Jane Curth, Author at MedFitNetwork

A Population in Need of Trainers

Jane Curth/3 October 2017/ All MFN blog/

No one looks forward to the day when they need to have a joint replaced. It can seem intimidating, and for good reason. Many patients can have a fairly extensive recovery period with some never regaining full use of the joint in question. But this doesn’t have to be the case. If they prepare properly, they can avoid a great deal of pain and frustration from recovery.

Every year in the United States, there are over 600,000 knee replacement surgeries alone. Hip and knee replacements are very common in those suffering from osteoarthritis, and they are in need of a critical professional — personal trainers.

The Need

Osteoarthritis primarily affects older adults over 50. As opposed to most millennials today, this generation of adults didn’t grow up with exercise being a regular part of life. As such, there is a high degree of sedentary people who also suffer from osteoarthritis and needing joint replacement.

The research is pretty clear — those who are more physically fit have fewer complications in surgery and, above all, require significantly less time to recover afterward. The problem is that a significant portion of this population do not exercise and do not know how to do so safely. Thus, the special skillsets that personal trainers have are incredibly valuable to them.

Training Focus

For most people facing joint replacement, there is a two-fold objective: weight reduction and muscle strengthening. This is because the less the patient weighs, the less pressure is placed on the recovering joint. Furthermore, the stronger the supporting muscles are around the rest of the body, the better-able the patient is to regain mobility.

As such, the training program should include:

Cardiovascular training
Upper and lower body muscular development
Core strength
Range of motion development

Above all, the key to training these clients is SAFETY FIRST. These clients are already suffering from joint pain, and excessive training can make the situation that much worse.

Helping a Growing Network

The population of older adults suffering from osteoarthritis and needing joint replacement is on the rise. It’s estimated that in 20 years, there will be as many as 4 million procedures a year. There is a definitive need for personal trainers who know enough about osteoarthritis and joints in the body to make a difference in these patients’ lives. Word of mouth referrals from successful outcomes are a likely possibility and the opportunity to collaborate with healthcare professionals is extensive.

Learn the Essentials

I have worked with Dr. Irv Rubenstein to put together a course like none other that will get personal trainers up to speed as quickly as possible on the essentials. We go over what happens in the joints and how they deteriorate as well as what happens during and after joint replacement surgery.

In this course, you will learn:

The basics of Osteoarthritis and how it affects the body
Exercise programming to prepare the client physically for surgery
Contraindications for post-surgery and how to avoid re-injury
Programs that will work in the home or at a gym
An overall approach to helping clients prepare and recover safely.

Most importantly, we discuss what is safe and effective for this clientele as well as what to avoid at all costs — exercises which increase the likelihood of injury and exacerbation of pain. We look forward to empowering personal trainers to use their skills and expertise to benefit older communities that they wouldn’t normally think about when looking for new clients. This is a population in desperate need of a personal trainer’s ability, especially in the delicate days before surgery and continued work with the client once their physical therapy time has ended.

Jane Curth is the co-founder and CEO of FitFixNow. Helping people on their wellness journey is her passion; Jane has helped clients and students with their diet and fitness struggles for over 20 years.

Training Clients with Arthritis

Jane Curth/14 September 2017/ All MFN blog/

One of the biggest challenges for fitness professionals is working around medical conditions and injuries. When a prospective client asks if you can safely train them, you definitely want to be able to accommodate their situation. But what about their limitations? What should they do and not do? How do you ensure that you’re doing the right thing as a trainer? This is especially relevant when working with arthritic clients.

What is Arthritis?

Arthritis is, in short, an inflammation of joint tissue in the body. It rears its head in many different ways and the NIH does a great job of breaking down the various facets of the condition. What it ends up doing is causing symptoms like pain, swelling, stiffness of the joint and reduced range of motion. But, most of this can be countered with the addition of an exercise program.

What a Fitness Professional Can Do to Help

This is where fitness professionals come in. Because of the fact that arthritis hits the majority of people when they are older, this also means that they might need some assistance with getting enough exercise in a safe and reliable manner.

It’s a perfect mixture — fitness professionals have a great deal of knowledge and arthritic patients have a great deal of need in this respect. Especially in the current generation retiring, the baby boomers, exercise outside of athletics was far less common than it is today. As such, there are many people who are retiring having no experience with exercise for their entire lives.

Fitness professionals like you are a great resource for getting this population treatment in the form of exercise!

Considerations to Keep in Mind

The key here is to make sure that you aren’t loading your arthritic clients with too much. The CDC’s resources on training for arthritic individuals are quite extensive and are a fantastic jumping-off point for developing your programming. For the majority of clients, it will simply be a reduced-load variation of many programs you already employ.

So let’s dive into a few:

Range of Motion

Initially, this will be one of the first things that a trainer will need to focus on. Range of motion is the key to performing other exercises. For this, a stretch/yoga approach is going to be an ideal way to go. And for people who aren’t especially limber, even just stretching will be a workout. So start light and get the range of motion up to snuff. Then you will be good to go to move on to more engaging techniques.

Don’t Let Them Skip Cardio

There can be many different objectives to a personal training program. Oftentimes, training programs will have cardio as more of an “outside the session” activity. Just make sure that they are doing some form of cardio in addition to what your normal program entails. This could be walking, cycling, swimming, using an elliptical trainer, etc. This will help these clients to improve their endurance and you should see results from this in your sessions. Whereas someone new to exercise might not be able to do pushups everyday, they can likely still do low-impact cardio.

Weight/Resistance Training

No one is talking about your clients working to be the new clean-and-jerk Olympian, but some moderate training with weights in a controlled environment can be incredibly beneficial. Developing the muscles that assist and support joint structures will alleviate some major pain that arthritic clients likely have. In addition, having a higher percentage of muscle tissue will increase the client’s basal metabolic rate, allowing them to burn more calories and lose excess weight which can add painful pressure to joints. All around, it’s a great idea. Just make sure it’s safe.

This might mean starting with slight bodyweight movements first. Once range of motion has increased, they can then start taking the exercises a little further. Resistance bands and weight machines can also be an excellent way to safely train those muscles.

Group Fitness Classes Can Be Helpful

Socializing is a great way to get through discomfort. Whereas we don’t want to push our clients to the point of pain, there will likely be a little discomfort in the beginning, especially in the first few sessions. Misery might like company, but the thing is that great friendships can be formed in such groups as well. Thus, with group fitness classes, you could help a larger segment of people with safe exercises. And, they would have a great social group to encourage one another when the going gets tough.

A Final Note

Injuries take longer to heal as people age. This is why an injury for someone with arthritis will likely be more extreme than in some of your younger clients. As such, it’s that much more essential to go slow and to not overload your clients with too much.

Additionally, make sure that your client has cleared your programming with their doctor. A client’s physician is the best initial defense from injury. Furthermore, it’s a wonderful opportunity to even partner with the doctors you come into contact with. They doubtless have many patients who do not exercise like they should. Relationships like these are win-win for everyone involved.

Exercise for Osteoporosis

Jane Curth/14 August 2017/ All MFN blog/

There are many conditions for which exercise can help. Osteoporosis is one such condition, but due to its nature, there are some important factors to consider when putting together an exercise regimen.

Exercising with Arthritis

Jane Curth/17 July 2017/ All MFN blog/

Although it comes in many forms throughout the body, in general arthritis is an inflammation. There are various reasons that this condition occurs, but one thing is for sure — it can affect a person of any age and in many different situations.

4 Exercises to Increase Balance for Seniors

Jane Curth/13 June 2017/ All MFN blog/

Balance is one of the first things to go as people age. It’s a skill that most people take for granted in their youth and one’s ability to perform balance movements fades with time. But just because your reflexes get a little slower doesn’t mean you are stuck with poor balance as you age. As with most things, practice makes perfect, and balance is very much a perishable skill.

Alzheimer’s and Exercise

Jane Curth/30 May 2017/ All MFN blog/

It’s been estimated that over 5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s, according to the Alzheimer’s Foundation. Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia which attacks the nerve cells in the brain. It results in a lack of memory and eventually language skills. This can be very difficult, both on the individual suffering from the disease as well as the caregivers looking after them.

Training Clients with Osteoporosis

Jane Curth/23 May 2017/ All MFN blog/

For those struggling with chronic medical conditions, exercise can be an often under-utilized way to manage some symptoms and improve others. This is especially the case for diseases like osteoporosis. This is a great opportunity for fitness professionals to utilize their training to really help others.

Osteoporosis is a disease of the skeletal system in which bones fail to create new tissue and when existing bone tissue breaks down. This means that bone structures on those with osteoporosis are much more susceptible to injury. As such, you — as a fitness professional — are uniquely suited to help osteoporosis patients who need to be much more careful and might require a little bit more creativity in their regimen.

First of All…

Make sure that the client has cleared their exercise program with their doctor. Nothing can take the place of a qualified medical professional in terms of assessing safety. This also means that you might want to be available to discuss programming with a medical professional if possible. This way, you become an integral part of the individual’s treatment team and can offer valuable insight to both the doctor and the patient as to how they are dealing with one thing or another in relation to their illness.

Structural Considerations

There are quite a few things to take into consideration when programming a client’s regimen. In large part, you can even take an engineer’s approach when thinking about what is most important for them to achieve their goals. For instance, a cable bridge like the Brooklyn bridge in New York City is supported both with pylons and cables. Similarly, the human body has a skeletal and a muscular system which work together to support people.

If the concrete pylons under the bridge started to decay, one could compensate for this a little bit by strengthening the more flexible cables which also work to hold the bridge up. In this same way, if a person’s bones are brittle, their muscles can help compensate for this deficiency to an extent. But that isn’t all.

Bones have also been shown to respond positively to exercise in a similar fashion to muscles. So when you consider the building of muscle as a reaction to contraction and exerted force, bones will react similarly. Just be careful not to do too much.

Injury Prevention is EXTREMELY Important

Whereas most people would agree that injury prevention is important in training, it becomes that much more important to consider when training someone with osteoporosis. When a person with strong bones gets injured, depending on the severity, they might bounce back in a matter of weeks. When someone with osteoporosis gets injured, it can be a matter of months before they can return to training. Psychologically speaking as well, this can lead to a confidence issue which will negatively feed upon itself in the gym.

Staying positive is really critical, both for success in exercise and success in treatment, and injuries which knock you out of commission can completely derail months of work.

Training Approaches

To continue the metaphor about a cable bridge’s support, another way to make those structures more effective is to reduce the amount of weight of the overall structure. Thus, weight loss can be a really helpful goal for the individual. This will alleviate some pressure and will likely lead to less pain.

Furthermore, strengthening the muscles which surround bones and joints can have a very positive impact on the individual fighting the disease. Stronger muscles mean that, even when sitting or standing, the individual uses less of their bone structure to support their body and uses more of their muscular system. This constitutes great progress.

As such, a combination approach is often best. The National Institution of Health notes that load-bearing exercises are best. Although activities like swimming are great for developing muscles and burning fat, there still needs to be a solid land-training component as well. This could be walking, hiking, or — for people who have more advanced experience with exercise — even running.

But cardio alone is insufficient. Resistance exercises will help to build critical muscle mass that will help them to live with less pain and less risk of an accident. This doesn’t mean that they have to start benching 300 pounds. Often times, simple and modified bodyweight exercises are a great way to implementresistance training. For those who are less mobile, resistance bands are incredibly useful.

Circuit Training

Circuit training is a great way to more efficiently train clients. It’s especially the case for those suffering with osteoporosis. As such, you might have a circuit where they perform an individual bodyweight exercise — say modified push-ups, bodyweight squats, and a few balance exercises. Have your clients perform each exercise under your supervision for 30 seconds, then have them walk for 60 seconds, then do the next exercise for 30 seconds, alternating until they get to 20 minutes. Obviously, a program like this can be tweaked to be harder or easier based on the client’s ability level. This is a great way to train outdoors on a track, and is also valuable because it could be used in someone’s living room on days with bad weather as well.

Educate Them for Success

It’s also important to understand that you are not just guiding the individual through their routine, but you are teaching them how to train when you aren’t around. This means that it’s even more important to explain why you are having them do one exercise instead of another and how it fits into the overall picture. Their ability to exercise independently of you will only garner more trust in your client/trainer relationship and they will see gains more quickly. Just remember to keep them safe and teach what you can. They will thank you for the effort!

Senior woman in wheel chair doing physical therapy

Training Considerations for MS

Jane Curth/11 May 2017/ All MFN blog/

People who suffer from Multiple Sclerosis already have a lot of challenges to contend with in their lives. Whereas many people already find excuses and ways to avoid hitting the gym, it’s that much harder for those with chronic conditions to get in a good workout. This is an area in which a personal trainer can become an effective key to a patient’s disease management strategy.