Do virtual coaching sessions work?

A walkthrough of a real, live virtual coaching session with a singer

Let’s chat about how virtual sessions work. I’ll talk you through a recent visit with a musical theater artist and teacher who needed help with a sticky diaphragm and trouble with breath support.

Main Points:

1. Someone said my voice is soothing so I just wanna give them a shout-out!
2. Virtual care is not for everyone. Some people really need that hand on care.
3. Virtual sessions are great for everyone else! You can get a LOT done in a short amount of time.
4. Abby walks you through a recent visit with a musical theater performer and teacher (a short nerd-out about ribs and breathing and stuff).
5. Virtual sessions allow for a lot of convenience, more accurate information about your life/practice setup, and (bonus) you can introduce me to your babies and puppies.

Next time: We will be discussing why your hands might be falling asleep while you practice and when to see someone about it.

As always, Let me know what you need!

• Transcript

  Good morning, World! It’s going to be a great day.

  Welcome to the Play Life Loudly Podcast. I’m your host, Abby Halpin. I’m a physical therapist who wishes I was a music teacher.

  Before we start, I would like to give a shout-out to a friend who told me that she listens to my podcast at night because my voice is so soothing. If you’re listening, Kelsey… I hope you had a great day. Sweet dreams!!

  Today I’d like to answer one of the most frequent questions I get. “Do virtual sessions actually work??”. My answer is always… YES!... Probably.

  I spent the first 10-11 years of my career as a PT and coach, working with clients in person. I 100% understand the magic of being in the room together. That’s why I offer mobile sessions here in Vermont. But the tumultuous time of the start of the Coronavirus pandemic threw me, and everyone else, into the online space. I was living in Seattle at the time, which was where the first outbreak was, and in one day, I built a virtual physical therapy practice and started an online fitness programming service so that I could continue to get my people what they needed when resources were limited. Honestly, I got into PT because I like people, not computers. I did not expect to like this at all. It was a means to getting my people the care they needed when resources were limited. But I have never been more pleasantly surprised in my life, and that shift actually opened a lot of doors for what was possible.

  Basically, virtual physical therapy and virtual coaching allow for all treatment types except the obvious, manual therapy. I have known for a long time that manual therapy helps… but it isn’t the thing the only way to alter someone’s symptoms or change their movement habits. Don’t get me wrong; I use manual techniques often in my in-person sessions! When I get a new virtual client who is in clear need of hands-on care, I am the first to tell them, and we work together to find who or what they need to make that happen. I am not interested in just trying stuff when I know what you need isn’t in my arsenal during virtual care.

  But most of my clients need guidance on how to shift how they are loading their bodies during painful movement, need to learn new ways of doing things, need to talk about their experience, and link some things together that they may not have thought were connected, and build a plan they can implement for themselves to feel their best or get through a big event without incident or play a certain piece that is especially physical in a new way. All of these things can happen virtually! So I’d like to take you through a description of a recent visit with someone (permission granted, of course) so you know what it looks like.

  This is the message I got from them:

  “I am a musical theatre performer and teaching artist. Recently, I have experienced some issues with breath support that do not appear to be due to any vocal issue per se. My voice teacher suggested contacting you to explore potential physical causes and remedies.”

  This person has significant dance training, is a fantastic singer, and teaches theater. His main complaint is that he loses breath support, feels strained and unstable when singing, and experiences a sticky, crampy feeling around his diaphragm area when he goes up in range.

  Quite honestly… this story makes me like… drool. It kind of sounds like something I made up because it’s so perfect for this type of work. I did not make this up.

  The first visit:

  We introduced ourselves, and he told me what was going on and what he’d like to get out of our work together.

  Since his symptoms showed up while he was singing, I watched him sing.

  Watched him sing again because I fangirled out too hard the first time. (this happens too frequently…)

  We did a standing posture/breathing assessment.

  I watched him move his neck, his shoulders, his back, and hips.

  I checked his balance.

  We did squats to see how he moved.

  He demonstrated some dance movements.

  I took copious notes. (Quick aside- Had to get a dry-erase board because I was wasting notebooks and notebooks of paper with scribbled ideas and observations)

  This point is often the sit-down-and-nerd-out-together time as we discuss our findings and start building a plan. But in this case, I promised him I had thoughts about what was going on, but with his level of body awareness and training, I wasn’t ready to share them yet. So we jumped into treatment before education. A huge thank you to this person for trusting me in that moment.

  I had him try some new ways of breathing, focusing on expanding the areas that appeared sticky and exhaling in the areas that were really good at expanding or staying expanded all the time. We did two different exercises.

  He sang again, and WOW. He felt freedom in upper registers, only had one incidence of that sticky cramping feeling in his diaphragm (we say diaphragm because that’s where it was geographically, but who knows.), and felt a general ease that wasn’t there before. There was less death gripping in his abdominals when he started each phrase. It was a win!

  So then we sat down and talked. I told him what I thought was going on - the quickness and all-or-nothing contraction of his abdominal muscles when he sang was locking down his rib movement in both directions (in and out). He had better expansion in the front of his body than the back of his body, but because his abs and some of his back muscles were death-gripping, he wasn’t even using that efficiently or effectively. So we needed to allow his abs to turn on in different amounts, 10%, 25%, 37%, etc, and be good at that in different body positions. And we needed to encourage other areas of his rib to expand so that the muscles around his ribs and his diaphragm had a broad vocabulary of movements. He needs to be able to sing and dance! He literally needs to make the same type of sounds no matter what movements he is doing, which foot he’s standing on, is he turning? Sidebending? Landing hard on a foot? All of that has to be available. Death gripping cuts off options.

  We built a plan - those two exercises were his homework. He was going to use them before his voice lessons and before teaching.

  I wrote up a summary of the session for him, including what I thought was going on, the plan to make it better, what to expect, and specific instructions for the exercises. I try very hard to write it in a way that the client can understand - none of that medical jargon gobbledegook!

  He asked me to send this plan to his voice teacher also, so I did that, and we chatted a bit as she was interested in implementing this stuff in his lessons as well. Teamwork!

  We made a plan to meet in 6 weeks to give him a lot of time to work on these things. The frequency of our sessions always depends on you. This person teaches other people. He felt confident that he could use the exercises and use the ideas in other movements throughout the day. He also wasn’t in acute pain, so we didn’t need to meet all the time. With some clients, it’s once a week for a while, others, it’s every 2-4 weeks or as needed depending on performance schedule. Sometimes it’s a one-off consult just to get something pointed in the right direction. These visits are all about you. So even the number of visits or how often we meet is a direct reflection of what you need from me.

  Phew! We did all of that in an hour!! I feel a little tired just talking about it.

  He had one more follow-up with me. It was a similar-formatted session, but the exercises got more specific to the things that were still lingering. We also came up with in-the-moment strategies to use, especially for long days of teaching or performing where there weren’t options to limit singing or dancing. This was the plan I wrote at the bottom of the summary:

  Plan: Check-in in about 6-8 weeks if needed to measure progress and make sure everything is moving in the direction we hoped for. Let me know if I can help at all in the future. Otherwise, just keep being wonderful!

  I hope that gives you an idea of how virtual sessions can be effective. They are also insanely convenient. This wasn’t the case with this person, but I’ve had a number of clients who play numerous instruments or have 3-4 different versions of the same instrument. It is so helpful to get to demonstrate what is bothering you on the actual instrument and sometimes in your practice space. This has also been clutch for pianists. Just like computer/workstation set-ups, it’s hard to describe when you get to your PT session. Having it all happen in the space and with the equipment makes it easier for me to see what’s going on. It also makes it easier for you to implement. You don’t have to go home and look around for something that looks like the tool you used in the session. It’s already all set up by the end of our session.

  There is something about treating people in the spaces they are comfortable. Clients seem more comfortable… literally more at home. And most importantly, I get to meet your babies and pets. I KNOW this space is all about you and making sure you have the tools you need to be the best you. But honestly… I get to listen to you play a bunch like my own one-on-one serenade, and I get to meet your cute pets and humans. It’s the best.

  All right. What questions do you have about virtual sessions? Please feel free to send me an email, a DM, or a text message. What are other ways to contact a person? Whatever you like works for me. If you have a topic or a question you’d like me to answer or discuss, you can submit a question. Go to the “I have a question!!” link in my bio on IG - look for the photo of the dog with a raised paw. Or go to the podcast page of my website at www.forteperformancept.com/playlifeloudlypodcast.

  If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend! Feel free to give it some stars if you like it, too! You can subscribe on Spotify to get a little reminder when the next episode drops next Tuesday morning.

  Speaking of next Tuesday, I’ll be talking about why your hands might be falling asleep while you practice and when to see someone about it.

  As always, Forte Fam, let me know what you need!