I spot-trained couple of clients today from a trainer-pal who's on vacation this week.

Always interesting to get peoples' responses to a different style of training. Their usual trainer is an old-school style trainer of the cardio-and-weights variety. She trains a lot of guys, and most of them are pretty buff: strong-looking, tough guys who also manage to look pretty lean as well. It's clear she gets results.

Still, there's only so much one can do in three hours a week, which is the usual time frame in which trainers are expected to get results, and when I worked with these two clients, I discovered that they did no stretching with their trainer. No mobility work, either, no post-workout stretching, and certainly no foam-rolling.

I suppose that's not too shocking: these things can be boring if you don't do them right, and they take time away from intense muscle-building work and from sweat-inducing energy systems work. I mean, we're getting paid to make our clients work hard, right? And what good is all that other stuff if it doesn't make them sweat, burn fat, or build heaps of muscle?

I wonder that myself. On the other hand, I have also found that, since I started having my clients do mobility work, foam rolling, and stretching at the front and back ends of their workouts, the number of incidents of pain and suffering among the group has dropped significantly. There's less back and knee pain. Everyone moves better.

And frankly, that's important. And not just in a quasi-spiritual or health-enhancing way, either. The way a person moves influences the way they come across every bit as much as the circumference of their thighs or waist, or the definition of their muscles. Whether you're a man or a woman, if you move like a chunk of granite, you don't look good. If you move well--fluidly, gracefully, easily--it looks great. That's something that comes across no matter how many layers of winter clothing you're wearing, and it's something you can work on and improve immediately, whether you're close to your ideal bodyweight or still have 100 pounds to lose.

At our local "Y", there's an elderly-person 'strength training' class in the weight room every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Occasionally I'll check out what people are doing, and the answer, inevitably, is moving terribly.  Sure--what they are doing is better than nothing, but they ideally need someone to improve the quality of their movements and not just the quantity of their movement. Teaching them to move their hips and not the spine. Teaching them to activate their glutes. Teaching them to extend their thoracic spine. Not easy, of course, but essential to genuinely make a difference in these peoples' health.

In the last few years, personal training has started to enter a weird territory that spans the no-man's land between Physical Therapy and Athletic Coaching. Every trainer is going to see him or herself somewhere along that spectrum: as either a healer of sick people or a trainer of unstoppable machines. Trouble is that most people are some combination of broken and highly-functioning.

In "Invictus," Matt Damon's character, a professional rugby player, when being asked about a nagging ankle injury, shrugs it off: "We never play at 100%," he says. There's always something that's not working exactly right, in other words, but we do our best anyway.

That's probably the best approach, whether you're a trainer or a trainee: know that you're almost always a little off. Strive to heal your injuries and poor movement habits, but at the same time push yourself to train hard within whatever limitations you're having.