Movement is essential to health, fitness and performance, but pain can complicate people’s relationships with their bodies. When clients experience pain, they often develop protective movement patterns. Unconscious strategies like stiffness, guarded posture or avoidance of certain activities serve a short-term protective purpose. Over time, these subconscious patterns reinforce fear, reduce movement options and limit progress toward fitness goals.
However, fitness professionals can help clients reframe pain, rebuild trust in their bodies and create positive new pathways for movement. Neuroscience, pain science, psychology and practical wisdom are rich resources from which fitness professionals can help clients reverse protective movement patterns. Next time a client allows pain to sideline health and fitness goals, try the following coaching techniques to reroute toward progress.
1. Reframe the meaning of pain
For many clients, pain feels like a red light; a red light means stop. Yet in most cases, pain doesn’t signal damage; it signals that the body wants something different. Pain is a protective alarm system, not always a marker of injury. If we teach clients to see pain as information, they can respond with curiosity rather than fear.
The key is showing clients that discomfort doesn’t equal danger. By modifying, scaling or redirecting the task, we keep clients moving and reinforce that their bodies are adaptable. This mindset shift is often the first step in reversing protective patterns.
2. Skip the anatomy talk
When clients experience pain, it can be tempting to explain the mechanics. Fitness professionals are often excited to share which muscle is irritated, which joint is stuck or how inflammation works. But research shows that overloading clients with anatomical education about pain often backfires, amplifying fear and making symptoms worse.
Instead, keep explanations experience-based. Use phrases like “your shoulder asks for a different angle today” rather than pathoanatomical explanations. This keeps clients focused on solutions, not problems.
3. Set the environment and task for success
When fear and hesitation are present, logic and anatomy talk rarely win. In fact, educating the client on anatomical damage can heighten their pain, fear and protective mechanisms. What does work instead is crafting an environment where clients feel movement success.
Take the example of a client afraid to jump. Rather than insisting on leaving the ground, start with something less threatening: ask them to bounce gently in place while shaking their wrists up and down. Even better, do it with them! Soon, without realizing it, you are both hopping and laughing.
What happened? Cognitive shift, environmental success and emotional reset. Humor and play are incompatible with pain and fear. This principle applies across fitness: sometimes success comes not from pushing harder, but from reframing the challenge so the nervous system feels safe enough to explore.
4. Make friends with neuroplasticity
One empowering truth to share with clients is that the brain can always change. Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself based on experience, explains why protective movement patterns can be unlearned and replaced with healthier ones.
Repeated positive experiences with movement gradually overwrite old threat associations in the nervous system. For coaches, every rep is more than physical training; it is also brain training. Small, consistent exposures create the long-term adaptations that allow clients to move freely again.
5. Leverage graded exposure to maximize confidence
The nervous system learns safety the same way it learns fear; they are both based on experiences. This is why graded exposure is one of the most powerful techniques to overcome protective patterns. Graded exposure means very gradually reintroducing feared or avoided movements in small, manageable steps. Each successful step builds self-efficacy, creating a positive feedback loop.
The fitness professional plays a key role by calibrating the challenge. The micro-progression is just enough stress to stimulate adaptation, but not so much that it triggers the alarm. When clients learn they can succeed repeatedly, their relationship with movement transforms.
Putting it together
Protective movement patterns are not permanent. They’re simply the brain’s best guess at staying safe. With the right coaching strategies, fitness professionals can guide clients toward freedom, resilience and confidence in their movement.
Reversing protective movement patterns is less about biomechanics and more about psychology, environment, and neuroscience. When clients understand that pain doesn’t equal stop, experience success in a safe environment, and progress through graded exposure, they unlock their ability to move freely again.
Next time your client feels stuck by pain, try applying these key takeaways:
- Reframe pain: Use phrases like 'your body is asking for something different.'
- Add play: Use games, laughter and novelty to reduce threat.
- Spot wins: Celebrate every small success to reinforce confidence.
- Keep language positive: Replace “I can’t” with “how can we?”
- Progress slowly: Let success build layer by layer, one micro-progression at a time.
Dr. Meredith Butulis, DPT, OCS, CEP, CSCS, CPT, PES, CES, BCS, Pilates-certified, Yoga-certified, has been working in the fitness and rehabilitation fields since 1998. She is the creator of the Fitness Comeback Coaching Certification, author of the Mobility | Stability Equation series, Host of the “Fitness Comeback Coaching Podcast,” and Sports and Orthopedic Physical Therapist serving Sarasota Memorial Health Systems. She shares her background to help us reflect on our professional fitness practices from new perspectives that can help us all grow together in the industry. Instagram: @doc.mnb
