03 Jun GrandMastersRx Injury Rate
GrandMastersRx Injury Rate
You don’t see this often – or ever!
We boast about “qualified coaches”, which in our industry and in our opinion, for that matter, means having working knowledge not only of your industry but also of your clientele.
Our clientele is aging. And modern-day aging is very different than the aging we saw from OUR grandparents. I don’t recall my grandparents on any medications (there probably weren’t that many back then) and they were wildly active in both their lifestyles and in our lives as grandchildren.
Enter today’s aging senior. Medications and medical appointments dominate their lives and there are more gadgets out there to make their lives “easier”, which makes them less able and generally less useful. Battery-powered screwdrivers lessen their grip strength. “Reachers” eliminate the need to reach the floor. Raised toilet seats and high sofas and mattresses eliminate the need to squat deeply. Training today seniors requires some knowledge and education on probably the #1 condition we see – weakness (or medically: sarcopenia), and the associated conditions and maladies that come with aging without activity.
It’s because of our working knowledge and education that training these “super-seniors” is both enjoyable and comfortable. We train in a risky environment…risky because most of what we do with our seniors include things they never do or have never done – it’s risky.
To play it safe would put us in the same category as Silver Slippers…I mean “Sneakers”, and other programs that use lighter loads and allow chair-based programming. We want function to result from our fitness – not for our athletes to say “we went to exercise class today”.
With the aggressiveness of our programming, we proudly boast an injury rate that is less than any other fitness or medically-based profession/para-profession out there!
GMRx
.0066% over 9 years
How did we arrive at this number? We are avid consumers of data and statistics on our business. We divided the number of injuries (which was 8) by the total number of athlete encounters since our inception in 2015.
We know you’re thinking:
- You must limit the loads they lift
- You must do low-impact training
- You must only train them 1-2 times per week
- You must not use barbells
- You must have short classes
- You must limit the age of new member/athlete…
Rather…
- We encourage heavy lifting and often do cycles of x3’s and x5’s for load
- We jump rope, broad jump and box jump (of course with scaling for newbies and ability)
- We train our athletes 3-5 times per week
- We DO USE BARBELLS – like real ones!
- Our classes are a full hour – and they’re packed
- There is no age limit – we train athletes ages 58 to 95
Our injury rate includes injuries that needed medical attention and were not considered “sports-related pain”, such as tendonitis or irritation caused by a lifestyle change of sedentary and weak and active and strong. We differentiate between sports-related pain and sports-related injuries as in the British Journal of Medicine study entitled: Pain or injury? Why differentiation matters in exercise and sports medicine.
We are highly involved in any sports-related pain or sports-related injury, and manage it conservatively either by scaling around it to allow it to heal, or referring out when necessary so that we “stay in our lane” as a fitness provider”. We are a very actively involved with our athletes, especially if/when there is a “tweak”.
Certainly, having Ed on board as a physical therapist helps assess the problem level and guides our management of the situation, but also having a solid working knowledge of the most common conditions seen in training seniors sets the foundation for our success. And along this line, we try to remember that words matter. We use the words pain and injury very differently. And we try to educate our seniors, who are quick to call pain an injury. Words matter!
Yes, there is an inherent risk in what we do. If we were training 30-year-olds, no one would bat an eye. But because we have Aunt Bee jumping rope, the whole world stops to take notice. If you think training seniors this way is risky, try being weak and living independently.
Part of our mission is to help educate others on the complexities of training seniors to help increase the number of credible and effective functional fitness programs available to our greatest generation.