Regardless of whether you Personal trainer, health coach or nutritionistKeeping track of customers’ health information can get confusing — fast. This is especially true when you have a large client base that deals with a unique combination of risk factors and health conditions.
But, missing a customer’s important health information could lead to serious health consequences for your customer and Legal complications for yourself. Therefore, in this article, find the main strategies you can use to retain and remember important information related to client health.
Types of client health information worth mentioning
First things first: What constitutes ‘Important Health Information’? Well, in general, important health information usually falls into three categories:
- Medical history: It includes details about your client’s past and current medical conditions (for example, heart attack, heart surgery, high blood pressure, or diabetes), along with the prescribed medications they are currently taking.
- Existing symptoms: The list of potentially worrisome symptoms includes “unexplained chest discomfort without exertion,” “unusual or unexplained shortness of breath,” and “unexplained dizziness, syncope, or syncope.”
- Lifestyle Habits: Does your customer smoke? Do they drink excessively (more than one or two drinks per day)? Do they have poor sleep habits (less than seven hours of sleep a night)? Cigarette and alcohol abuse, along with insufficient sleep, are among the The most important lifestyle habits that negatively affect your fitness and diet choices.
Noticeable: As a health and wellness professional, the three categories provide important health information that you need to get from clients as the information will affect the specific types of programs you design.
How to obtain important information related to the health of the client
Admittedly, this is a lot of information that you need to get from your customer. Worried about hours-long initial client counseling/assessment sessions where you feel like you’re running a “quick-fire question session”?
There is no need for that. That’s what shapes (eg, Medical clearance, health history and symptoms questionnaire) in order to.
Print it out or send it digitally and have your customers fill it out. Keep in mind that your clients’ health conditions and lifestyle habits may be sensitive topics for them. Therefore, you should always inform your clients that their answers to all questions during a health screening session are strictly confidential.
Remind them of the importance of answering all questions honestly and in as much detail as possible; Let them know that the more you know about their health, the more you can design programs that better serve their needs.
It is important to remain non-judgmental and use open and warm body language during all communications with clients.
Keep and remember important health information
Do all the necessary paperwork, and you’ll have a stack of relevant forms for each client on hand. But wait – how do you remember everything without looking like you’re flipping a textbook during each session?
Keep a file for each client
Remember the “stack of models” previously mentioned? Be careful about confusing paperwork between clients (eg, the misconception that client A has diabetes when he has high blood pressure, and vice versa for client B).
Keep each client’s file organized and organized. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need physical copies of each client’s file – although you can if you wish.
Instead, you can rely on applications to simplify the client “database”. In addition to providing you convenience, the apps also reduce the potential for confusion between one client’s health information with another.
Here is a list of the top three training apps that you can consider using:
- train betterA complete exercise management application for health and wellness professionals. In addition to tagging each customer with specific notes and documents, you can also set up automated reminders and create downloadable resources for your customers. Other notable features include in-app messaging, session, scheduling, and billing management (among others).
- real coach: Although primarily designed for personal trainers, health coaches and nutritionists can also use True Coach to track client data (including important health information) and schedule training sessions.
- Satori: Once again, Satori allows you to keep track of all the health information of the customers. Moreover, this powerful CRM software is especially useful for anyone who provides remote training services. Automatically detects client time zones and performs calculations for easy session scheduling.
Summarize the main health conditions
Each client has his own profile. Wow! But this still does not address the possibility of information overload, where reference to a customer’s “file” (either physical or digital) leads to the discovery of a gap of symptoms, key considerations, and contraindications.
For example, imagine that you are a personal trainer and your client has high blood pressure.
Here’s what your notes can read:
“The client has high blood pressure. It is best to avoid high-intensity exercises like jogging, weightlifting, plyometrics, and all forms of HIIT training because they can raise blood pressure quickly and put too much strain on the heart and blood vessels. The client, instead, should, Be advised to do moderate activity.The client is on angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs), a medicine that allows blood vessels to remain open. May cause dizziness. “
Yes – it’s a huge chunk of words. This is only one aspect of their health information.
In most cases, you may also need to read multiple paragraphs that cover other health conditions and daily lifestyle habits. It’s a nightmare. So what can you do about it?
Answer: Take the time to learn the ins and outs of a few common chronic conditions that clients typically encounter (such as diabetes, high blood pressure, hypothyroidism, and cardiovascular disease) and then summarize the critical points in your own words. Note: If possible, you should write this brief information below; Preferably in a separate document that you can easily refer to as often as needed (eg a personal journal).
Oh, and if you are having difficulties understanding the medical condition of a particular client?
Don’t be afraid to ask your client for a brief explanation. Your health care providers will likely give them a concise, easy-to-understand overview of their health conditions — which they can then pass on to you.
Benefits of summarizing and writing basic health information
Search Summarizing is shown to aid in understanding knowledge and transferring it to long-term memory (i.e. storing information over long periods). Handwriting is also known Increase memory retention and comprehension.
Customizing key health information in memory allows you to ‘tag’ a specific customer with bullet points because you’ll know what this entails for your customer and how to design your software. So, here’s what your feedback to a client with high blood pressure might look like when you have a deeper understanding of the condition:
“The client has high blood pressure and is currently taking an angiotensin receptor blocker.” More efficient, right?
Keep your knowledge updated
That said, remember that Keep your knowledge updated. Ensuring that your recommendations and advice comply with the latest health and nutritional guidelines is fundamental to your client’s well-being and the success of your business.
Here are some tips that will help you with this:
- Join a professional association: Becoming a member of a professional association (for example, National Health and Wellness Training Council or Health Coach Alliance) usually gives you free access to high-quality studies and information related to the areas of health and wellness.
- Subscribe to the Authority’s newsletters: There are two general types of power organizations. The first is associations and organizations made up of experts and professionals in a particular field or subject matter. Examples of associations and organizations you might want to follow include: American Nutrition Association and the American Public Health Association. The second type of authority body is the government bodies responsible for official directives and regulations. Examples include World Health Organization And Choose MyPlate.
- Completion of Continuing Education Courses (CECs): Accredited organizations of health and wellness professionals (including the AFPA) offer short courses to allow personal trainers, nutritionists, and health coaches to further their education and keep their knowledge up-to-date. to do that Consider getting your own CECs If you haven’t already done so.
Review client files before their sessions
Another psychological “trick” you can use to better remember important client health information is something callednovelty effect. “
For those unaware: The modernity effect is a memory phenomenon in which the most recent facts, impressions, or presented items are remembered better than previous material.
So how exactly do you take advantage of this?
Well, do you remember the “files” you kept on each client? Be sure to review them immediately before starting your training session. This will keep any relevant health information “handy” in your mind.
Of course, this means that you should not schedule back-to-back client sessions.
Instead, always make sure that you have at least ten to twenty minutes of ‘breaking space’ between clients so that you can catch up on any relevant information about the upcoming client to better serve their needs.
Perform regular check-ins
You cannot assume that your client’s health status (ie, chronic conditions and lifestyle habits) remains the same indefinitely. Instead, something can change – maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.
This may affect the effectiveness of the program you design for them.
To clarify: imagine that you are a Certified Nutrition and Wellness Consultant With a client in relatively good health. Thus, your focus with this client has always been on promoting positive eating habits and behaviours, along with designing meal plans based on MyPlate (a government recommended review of the food pyramid).
However, your client was recently diagnosed, unknown to you celiac diseaseIt is an autoimmune disease in which eating gluten damages the small intestine.
It is conceivable that failure to account for this in their meal plans is harm their health. Of course, some clients won’t be shy about sharing their latest health conditions with you. But others may have reservations about doing so, especially when you’re not asking for it.
Another example to highlight is when your client engages in behaviors that negatively affect their health and fitness (eg, smoking again after quitting). Not having access to this new information may push the client harder than their bodies can handle during training sessions, for example.
This in turn highlights the importance of having regular “health check-ups” with your clients. Do this at least once every three months.
If your customers are not comfortable with the idea of face-to-face communication, you can also take advantage of the following “check-in” methods:
- Correspondence: If you are using a training app, feel free to set up automated check-in messages along the lines of “Hey, is there anything new I should know about your health to better support you on your journey?” that are sent periodically. But if you are not, there is always an option to do it manually (it takes a little effort of course).
- email: Check-in emails can be part of your email marketing strategy. As with training apps, investing in a good email marketing service provider (eg, HubSpotAnd conversion kitAnd dripSend automatic check-in emails so you don’t have to manage them manually.
away
Working with important health information is part of the job as a personal trainer. And it’s essential to treat it well – starting with getting all that information and remembering it.
It may seem like an uninteresting and tedious business, but it’s the key to helping your clients build a healthy, sustainable lifestyle. After all, you want your customers to always feel supported and safe with you.
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