What are we normalising in movement and sport?
We’ve been talking a lot about culture in professional sport lately. About what gets normalised, what gets overlooked - and what happens when the interests of the team or organisation become more important than the people within it.
I keep thinking about how much of this happens outside professional sport too.
A coach inherits the practices of their coach. A recreation provider inherits the norms of the previous contract holder. A club inherits the expectations of the people who came before. Eventually, those things can become so familiar that nobody remembers to ask whether they are still appropriate.
This comes up a lot when I’m teaching trauma-informed practice to movement and sports professionals.
We start talking about things that can sound very simple: choice, agency, communication, boundaries, consent. Then the conversation gets more complicated.
What happens when someone says no? How much choice does someone actually have in a session?
What happens when a participant discloses trauma or mental health difficulties?
What behaviour do we explain away because it is familiar?
These aren't questions about turning sport into therapy, and I don't think every coach needs to become a mental health professional (or anything close).
They matter because we are working with people. Their bodies. Their experiences. Their boundaries. And their capacity to participate and do their best.
Trauma-informed practice in sport isn't just about trauma disclosures
A lot of the work around trauma-informed practice in sport has understandably focused on child safety, abuse disclosures and how organisations respond when something has happened. There is good reason for that, and it is an important part of trauma-informed practice.
But I don't think that should be where the conversation ends.
Trauma and chronic stress are present in most groups, most sessions, every day. The people we work with bring their experiences with them into movement, sport and fitness, whether or not those experiences are something we know about.
That doesn't mean we need to know what has happened to someone.
It means having some understanding of how stress and trauma can affect behaviour, engagement and someone's ability to participate, and being more deliberate about the influence we have as coaches, facilitators and leaders.
In a recent Trauma-Informed Movement and Sports Facilitation program, participants reported a 57.1% average increase in confidence offering choice and agency to support participants' felt sense of safety. Confidence navigating physical touch and consent increased by 31.3%. Participants also reported a 22% increase in their ability to identify signs of stress or trauma in people they work with.
I find those numbers interesting because they aren't really about learning to "spot trauma". They're about becoming more confident in practices that movement and sports professionals are already responsible for.
Participants also rated their understanding of how stress and trauma impact a person's ability to engage in movement at 4.8/5, and their understanding of how they could practically contribute to psychosocial safety at 4.4/5.
This is a big part of why I developed these programs. I wanted to create somewhere for people working in movement and sport to actually work through these questions, rather than just give them another introduction to what "trauma-informed" means.
Because we don’t just need to consider trauma & chronic stress when we’re talking about abuse disclosure policies or psychosocial safety - we should be talking about it when we’re focusing on:
how to create environments where people can be their best
how to create environments where great performance happens
how to create environments where mental health and safety is taken seriously
how to actually ‘do’ inclusion and support people with different life experiences to ourselves.
Trauma-informed practice and psychosocial safety
This is also where I think there is a useful connection with the growing focus on psychosocial safety in sport and fitness organisations. Having a policy doesn't necessarily tell someone what to do differently in the middle of a session.
What happens when a participant becomes overwhelmed? What happens when someone disengages? How do we understand behaviour that might otherwise be labelled as difficult, resistant or unmotivated? How much influence does a coach or facilitator actually have over whether a space feels safe enough for someone to participate?
The training we deliver is designed to help people work through them within the boundaries of their actual role. Participants aren't being asked to diagnose anyone or become mental health professionals. They're developing a better understanding of nervous system regulation, stress responses, their own responses and the influence they already have as movement professionals.
For organisations, that can also provide a shared language for thinking about trauma-informed practice, psychosocial safety and inclusion across different roles and settings.
What does this look like in practice?
It will look different depending on where you work.
What trauma-informed practice looks like in a community footy club is different to what it looks like in a high-performance environment, a recreation centre, a fitness facility or a community health setting.
That's why my Trauma-Informed Movement and Sports Facilitation programs are tailored to the organisation through a pre-workshop consultation. The aim is to make the learning relevant to the people actually doing the work, rather than giving everyone another generic introduction to trauma-informed practice.
The programs range from a one-day Foundations program through to a two-day Application program and a five-day, 30-hour Facilitation Certification. The longer programs provide more opportunity to work through real-world scenarios, modify communication and cues, and apply the framework within the organisation's own context.
No prior knowledge of trauma-informed practice is needed.
The methodology draws on trauma-informed practice and clinical yoga facilitation. Yoga is the source of the methodology, not the delivery context. Participants don't need to practise yoga to benefit from the training. The body-based understanding of stress and trauma is translated directly into the language and practice of movement, sport and fitness.
This isn't about turning every sports professional into a trauma and mental health professional.
It is about giving people who already have a significant influence over others' experiences of movement some additional understanding and practical skills to use in the work they're already doing.
Because the culture we create is built through these everyday decisions.
What are we teaching through the way we facilitate and lead?
And what are we teaching our participants unintentionally?
