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I’ve worked as a personal trainer at rec sports for the past 2 and a half years. It’s my job to teach my clients the safest and most effective ways to exercise. Every client is a puzzle. Different experience levels, goals, age, medical conditions, and various other factors make each client completely unique. Before training begins, I conduct an assessment with the client. It’s here where I gather information necessary to begin programming a workout plan for them. For every single client, training begins with movement training. While all of personal training requires problem solving, movement training is what truly makes it a puzzle. I’m going to explain a client that left me stumped.

Squatting is one of the fundamental movements of life, but many people have no idea how to perform it safely. During the first session, I set off to try to teach the squat. My strategy was to demonstrate the movement and ask him to try performing it. Right away I noticed that he was skipping the hip hinge and dropping straight down. This resulted in his heels raising and losing control of his knees. Then I proceeded to use verbal instructions to try to solve this problem. I told him to imagine he was shooting his hips back to the wall and lower his body to the floor. I then asked him to practice the squat again, focusing on moving his hips first. This is known as attentional cueing and whole practice. I reasoned that having him perform the movement all together was crucial due to the hip hinge being a fluid motion with dropping to the ground. I was trying to conserve the spatial and temporal characteristics of the motor skill. I was hoping that me directing his attention to the hip hinge portion of the movement would help him fix the error while still maintaining the natural flow of the pattern.

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As he attempted again, I noticed the same problems. I realized it was time for a different approach. Since the hip hinge starts the movement of a proper squat, I decided to try splitting up the movement into two parts. I utilized a part-task practice strategy known as segmentation. Instead of having him practice the hip hinge with the rest of the squat, I focused solely on the hip hinge. I proceeded to demonstrate just the pelvic tilt. I also used the verbal analogy “imagine I tied a string to your butt and slowly pulled it back”. After many sets, I started to notice the hips moving more freely.

I then asked him to try sitting down after he performed the hip hinge. As he sat down I noticed his knees and hips moving back forward. I then asked him to picture that, after the hip hinge, his hips were on a track that held them back as he lowered to the ground. As he practices again, he was able to achieve the proper movement pattern.

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My next step was to teach him to use intrinsic feedback to detect and correct errors. Intrinsic feedback is information that is naturally available when performing a skill. My end goal was to guide him to use proprioceptive feedback to sense errors. At this point we began to discuss specifically where he felt tension in the body. I had him squat down without emphasizing the hip hinge, and asked him what he felt throughout his legs and in his knees. He said he felt a lot of tension in his quadricep and pressure in his knee. Then I had him perform a squat while emphasizing the hip hinge. He said he felt no pressure in his knee, and more tension in his glutes and hamstrings. I had him practice the movement, focusing on noticing if he felt pressure anywhere in his knees or quadriceps. I then started reducing the frequency that I gave augmented feedback. I would only provide a summary of form discrepancies I noticed at the end of each set. As his performance of the squat became increasingly consistent. I decided it was time to remove the mirror. By removing the mirror, I was forcing him to rely solely on proprioceptive feedback to accomplish the movement. After continued practice, his squat form was almost always correct, and any errors were self corrected.

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His squats were becoming more autonomous now, meaning performance of the motor skill required little conscious effort. I had him try squatting while having a conversation to test how much attention the motor skill required. He was able to maintain a conversation without any form deviations, so I decided to make it more challenging. We were now ready to add another component to the movement. I decided to show him wall-ball shots, which consist of throwing a weighted ball at a wall as high as you can and catching the ball and squatting. The goal of the movement was to learn to absorb the momentum of the ball, dropping into a squat as the ball was caught. As he squatted back up, I asked him to utilize the momentum generated by his legs to throw the ball. I was amazed at how quickly he was able to learn the added component. His ability to hold a conversation and add another component to the movement demonstrate the reduced attention demands of the learned motor skill.

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I decided he was ready to apply what he learned to the deadlift. I was hoping that he could transfer his learning from practicing squats to performing a deadlift. Transfer is the gain or loss in proficiency of one skill due to practice in a different environmental context or a different skill. The Identical Elements Theory of Positive Transfer states that two tasks that share a greater number a similar elements are expected to transfer more than two tasks that share fewer similarities. I was hoping that the skills he learned in squatting would apply to the deadlift. The hip hinge is the most important component of a deadlift. In fact, not hip hinging correctly results in a high amount of pressure directly on the spine. Since practicing the hip hinge component of the deadlift was too dangerous at first, I utilized positive transfer of learning to achieve this. Sure enough, my client was able to perform the deadlift correctly in a fraction of the time he learned the squat.