What is an Athletic Trainer?

Traditionally Athletic Trainers are allied healthcare professionals with advanced musculoskeletal and medical training and education from accredited universities and colleges.  These healthcare professionals support athletes, building relationships in the training room, creating a prevention-focused care plan, encouraging early discomfort recognition, and guiding athletes back to their sport after an injury.

Athletic Trainers have significant training in addressing sprains and strains with advanced knowledge of how the body works and how it works safely.  These skills included training in ergonomics and functional body movement, and body mechanics.

The goal of the Athletic Trainer is to keep their athletes in optimal performance to compete safely and be highly productive to win at their sport.

At CIP Solutions, we consider your employee's workplace athletes.  Your employees, just like athletes, must return to work every day, maintain and sustain job tasks, and may experience repetitive forces, fatigue, dehydration, and stress that can create strain on their bodies as a result of work.

Our athletic trainers undergo rigorous training in workplace safety regulations and practices, blending their expertise in sports medicine with learned experience from worksite environments. By bringing a fresh perspective and specialized knowledge in areas such as ergonomic coaching to your team, they enhance your team’s existing efforts and provide additional resources to prevent injuries and promote a safer work environment.

What is the Sports Medicine Model?

The Sports Medicine Model encompasses three domains.  The first domain is prevention-focused care.  The second domain is early recognition of discomforts to prevent injuries.  The third domain is guided return after an injury or illness. 

Our Athletic Trainers use this model to develop your workplace athletes’ confidence and resilience.

If Athletic Trainers work with athletes, why would I hire them to support my employees?

Over a decade ago, employers were desperate for a prevention model that would assist them in lowering injury claims, decreasing workers’ compensation spending, and guiding their employees in an effective ergonomic, health, and wellness program.

Their existing healthcare approach was reactive, stopping work, increasing lost time, and in many cases, by the time the employee addressed their concern, it had become a work-related injury. 

CIPS’ Athletic Trainers continually shape each individual, on-site or remotely, to perform with increased confidence through ergonomic coaching for prevention, “no name, no blame” observation, early reporting and discomfort management, and guided return—ensuring that every movement contributes to creating a safer workforce. By developing a team’s workplace athletes, Athletic Trainers help them develop ergonomic confidence so that they can face uncertainty with more resilience than ever before.

Is an Athletic Trainer the same as my personal trainer at the gym?

No!  Personal trainers are typically enthusiastic fitness trainers who require a fitness certificate to train people within a gym.  Unlike Athletic Trainers, physical trainers are not allied healthcare professionals.  However, some Athletic Trainers have many additional credentials, including the certificate of a physical trainer.  Most Athletic Trainers have their Masters or even Doctorate degrees. Some other credentials are Certified Ergonomics Assessment Specialist (CEAS), Advanced Office Ergonomics Assessment Specialist (AOEAS), and Certified Exercise Specialist (CES), to name a few.

How does CIPS build a prevention-focused culture?

The most effective way to create a prevention-focused culture is to allow Athletic Trainers to build relationships while they learn about the work your employees do each day. These interactions will build a trusting bond.  Often employees do not have a current medical provider; by offering care via your onsite Athletic Trainer, discomforts can be caught early and resolved to keep your employee working.

In an industry dominated by reactive messaging centered around statistics that are backward-facing in nature, CIPS takes a proactive approach to injury prevention success. Instead of claiming to be able to lower injury rates by a certain percentage or reduce OSHA recordables, we make a different claim—we will create a more resilient workforce using sports medicine to limit vulnerabilities. There will always be unknowns in a volatile workforce, and we assure safety leadership that they will be able to face threats with confidence without promising to change things they cannot control.

How does CIPS encourage early recognition of discomforts?

By being present, available, and relational, Athletic Trainers will continuously educate the employees on the importance of addressing every and any discomfort that they might be experiencing, whether at work or home.  By addressing the pains by screening, stretching, and using OSHA-guided first aid principles, aches never have to become an injury.  

How does CIPS assist in returning injured employees back to their work?

Your Athletic Trainer is the best liaison between your employees, their injury, physician care, physical therapy, and your workers' compensation team.  Often employees are sent back to work not physically ready or, more often than not, they are sent back without sufficient emotional preparation.  

By creating a back-to-work EMPOWER plan, your employee will begin working with their Athletic Trainer as soon as possible.  Often when a Physician is aware that their patient has access to Athletic Training at work, the Physician familiar with the practical approach of Sports Medicines guided return, will release the employee to the Athletic Trainer.  The Athletic Trainer and employee can arrange times for one-on-one interactions, screenings, and rehabilitation as they guide the employee physically and emotionally back to work.

How does CIPS drive an ergonomic solid solution?

As the Athletic Trainer learns more about the employees and their job tasks, they will also get to know their environment and watch how they use their bodies to get their jobs done.  After the Athletic Trainer addresses a discomfort or injury, this interaction will naturally guide the Athletic Trainer to identify ergonomic risks and to develop mitigation strategies to prevent future discomforts or injuries.

There is more to decreasing ergonomic risks than assessing and developing a mitigation strategy.  The key is also coaching the employee on using their body safely.  This training includes functional body movement, body mechanics, posture, and power zone training. With training, your employees can go about their days with ergonomic confidence.

The Athletic Trainer can develop an ergonomic committee within your organization to gain employee buy-in and spread the information across departments, peer to peer.

How will I know if the program is working?

At CIPSolutions, we have realized that a safer workplace stems from building confidence in every workplace over time. During our discovery and planning phase, we will work together to define your project identification document (PID), including what metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) are essential to you.

Monthly reporting will provide insight into how the program is performing.  Metrics may include work-related and non-work-related discomforts or injuries, medical referral avoidance or referral, program promotion, training and coaching, ergonomics risk identification and mitigation, employee satisfaction, and feedback. 

In the short term, you should expect to see employees who are more confident on the job and assured their leadership supports them. In the long term, increased retention and acquiring better talent should occur as well.

What if my numbers are good, and we haven’t had any incidents?

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Benjamin Franklin

“The future belongs to those who prepare for it.” Jim Moran

“Change is the law of life.  And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” John F. Kennedy

The point here is discomforts are little accidents waiting to happen.  Dehydration and fatigue are one injury away from a hefty price tag; hiring unknown injuries affects the bottom line, etc.  There is much more to safety than compliance and training. Our Athletic Trainers develop strong relationships with workplace athletes founded on trust, objective advice, and subject matter expertise. Understanding each worker as a holistic person, Athletic Trainers equip every individual from boots to suits to move better on and off the worksite.