Please Get a Coach
A Letter From Your Therapist:
Please, for the sake of your recovery, get a coach. As a massage therapist, working with people who don’t have coaches makes everything more difficult. I’m not referring to my overall ability to help you. What I am referring to is the amount of massage work that needs to be done for an athlete during every session is significantly more when they do not have coach. Each massage will be like taking two steps forward and a mile back. Which means that I don’t make as much recovery progress with that client. It ends up being frustrating for both of us. It will appear to the coach as a lack of progress in the athlete’s training, and to me that there is no resolution.
A coach stops you when things are off. They help you understand why the movement needs to be fixed. An incorrect movement is an inefficient movement, and inefficiency, at best, leads to early fatigue. “I can’t be tired, I have two more sets to go…” Not with that form you don’t. You’re lucky you still have knees after the first two sets. Early coaching intervention prevents unnecessary fatigue. Preventing this also then prevents undue stress on the body. The body is amazing. It will continue to try to do what you’re asking it do even if it is tired. Without a coach, your fatigue will cause you to unknowingly begin to compensate with even more inefficient movement patterns These accumulate over time. The accumulation makes recovery take even longer. Soft-tissue fatigue will persist in muscle groups because those muscles were never meant to be used in the way you’re using them (“You mean my hips aren’t suppose to shift like that on every rep?”). But you don’t know any of this. You don’t have a coach. You just keep on rolling: moving wrong, lifting heavy, going to town like you’ve got all the tendon health in the world. That scenario is a recipe for injury.
There is so much from a recovery standpoint where you need a coach. The coach probably doesn’t think of it that way though. More than likely, their emphasis is on fixing technique to increase performance. But guess what? Performance increases with technique and strength. How do you get strong? By being able to recover from the training you perform. What do you think happens if you have faulty movement patterns that prevent you from being able to recover effectively in a timely manner so that you’re able to continue training according to the strength program written for you? You’re not getting stronger, that’s for damn sure.
Training is already brutal on the body. I already have my hands full trying to keep up with varying phases, competition prep, peaking, etc. If not for your own performance, then for my sake, get a coach, please. Make my life easier when it comes to helping you with your health and recovery.
-Dane Lee, LMT
