Detachment can be a tricky concept to understand. The Law of Detachment – from my book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success – helps us realize that being detached doesn't mean you don't care, but rather that you are blissfully free from attachment to outcome. You set goals but don't cling to your idea of exactly how they should manifest, you act in accordance with your values but remain flexible about the fruits of those actions, and you treat people with loving kindness but resist the urge to control them.
When your happiness depends on anything outside your own Self, you are a slave to external circumstances. Detachment allows you to be happy for no reason – to take joy in the sheer fact of existence, the way a child is happy. This is true freedom.
Carry these 3 affirmations with you today to start living the Law of Detachment:

 I allow myself and the people around me to be exactly as they are.
 I do not try to force solutions to problems. I trust that if I remain present and open, a perfect solution will spontaneously emerge.
 I embrace uncertainty as an essential ingredient of my experience. When I do not rigidly impose my idea of how things should be, I step into the field of infinite possibility. Depok Chopra

Don't Sacrifice Function for Fitness

 Written by Brandon Bennett

When it comes to removing negatives, one of the hardest conversations you’ll have is when telling people they should stop training or exercising. Exercise and training have become a big part of people’s identities today. Telling people they need to temporarily put things on hold or implying that the bootcamp class or running club they’ve been participating in may have actually been eroding their production can be a touchy subject. If you don’t believe me, try telling an injured runner to stop running. 

We often find people who have the illusion of fitness. They find or modify environments so they can move in isolated ways or participate in group training or endorphin-producing activities that may cloud their perception of dysfunction. They’re chasing more plates for an exercise or a faster time in a workout, but in their pursuit of fitness, they’re sacrificing function. Function and fitness should grow together—but giving up function to get fitness won’t let you keep fitness for very long.

For example, after ACL reconstruction, we’ve seen high school athletes trying to return to running who demonstrate single-leg balance measures four standard deviations below those of a 70-year-old adult. They’re good compensators and may be able to accomplish the act of running, but if we looked at them as 70-year-olds, we’d consider them unsafe to even take a walk for risk of falling. 

Plenty of people can perform with a medical or functional problem by gritting through it or compensating around it, but suffering through activity shouldn’t be our standard operating system. That medical or functional problem might not improve and may actually get worse, creating even more problems. 

The connection between exercise and health is so drilled into our brains that we continue to pursue fitness activities, believing they’ll improve health or function…even to our own detriment. 

No matter if your clients are with you to improve their health, fitness, or productivity in a given activity or sport, your responsibility is to protect the integrity of all of them. When someone scores below the acceptable thresholds on the movement screens, if the conversation doesn’t address pushing pause on exercises or activities that jeopardize that integrity, then you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. 

Of course, telling adults they aren’t allowed to do something works about as well as it does for teenagers. If you’re continuously telling them “You can’t do this. You can’t do that” and don’t allow them to work out or participate as they envision, they’re going to go find someone who will tell them what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. You need to communicate that having a movement pattern or body part that’s painful, dysfunctional, or asymmetrical doesn’t mean they need to scrap their fitness plans—just the fitness that’s counterproductive.

I often ask patients and clients, “Can you commit to temporarily not working on your fitness while we work on other things that may have a bigger influence? Can we put your fitness goals aside for a bit, hit a corrective strategy for a week or two, and then come back and reassess?” If you’ve done the work on the frontend to gain buy-in of the process, asking those questions and vetting the potentially counterproductive exercise or activity choices will be less painful. Guiding clients and patients through that experience can produce massive change with no added stress because better perception drives better behavior in both the short and long terms. Education is best invested once better awareness is in place, because once awareness is set, protective behaviors should be clear, simple, and actionable. The conversation moves from one of “You shouldn’t” to “Why would you?” 

Gray Cook: The Lack of Movement Health Requires Rehabilitation

Don’t put a fitness solution on a health problem. Gray Cook gives advice to coaches and personal trainers about when to work with their physical therapy partners to get needed rehabilitation for their clients. 

If we’re going to look at movement on a continuum when we’re trying to create move­ment health, we call that rehabilitation. If you’ve got pain with movement and you’re looking at your gym for a solution to that, you don’t even have a diagnosis. The low back pain you may have might be a hip flexor problem or it could be bone cancer.

I’m pretty sure side planks are not going to specifically address those problems equally, but I’m not saying side planks won’t help a weak back. You don’t know what you’re aiming at. When somebody has pain or a movement dys­function or a past medical history that scares us, let’s find out what we’re working on and what’s causing these problems.

The old-school way of doing this in fitness is a workaround.

“That hurts.”

“All right, we’ll just do it this way.”

If you’re training people with a large amount of pain, your workarounds are going to start multiplying, and then they’re not your clients. The workarounds never lessen. They always increase because what you’re doing is running from the problem instead of confronting it.

If you don’t have the credentials to diagnose the problem, find somebody who does. It’s as simple as that. You’re not losing control. If I as a physical therapist make a good referral to a neurologist or an orthopedic sur­geon, I get 50% of the credit for that awesome decision, unless the person I refer them to is an idiot and I’m not going to do that. I’m going to refer you to somebody I would refer a family member to and when they’re successful in finding the things I’m not able to find, I get 50% of that credit.

We’ve seen football coaches scared to death to send players down to the training room because they’ll lose control of the athlete. We’ve seen personal trainers scared to death to send a client back to rehabilitation, maybe a different therapist this time, to finish the job because they’re scared they’re going to lose control.

You’re not. If it works out right, you get 50% of the credit because you picked up the problem. You identified a need you couldn’t provide, but you were so concerned about that need, you created a path. God bless your heart. That’s what professionals do. You don’t bottleneck things with you, and you don’t let problems sit on your plate too long. Otherwise, you are the problem.

All content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician. All coaches should have at least a masters degree in a coaching area.