I see women every week in clinic who have developed fear around movement.
👉🏻Fear of bending forward and causing back pain
👉🏻Fear of doing overhead press and causing shoulder injury
👉🏻Fear of squatting or kneeling and causing knee pain
When you’re worried that doing an exercise badly will cause injury or pain, you either:
👉🏻 Avoid the exercise or movement completely
👉🏻 Play it safe by keeping the load or difficulty low
👉🏻 Rely on someone else to tell you if you’re doing it properly
But avoiding a movement or continuing to play it safe often creates FEAR around that movement.
Your brain might then perceive the movement as a THREAT, making it scarier or even uncomfortable.
👉🏻 This robs you of the opportunity to get stronger, build confidence and increase your capacity
Relying on someone else to tell you when you’re doing an exercise correctly isn’t a great LONG-TERM solution either
👉🏻 What happens when your trainer goes on maternity leave? Or your Physio moves away? Or your favourite instructor has a career change?
👉🏻 Outsourcing to someone else takes away your opportunity to build skills of self awareness and trust in your body
There is no ONE right way to move.
And it’s possible you’re OVERESTIMATING how bad it would be if you did an exercise “incorrectly”
Fear of moving the wrong way is more likely to contribute to pain than occasionally doing a movement “badly”.
If clients are in pain, have had an experience with injury, or they’ve just been told they shouldn’t move in a certain way and it’s stuck with them.
I don’t tell them that they need to ignore all cues from their body and just push through.
Instead, together we:
⭐️Challenge the fear
⭐️Explore different ways of moving
⭐️Observe the body’s response to exercise (during & after)
⭐️Find ways to notice when an exercise is feeling good and not so good in the body
⭐️Plan what and how they can exercise on their own with confidence
Because the end goal is to move with confidence.
We have our one body for life. It’s up to educate ourselves and build the skills to get the most out of it 💙