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My client was just finishing a set of tough oblique crunches, and I asked:
“Where did you feel that the most?”
This is a standard question used by many personal trainers, physical therapists, and the like to access the client’s perception of what musculature has been working for the duration of the exercise. I expected the client to say, “…the abs, on the side,” or something like that, thus confirming the intent of the exercise. Had the client said something like, “…the legs,” then I would have known that something wasn’t right and would have made the necessary adjustments.
But…
Kenny, the client, is no ordinary guy, and therefore doesn’t give ordinary responses. This is the same guy who refers to any glute exercise as “doing a little glutation…oh yeah.”…and then he winks.
His response:
“In my mind.”
We laughed, and I knew instinctively what he meant. Anyone who has worked out hard and has pushed the limits knows what this means. Possible meanings are: “I’d like to quit, but you were standing there and so I didn’t”, “I know why I’m doing it, but it sucks to do it”, or “Don’t ever ask me to do that again.” Experience teaches that this thought process lasts for about 20 seconds, then the feeling subsides, and you’re left with a dissipating memory that doesn’t seem so bad. Let’s face it, if the memory was all that bad, we’d never do that activity again. Most certainly, while you’re in the middle of an exercise, you’d never psychologically make it through if you couldn’t take solace in the fact that you were never going to have a functional memory of that event again. This uncanny ability to survive the moment, this surreal ability to divorce your self from the immediate happenings of any pain, peril, or danger, is what my martial arts instructor affectionately calls “mental gymnastics.”
