When I first opened the studio, one of my initial goals was to provide a small group or semi-private personal training experience as an additional service. At that time, I had trained people privately for twenty-three years and had grown very proficient as a coach. I understood that the group environment created a different dynamic and I experimented with that for one year, subletting space in a ballroom dance studio, before I took the eventual plunge and opened my own place. During that time, I varied the group size, coaching groups as large as eight people, while trying to determine the optimal size. My criteria was that the participant had to have a sense or “feel” of private training. Six people eventually became the maximum number for my group size. The choice of exercises and equipment used had to be considered when developing the format for the workout. What I didn’t know at that time was that the pressure to conform in front of a group, even though small, would have a big impact on how I would coach and train others.
When I bring on a new coach and start them with our on-boarding process, I share that their journey as a coach will go through phases. First, it’s gaining a grasp on basic movement concepts, strength principles, and human anatomy. This allows them to understand a concept and then apply the method. In this case, the method is exercise. I stress not to fall in love with exercises, but rather concepts. Once they gain competence in that, we move into refining their communication skills.
It’s in the maturation process of every new coach that they over communicate and verbalize every cue known to man for every exercise early on. I was the king of this. I gave it the name, for lack of a better term, “diarrhea of the mouth”. I still catch a bit of this bug from time to time. Once a coach understands that it’s not what you know, but what you can teach that matters, they take a positive stride in their learning journey.
The final step, or so I thought prior, is to then communicate it so that the person in front of you understands. This is when understanding the different formats of learning (visual, oratory, or kinesthetic) comes into play. Here I stress speaking as simply as possible. A good communicator is not someone who spews complicated terms, but rather someone who can take a complicated idea and get the point across using simple terms. I tell coaches to speak in the lowest common denominator. I thought that was all it took, but I was wrong.
I recently came across a book, The Wisdom of Crowds, by New York Times columnist, James Surowiecki. The premise of the book is that in our everyday life, the government and our economy are all affected by the power of crowds. Things can go in a negative direction when elements of an intelligent crowd are missing or underexpressed. This book narrates that large groups tend to be smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. It was in this book that reference to the Asch conformity experiment, came up. Solomon Asch was a psychologist who performed a series of experiments in the 1950s. He was able to show how individuals yielded to or defied a majority group and the effect of such influences on beliefs and opinions. An explanation of the Asch conformity experiment, per Wikipedia, is as follows:
Groups of eight male college students participated in a simple "perceptual" task. In reality, all but one of the participants were actors, and the true focus of the study was about how the remaining participant would react to the actors' behavior.
The actors knew the true aim of the experiment, but were introduced to the subject as other participants. Each student viewed a card with a line on it, followed by another with three lines labeled A, B, and C (see accompanying figure). One of these lines was the same as that on the first card, and the other two lines were clearly longer or shorter (i.e., a near-100% rate of correct responding was expected). Each participant was then asked to say aloud which line matched the length of that on the first card. Before the experiment, all actors were given detailed instructions on how they should respond to each trial (card presentation). They would always unanimously nominate one comparator, but on certain trials they would give the correct response and on others, an incorrect response. The group was seated such that the real participant always responded last.
| One of the pairs of cards used in the experiment. The card on the left has the reference line and the one on the right shows the three comparison lines. |
Subjects completed 18 trials. On the first two trials, both the subject and the actors gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the actors would all give the same wrong answer. This wrong-responding recurred on 11 of the remaining 15 trials. It was subjects' behavior on these 12 "critical trials" (the 3rd trial + the 11 trials where the actors gave the same wrong answer) that formed the aim of the study: to test how many subjects would change their answer to conform to those of the 7 actors, despite it being wrong. Subjects were interviewed after the study including being debriefed about the true purpose of the study. These post-test interviews shed valuable light on the study: both because they revealed subjects often were "just going along" and because they revealed considerable individual differences to Asch. Additional trials with slightly altered conditions were also run, including having a single actor also give the correct answer.
When people join the studio, and opt to train in a semi-private group as opposed to privately, one of the questions I get is, “Will they adjust to me?” One of the things that differentiates J & D Fitness Personal Training from other studios is that we adjust to each person’s skill level. What’s interesting is that people like hearing that, but once in a small group tend to adopt the “just going along” mindset. It’s over time that people become comfortable in the studio and will embrace the individual adjustments and attention provided in the small group setting. Mastering exercise is one thing, understanding human behaviors is an entirely different matter. The good thing is that we’ve come to understand this dynamic and understand how to handle it. Prior to opening the studio, I used to think coaching how to perform a lunge with a sandbag was hard. Now I know better.
I’ll see you at the studio.