Nicole Ezcurra, M.S, CF-SLP; Autism FItness Certified

Truth be told, I think exercising does way more for your brain than for your body. (Your great physique from working out is just a bonus from working out!)

Maintaining motivation to workout is hard for everyone. But it can be even more difficult for someone with special needs. That’s because motivation, and understanding that working out for your overall health and well-being, are very abstract concepts. They require skills like being able to look into the future and having a general understanding of what “health” means and looks like for oneself. Not only that, but progress isn’t always very obvious, so intrinsic motivation needs to kick in at some point, which is a higher order thinking skill.

Working out is lot of work and it usually takes more work for someone with special needs to move their body than for someone without special needs.

Some tips to maintain motivation when training someone with special needs:

Tip One: Help Discover Their “Why?”

Is your athlete training for social- emotional benefits like finding friends, creating a community, being around others, or are they training for physical benefits like losing weight, decreasing the impacts of diabetes, or to build strength and endurance? Teach your athlete about the brain benefits of working out. How it can improve attention span, increase neural transmission pathways to facilitate learning, decrease anxiety, increase confidence, etc. People train for different reasons and it’s important to find out WHY your athlete wants to train. In order to maintain motivation, there needs to be some sort of autonomy to their training, which first occurs through goal setting. Try keeping goals simple, the fewer words the better, and pick only 1-3 goals at a time to work on.

Tip Two: Use Visuals

I don’t mean visual schedules (however, do incorporate those too!), but after the first few assessment sessions and building rapport sessions, sit down with your athlete and make visuals of their goals. Individuals with Autism learn better from visual stimuli than from linguistic (verbal) information. You can take pictures of “before and after,” show photos of your own progress and training, of others training with you, make exercising and exercises familiar by showing videos and pictures of what wants to be accomplished. You can have your athlete draw pictures, use comic strips, or find photos online. Essentially, you’re making a collage of his/her’s goals to provide a visual cue for your client, reminding him/her of the goals and process.

Tip Three: Make Goals Interactive

Individuals with autism often live in the “here and now,” which makes connecting knowledge to the past or to the future more challenging to understand, as they are abstract concepts. Try to relate your athlete’s goals to their own life journey and experiences. For example, if Jonny comes to you wanting to work on making new friends but he isn’t sure how to, remind Jonny of a period in his life where he most likely has done it before, like at school or even how he came to start training with you, instead of saying a general statement of “oh you’re so friendly, you’ll make friends easily!” This strategy of using previously known information about your athlete’s own life and connecting it with his new goal, will help make the new goal easier to grasp. Goal making and goal setting need to be a continuous, dynamic and interactive process. Use pictures, social stories, create a tangible “workout goal book,” and before each session, spend a few minutes looking at and/or reminding your athlete of his or her goals.