Last week, I spoke about how much we had to experiment to get the exact right mix of exercises that worked for C and how much progress she made. Unfortunately, there was a huge setback. Since consistency is the key, this became a very real issue, setting her back. Luckily, she wasn’t back to square one, and when I was able to start back training her, she was able to, once again, make very real progress.

The first challenge came when my vehicle went down. This shouldn’t be a problem, really, since there’s always public transportation. However, I sustained a pretty serious ankle injury at around the same time. C lives on a pretty steep hill — getting up there would have been a bit expensive (we use route taxis, so I’d have to pay to go off-route), but possible. The issue would be getting out. I would have had to walk down the hill with my injured ankle. Mind you, I could barely walk on flat ground. The point is that there are times when you have very real obstacles that prevent you from making it to a client. It is up to you to find some way around or, in my case, send routines to him/her so that he/she doesn’t completely lose out. I tried and maybe this was the main reason that C wasn’t set all the way back to the start.

Another major issue is the client’s emotional state. Having some of these issues, especially when you are cognizant enough of it to know that something is “wrong”, usually puts a huge mental strain on a person. I found myself having to be the motivating factor many times. I would feel drained, myself, but I’d have to give off an enthusiastic and optimistic air to encourage C. I think it worked for the most part because she continued for quite a while. However, sometimes there are emotional battles you cannot, as a trainer, win, but I’ll expound on that next week as we explore why it all ended.

Believe it or not, another major issue could be scheduling visits. This goes for all clients. As a trainer, it is not your job to give up everything to serve clients. You have a life also. You need to train, you may have a family, training may only be one of your jobs and you may have a second job to attend to. You’re allowed vacations and time off. When you factor all of this in, it is important to figure out when you can actually work. This may not always match up with your clients’ schedules. In the case of me and C, we had to do a lot of reorganisation of both of our times to make it work on certain days. Our Saturday morning walks ended because she could no longer make it and we had to substitute it for walking up and down her hill on one of the regular training days. This also meant less attention could be paid to calisthenics and therefore strength and stamina training.

So, there you have it. The reality is that with any client, you may experience setbacks, but when someone is in need of special attention, those setbacks may become major, and you have to find a way to navigate around them as I did with C. We started back working a few times and, finally, on a consistent level, this year. Next week, I’ll talk about our new approach, how it helped and, as I mentioned above, why she decided it was time to try a new approach.