chris: Right, I think more importantly the plain English, exactly. Otherwise you’re potentially giving some bad news to somebody – I don’t know.

Simon: Right, it’s got to be all delivered in a positive way. So the way our personal trainers that we train tend to work is to do these tests, they then say to the client, “Well, we know your objectives are to lose weight, to get fitter for running…” or whatever it might be, “because of what I’ve checked on your body, this is the right exercise set for you.” And if the client turns around and says, “Well what about going on a treadmill?” for example, they might turn around and say, “Well actually, at the moment you have a high marker that say you shouldn’t really be putting forces through your knee so we will train you in a different way.”

Chris: Okay. So give us an idea of these markers that the trainer would be able to employ, or to identify I guess. I’m thinking it’s something it’s something along the lines of exercising and perhaps there being a perfect range of movement within a joint and then if the client can’t achieve that then that that’s an indicator, or is that too simplistic?

Simon: It’s part of the solution. In our training courses we actually teach that there’s two types of biomechanics, and without getting too technical; there is biomechanics from the outside – what we can see – but most people’s view of biomechanics is photographic athletes with little balls on them and watching the angles of their body and various other forces that are acting on the outside.

Chris: Yeah I have seen that.

Simon: That’s called extrinsic biomechanics. What we are talking about is what is happening on the inside, we can now apply those same principles to various soft tissues of the body. And of course you can’t see those, they are hidden by our skin and our body, you can’t see for example how the hamstrings are pulling and whether their pulling in the right direction.

Chris: Well no, exactly.

Simon: But we give the trainers the ability to work that out through very simple tests that they do. Yes they have to put the client in particular positions and do certain movements with them that are designed to pick up those markers. And we’re looking at the soft tissues in the body, and that’s everything from joints, muscles, nerves and all the other soft tissue things that are inside our body. And we’re just picking up what we now understand as being markers which give a high degree of certainty that that person should really not be doing that type of movement at this particular point in time.

Simon: That’s interesting because of course what that would mean, if you think about it, say I go to the gym and I decide I am going to take on a personal trainer to help me, I would be looking at a plethora of choice really, maybe five, six, seven or eight personal trainers who within that particular gym, and how do I choose? I think that’s one question, if you haven’t been referred to a personal trainer, it is difficult isn’t it? You know I wouldn’t know. So recently, in January of course like with most people – they go to the gym at the beginning of the year, I’m looking at the PTs and I’m thinking, “Okay, that one looks a bit young, that one looks a bit old, that one doesn’t look like they know what they’re doing etc.” so I end up choosing just one guy who seemed okay and who spoke to me in a respectful way. Now I suppose if there’s a way that personal trainers can differentiate themselves in that sort of marketplace because really if you look at it from an economic point of view, someone is making a big investment to become a personal trainer, it is something the love to do and they need it to pay for their own lifestyle don’t they? Effectively it is their job so this is like putting up a new offering, a new service, a new shop front; something to differentiate themselves from their peers who they’re also working with so that they get more business. Is that right?

Simon: Absolutely, it’s a very crowded market, the fitness and exercise market. You’ve got personal trainers, you’ve got fitness instructors…

Simon: They are different, they have different qualifications. And you’ve got group exercise people as well – Pilates and yoga and other types of exercise. And as with all businesses it is crucial to find unique selling point, something which you can say to your clients which is basically going to give them a hands-up that says, “Hi I’m here, I can do something different, I can actually make sure that the exercise program that I’m giving you is right for your body – tailored for you!” And that is a massive differentiator, it makes them stand out from the crowd, allows them to charge more for their services.

Chris: I suppose it would do wouldn’t it? Well yeah if you’re better trained and you’re an expert in something, then yeah you have to charge more for the services. And of course you will keep your clients longer because they are going to be even happier with the results.

Simon: Absolutely, I mean the crucial thing is that the client is happy. If the client can get to their objectives quicker, more safely but still achieve the objectives they want to achieve – that’s’ a big tick. If the personal trainer or the exercise professional that their working with can give them some useful information about their body and how their body’s working…

Chris: Especially if they didn’t know anything about it is the first place.

Simon: Absolutely. So help them in their daily lives especially if they’re, as is very common, somebody who is sitting at a desk behind their PC or driving a lot, then they can give that information. Just like they do currently with nutritional advice, it’s the whole package and this is just a new tick in the box to say, “I can give you a tailored exercise program for your body because I will be able to tell you which exercises are right for you today, which ones are perhaps not so correct for you today,” and if the personal trainer’s got the right mindset, some do some don’t and that is absolutely fine, they can either steer them in the direction of other exercises or use exercises, which they are the professional in, to actually help correct the markers. We can get rid of these markers and that’s crucial.

Chris: Well yeah I understand. Again going back to the shoulder, it’s about making sure that the shoulder issue is sorted out through exercise and all that sort of thing. Well that makes a lot of sense Simon and really I’m getting exciting just learning about this. I think when I go to the gym next I’m going to be asking whether or not the exercises that I’ve prescribed are the correct ones. Should I be spending ten minutes on the cross trainer if I have an issue with my hip? Is it a good idea?

Simon: Absolutely. I think that’s a perfectly valid question and people are getting more knowledgeable about their own bodies in a whole series of ways. When they go to see the doctor they will typically ask what these drugs or what this intervention is designed to do. When you go to find a personal trainer or any exercise professional, whether it be pilates/yoga, in a gym or a sports coach, it’s really good to ask those questions and get answers back from that professional say, “yes, your body is right for this.” And that’s really where we are now, we have this ability to get this knowledge out there as widely as possible so that the fitness and exercise industry can really be proactive in giving their clients the best exercise program for their objectives and their body.

Chris: Okay fantastic. Well I think that what we’ve got now is a real opportunity for PTs, or any wellness professional really, that is involved in mobility or exercise or training or anything like that to really benefit and grow their business whilst helping their clients. So I think that in our future podcasts what we’ll be doing is looking at various tips and tricks that people can learn and actually use with their clients so that they can help them to move forward quickly. And Simon you don’t mind giving those tricks and tips to people do you?

Simon: No we can give out a few.

Chris: I think it’s a really good, think people will absolutely love that. And then of course, at the end of the day, what makes more sense is that Unity Body MOT offer a full one to one training system that you can either subscribe to and come along and Simon will help you with that so that you can learn a about how your clients work. You want to tell us a little bit about that?

Simon: Yes. Our differentiator is that we look to provide training that fits in with the professional’s lifestyle and business. We put on public training courses; we run both a one day and a two day workshop but we also, and actually what I do more of, is the fitness professional will contact me and say, “Love this material, want to learn it. I simply don’t have the time to go on a two day training course, can you come to my gym and train me at my location or can I come to see you?” And I’ll do that and we’ll work out a package, and that can be on a one to one basis or a small group basis. The key part here, if we do that the personal trainers own premises, they can bring clients in. And they learn, obviously the client has got to be okay with this, but they learn with a real client so they can learn the skills and we can be helping a client at the same time. It instills the knowledge more quickly, they haven’t got to go away for a weekend and learn the stuff and then come back to their workplace and think, “Okay, how on earth do I implement this?”

Chris: Exactly, so that’s the way you go on training and then you hope you’re going to remember it when you put it into practice, whereas if you have a live client with you – wow!

Simon: Absolutely. And then what they do is they join a learning community. We’ve got a secret Facebook group where people who have been on the training are members and the idea then is that they can join that community and ask questions.

Chris: And that’s so vital because that’s the thing, people are in isolation more and more and especially, if you think about it, if one out of the ten PTs at a particular gym is on the Unity Body MOT program there is no one that they can discuss it with so you feel very lonely, isolated and all of that knowledge potentially goes to waste. I love that Facebook thing that is brilliant.

Simon: And we’re hoping to run other courses around the country as widely as we possibly can but also what I want to do is to put on what I’m calling masterminds, so that once or twice a year we’ll grab a room – at a gym if somebody wants to host it that’s great – or at a hotel or some other venue, people who’ve been on the training can come and collaborate through that. And they can bring case studies if they want, we can do some refresher work, we can answer their questions and we can give them an update because this knowledge is not static, it changes all the time and it is crucial that we give them up to date information. So if something has changed or we’ve got a greater understanding of something that we taught them, we’ll give that information on the mastermind so they’re cons