Problem Solving for Fitness Professionals

If you think that fitness professionals just train clients and design exercise programmes, then I’ve got some news for you. There’s much more to it than that! When your job revolves around helping people, then Problem Solving is a fundamental component of your work.

Because every client is unique, the exercise programmes we design and the sessions we deliver must be tailored to suit each and every individual. Sometimes we get it right, but usually problems arise which need to be addressed. Modifications often need to be made.

Without well-developed Problem-Solving skills, clients struggle. And as a consequence, so do fitness clubs and fitness professionals.

So, in this article we’ll cover:

• What Problem Solving is
• Why Problem Solving is important for fitness professionals
• Whether or not Problem-Solving works
• The 5-key steps to effective Problem Solving.

What is Problem Solving?

Problem Solving is one of the behavioural change techniques we use in our Weight Management programme. Like the name suggests, Problem Solving is about effectively identifying, addressing, and solving problems. As a technique or intervention, the aim of Problem Solving is to teach clients the process of effective Problem Solving and then help them apply it to the different problems they encounter.

In Weight Management we might help a client to understand what triggers and reinforces an unhealthy ‘comfort eating’ behaviour. Then, we might help the client identify a healthier behaviour that is also ‘comforting’ and support them to substitute the unhealthy behaviour for the healthier version.

In fitness, we might help a client to identify the factors causing them to miss their scheduled training sessions. Once identified, we might help them to identify and implement a solution that results in future sessions not being missed.

‘A problem shared is a problem halved’

In the health and fitness context, Problem Solving is a shared process. Many practitioners avoid this process on the mistaken belief that they, the practitioner, are responsible for solving the problems of others.

This isn’t the case. Responsibility ultimately lies with the person who is struggling with or suffering from a particular problem. The practitioners responsibility is to help people develop their Problem-Solving skills, so they’re equipped to solve their own problems.

At a cognitive level, the decision to problem solve helps to shift a person’s perception of control from the external (factors outside their control) to the internal (factors they can control). Ultimately, this leads to increased self-efficacy (the person’s belief in their capacity to control their own behaviour, motivation, and environment).

This psychobabble is perhaps best explained with a famous proverb from Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu:

‘If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime’

When applied to fitness professionals, the proverb is saying that when you solve another person’s problems, you’re not really helping them. However, if you help them to solve their own problems, you’re equipping them with the skills to solve many future problems, independently.

That’s not to say they won’t need you as a sounding board at various times as part of the process, but it is saying that they own that skill-set for themselves forevermore.

Why is Problem Solving important for Fitness Professionals?

In Exercise Behaviour is More Important than Just Working Out, we highlighted a major issue in fitness. Namely, that as the initial motivation to exercise drops, the attendance of new exercisers also drops.

Attendance drops because the barriers to exercise that high motivation levels initially overcame start to interfere as motivation wanes. Barriers are quite simply problems that need to be addressed. These can be relatively simple such as a clash in timetables or forgetting how to perform a certain exercise.

They can be more complex such as a friend or family member being dismissive of a person’s efforts to get fit or lose weight…again.

Unfortunately, new exercisers rarely have the skills to address such barriers independently. They need a little help.

As a skill, Problem Solving is easily dismissed or taken for granted. If a client misses a session or fails to use their membership, we tend to write it off as ‘their problem’. ‘If they tried harder, they could have achieved great things’. We link failure to effort, or discipline, or character.

Unfortunately, the likely outcome of these scenarios is that everyone suffers. Clients give up on exercise and their health suffers. Clubs and trainers lose clients, and their businesses suffer. This is a major problem in fitness.

All because a reasonably simple, fundamental skill isn’t being used and taught.

When should Problem Solving be used?

The best time to use Problem Solving is before problems manifest. This is why we devote so much time to the Consultation and Progress Review processes in our Personal Training programme.

By gathering information about a client’s goals, exercise history and preferences, and time availability, we tailor our prescription to the clients unique needs, wants and circumstances. By scheduling regular review sessions, we search for problems to solve with our clients, so we can refine the prescription to better suit them.

We build in an expectation that slip ups will occur, that is normal. Through the initial client consultation, we have interventions pre-agreed with clients particularly around attendance. This approach comes from the relapse prevention area and is baked into our programmes so we can partner clients in progress and break through cycles of historical behaviour.

As fitness professionals we want to prepare for slip ups, reflect and learn what they are telling us and the client, then adjust future actions to make progress. It is a process and relies on structure and skills. We want to make sure that slip-ups don’t result in people disengaging.

Expect problems; prepare for and learn from them

However, regardless of how effective we are at pre-empting and addressing problems, they will still appear. Consequently, the second-best time to use Problem Solving is when a problem is on your doorstep. Usually this will take the form of a missed session, insufficient use of the club, or a session the client doesn’t enjoy. These are all signs of problems, that left unaddressed, will soon result in  the client or member stopping.

Once such problems are recognised, prompt action is required to (re)engage the client/member, find out what the problem is and help the client to solve it.

Within fitness clubs there are more problems occurring early in the members lifetime with the club, than later. Naturally then, club drop out is highest with new members and particular attention and time is needed to ensure they are well looked after within the first 12 weeks of their membership.

Does Problem Solving Work?

If unresolved problems result in people disengaging from exercise, then Problem Solving must be effective…surely? At the rational, logical level this is a no brainer. It’s always good to check what we assume to be true against research though.

Because Problem Solving is used as a behavioural intervention, there is an abundance of research in the psychological domain. Deficits in Problem Solving skills are linked to a host of psychological conditions including depression and anxiety, as well as the ability to cope with chronic illnesses such as diabetes.

Problem Solving Therapy (PST) which focuses on teaching specific problem-solving skills has proven beneficial in multiple contexts including smoking cessation, weight loss, marital therapy, and the treatment of mood disorders.

Specific to our roles as Weight Management Coaches or Personal Trainers, Murawski [ref 1] investigated the relationship between Problem Solving, treatment adherence and weight loss outcomes. 272 women participated in a study which consisted of a six-month lifestyle intervention for obesity. Half the participants were assigned to a conventional treatment group. The other half received this conventional treatment as well as PST combined with a diabetes prevention programme.

The study found that:

• On average, participants lost 8.8% of their bodyweight
• Weight loss was associated with improvements in Problem Solving skills
• Those who lost the most weight demonstrated the greatest improvement in Problem Solving skills.

The authors concluded that improvements in Problem Solving skills:

• Enable participants to overcome barriers to adherence and thereby, enhances treatment induced weight loss.

It’s notable that the PST used in this study was the 5-step model which we’ll look at now.

What are the steps to effective Problem Solving?

Effective problem solving can be broken down into the following five steps:

1. Identify the problem
2. Identify all possible solutions
3. Choose the best solution
4. Prepare to implement the solution
5. Implement and review the solution’s effectiveness.

Like any behavioural intervention, Problem Solving is most effective when these steps are completed methodically.

When applied to fitness professionals this means that when building the Problem-Solving skills of your clients, you’d work through each of the steps at least 1-2x before expecting your clients to be independently capable of solving their own exercise-related problems.

Let’s work through the five steps.

1. Identify the problem

Sometimes problems are easy to identify, sometimes they’re not. A client who’s missed their last two sessions may talk vaguely about the problem:

• ‘I’m just finding it a little difficult at the moment’
• ‘I just don’t think it’s going to work’
•  ‘There’s a few things going on at home/work right now’.

Counter vague answers by becoming a ‘naïve enquirer’

A naïve enquirer asks open-ended questions to gain insights into what lies beneath such vague statements. I might ask:

• Can you tell me what you’re finding hard at the moment?
• Why don’t you think it’s going to work – what’s getting in the way?
• Can you tell me what’s going on at work – what has happened that’s affecting you more now?

To encourage the client to discuss and elaborate I might need to use prompts such as:

• Is it something about the programme or the sessions that you’re struggling with?

And I’d need to make the client feel comfortable about discussing their problems. I might reassure them that:

• Most people struggle with exercise at some stage
• They won’t offend me if they want to try a different type of exercise or change their programme
• Most problems have a range of solutions that we can troubleshoot together.

Once the problem has been clearly identified you can progress to the next step.

As a footnote, all solutions provided by Weight Management Coaches and Personal Trainers involve problem solving. As such, they require a strong and respectful relationship to exist between practitioner and client.

This is why we spend considerable time in our Weight Management and Personal Training programmes on the ‘soft skills’ involved in working with people in the real world. Rapport building, listening skills, consultation, planning and goal setting all need to be well developed before you start providing services to clients.

2. Identify all possible solutions

Encourage your client to think of as many solutions as they can, regardless of whether they’re good or bad. You might even suggest a few ‘off the wall’ solutions to signal that creativity is important at this stage. For a client that isn’t enjoying their current programme I might suggest that:

• They design a programme for our next session
• They train me the way they’d like to be trained in the future (and I’ll pay for the session)!

If the client is struggling to come up with solutions, you could ask them to:

• View the problem as an outsider – ‘What would your friend do in this situation’?
• Consider solutions that may have worked in the past – ‘Have you encountered problems like this before’? ‘What did you do and what was the result’?

If there are obvious solutions that you’re aware of that the client isn’t, you should add these to the mix.

Once a range of solutions have been identified, move to the next step.

3. Choose the best solution

At this stage you review the solutions and encourage the client to pick the one they think is best. If the client struggles to do this, you could help by:

• Encouraging them to eliminate the least practical solutions first
• Consider the pros and cons of the remaining solutions and
  • Prioritise those with the greatest benefits and lowest risks
  • Combine elements of a few solutions to get to the best overall solution.

4. Prepare to implement the solution

If the proposed solution isn’t an easy, immediate fix, some preparation may be required. Preparation usually consists of the following components:

1. Identify the resources required to help the client implement the solution
2. Identify potential obstacles to the solution and ways to overcome these.

Here’s an example. My client was missing our 6pm sessions because her friends were pressuring her to go out with them for after work drinks. They were dismissive of her goal to lose a few pounds and take part in an upcoming half-marathon. My client didn’t want to isolate herself from the group.

After identifying a range of solutions, my client decided to try enlisting the help of one of these friends. The plan was to explain to this friend why her goal was important and that she needed her support. The resources available to help were the friend and me as her trainer.

Understandably, my client was nervous about enlisting the help of her friend – what if the friend didn’t understand? This would be an obstacle. As such, our preparation consisted of:

• Discussing the suitability of the chosen friend (this helped to confirm that the chosen friend had been supportive in a similar way previously, and had no problems saying ‘no’ to others)
• Role-playing the conversation with the friend (this helped to build my clients confidence, refine her explanation, and prepare answers to questions we thought the friend might ask).

Once the preparation has been completed, there’s only one step left…

5. Implement and review the solutions effectiveness

The final step involves putting the plan into action. Client and practitioner alike need to keep a check on whether the solution is working. If it’s not effective or only partially effective, then it needs to be reviewed. Encourage the client to think about:

• Why the solution isn’t working
• How the solution could be modified to be more effective
• Whether an alternative solution needs to be tried.

It’s important to stress here that Problem Solving is a learning process. Sometimes problems aren’t solved. However, the learning that underpins the process helps to develop the skills required to solve problems more effectively in the future.

By partnering with clients to solve their problems we’re helping them to learn about what works and what doesn’t work for them. In essence, helping people to develop Problem Solving skills is a fundamental part of any personal development.

A Final Word

As fitness professionals, Problem Solving skills are important for us as well. We need to reflect on our actions as practitioners and identify where we might be creating problems for ourselves and those we’re trying to help.

Too many times I’ve been guilty of creating problems for my Personal Training clients. Believing that clients needed to be pushed to train hard, I made training unpleasant for many. I created reasons for my clients to miss sessions. I didn’t recognise missed sessions and a lack of enjoyment in some of my clients as problems. Consequently, my business suffered, and I failed to make exercise an enjoyably ‘addictive’ experience for some.

A lesson I learnt too late in my PT career was this – pay attention to what your clients are telling you, either in word or via their actions. If they’re not enjoying their training and missing sessions, then ask yourself why. If the answer isn’t obvious, ask your clients, listen to what they say and act upon it.

We might know a lot about exercise but only our clients know what’s best for them.

References

1. Murawski et al. (2009). Problem solving, treatment adherence, and weight-loss outcome among women participating in lifestyle treatment for obesity. Eating Behaviors: An International Journal, 10(3), 146-151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2009.03.005