Exercise Physiologists have been having an identity crisis since the profession was born. In my opinion, it’s a crisis faced equally by the governing body, Exercise and Sports Science Australia (ESSA), and the thousands of Exercise Physiologists who’ve built a career around the profession.
And I think there’s an answer. That answer is ‘goal dilution’. And that’s what I want to explore here.
But before we talk about what goal dilution is, and how we can use it to overcome our identity crisis, let’s define the problem.
Exercise Physiologists are like awkward teenagers searching for an identity. Sometime we hang out with the Physio kids, but we don’t really fit in. Sometimes we hang out with the Personal Trainer kids, but we don’t really fit there either.
We don’t know where we belong, and heaven forbid if someone asks us what we do.
We can’t answer ‘I’m an Exercise Physiologist’, because no one knows what that means – there’s just no public perception or recognition of the profession. So we need to answer by defining what an Exercise Physiologist is. Let’s see if the governing body can help. According to ESSA, Accredited Exercise Physiologists are ‘…university-qualified allied health professionals who prescribe, deliver, and adapt movement, physical activity, and exercise-based interventions to facilitate and optimise health status, function, recovery, and independence. This helps people participate in activities at home, school, work, and in the community. AEPs provide services to people across the full health spectrum, healthy through to those at risk of developing a health condition, and people with health conditions, a disability, and aged related illnesses and conditions, including chronic, complex conditions.’
Ok, so I don’t know about you, but that sort of reads like a committee decided to cover as many concepts as possible in three sentences. I totally get it, it’s really hard to distill a professional into one clear statement, but if I asked you to summarise that scope of practice without looking back over that, could you? Maybe, but probably not.
And if we don’t clearly know what we do, GPs don’t know, Allied Heath professionals who may refer to us don’t know, insurers don’t know, the government doesn’t know, the NDIS doesn’t know, my own mum doesn’t know, and the actual people we can potentially be helping definitely don’t know.
I think the problem is, we’re trying to claim we do everything, which ends up with the profession being incorrectly perceived as the ‘rich man’s personal trainer’ or the ‘poor man’s Physio’.
The boundaries of our profession are not clearly defined. Our profession is blurry.
My two kids love colouring in books. And once they’ve finished colouring in whichever Disney Princess they’re working on for that day, it’s pretty obvious who it is. Not because of the colouring, but because of the solid black line they’re colouring inside.
Like any parent, I’m convinced my kids are super-advanced-future-Picassos, but even I’ll admit that if they didn’t have a black line to colour inside, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Cinderella and The Little Mermaid.
And this is the problem. Exercise Physiology is defined by what we DO, by the colouring inside the lines. But the problem is, there are no lines.
To define the SHAPE of Exercise Physiology we don’t need to define what we do by colouring inside, we need to define where our boundaries are, and (more importantly) what’s outside those boundaries.
We need to define what we don’t do.
And this is where the idea of goal dilution can come to the rescue.
To understand how goal dilution works, I want you to imagine you’re walking into a gym to get a coach. You want someone who can help you get really strong.
As you walk in, you browse the A3 posters near reception – the profiles of all the different trainers. You see a bunch of hard core looking people with their arms folded across their chest. Below some cringe quote about growth happening outside your comfort zone, there’s a list of ‘specialities’.
This is what the first coach’s profile has listed under specialities: weight loss, sports specific conditioning, toning, boxing, pilates, pre- natal, post- natal, mobility, menopause, bodybuilding and strength training.
You move along to the second profile. They only list one thing… ‘strength training’.
Remember, your goal is to get strong.
Who do you choose?
The first person included strength training as one of their areas of expertise, along with a whole bunch of other stuff.
The second person listed one thing only – strength training.
Surely you go with the person who truly specialises in that discipline, I know I would.
So why does the official statement that defines our scope of practice contain so many areas of expertise?
I totally get it – we study hard, and we DO have a great breadth of expertise, but I think it’s the depth, not breadth of expertise we should be emphasising. It’s our depth that should form the public perception. You wouldn’t see your GP for brain surgery, you’d see a specialist. Exercise Physiologists need to be the specialists that people go to see when they have a specific and clearly defined problem that needs solving.
We need to stop telling people what we do, and start telling people what we don’t do. This is what I mean by goal dilution. If we admit to being bad at some things, it implies we must be really good at others. We don’t do bodybuilding, we don’t run fitness classes, we don’t diagnose your injuries, we don’t do manual therapy. We DO use exercise to manage chronic and complex health conditions.
And that’s what goal dilution is. Blatantly and unapologetically telling the world what we DON’T do. This is the way we can clearly define what we do. We need to have the guts to refer people chasing a bikini body or bigger biceps to a Personal Trainer. And to send people who require complex musculoskeletal diagnoses and manual therapy to a Physio.
We need to know our lane, and we need to aggressively stick to it. We need to send a message that we know what we don’t do and we know what we do – and we’re bloody good at it.
Coffee drinkers tend to either like either an iced-coffee, or a hot coffee. Knowing that, would it be a good idea to open a cafe that serves luke-warm coffee? I mean, that’s the average of what people want right? No! That’s a terrible idea. If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll end up being nothing to everyone. Serve your coffee cold, or serve it hot. But either way – pick a lane.
There’s a concept I talk about a lot – red ocean versus blue ocean thinking.
The red ocean is one where everyone is competing to be the best. You’re all doing pretty much the same thing, with everyone trying to be better than everyone else. There’s so much fighting going on that there’s blood in the water – the red ocean. This is what all exercise-related professions are doing now.
The blue ocean on the other hand is an ocean that only you are in. You’re not spending your time trying to be better – instead, you’re trying to be different. If you’re different to everyone else, there is no competition.
You’re in a category of one.
To succeed in a crowded red ocean, you need to be ten times better than everyone else. To succeed in a blue ocean, you just need to be different. And it’s easier to be different than it is to be ten times better.
Beyond knowing what we do, clearing defining WHO we’re for can help too. We need to define our avatar – our target client. I don’t mean their demographic – their age, gender, income etc. I mean their psychographic. We need to be able to complete the sentence ‘Exercise Physiology is for the sort of person who needs…’.
That sentence might read something like ‘Exercise Physiology is for the sort of person who needs exercise to manage chronic and complex health conditions.’
I’m really confident that if we can define what we don’t do, it’ll more clearly define what we do. And if we can combine this position statement with a succinct summary of the psychographic of our target client – I really do feel like we can shake this identity crisis and become a respected industry of experts that form an indispensable part of the Australian health landscape.
