3 Myths of Corrective Exercise Part 3
This is a 4-part blog and video series put together by Dr. Evan Osar to help you uncover the 3 biggest myths surrounding corrective exercise and help you create a strategy to overcome so you can help your clients get faster, better results.
Part 1: 3 Myths of Corrective Exercise: It’s NOT about Correcting Dysfunction
Part 2: 3 Myths of Corrective Exercise: Strength Prevents Injuries
Part 3: [You Are Here] 3 Myths of Corrective Exercise: All Clients Have the Same Problem & There’s Only One Solution
Part 4: 3 Myths of Corrective Exercise: The Solution—Your Corrective Exercise Program System
If you need a quick recap of what we’ve covered so far in this 4-part series, make sure you check out the articles by clicking the links below. Here’s a quick recap…
Myth #1: Corrective exercise is designed to correct dysfunction
Myth #2: Strength Prevents Injuries
Now that you’re all caught up it’s time to cover myth #3!
Myth #3: All Clients Have The Same Problem & There’s Only One Solution
Lots of great trainers think all clients have the same problem, and there is one solution that’s going to fix all your clients’ problems.
Here’s an example: We think that all clients have thoracic kyphosis, or an anterior pelvic tilt, because we’ve been taught to look for that.
My favorite poet Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “People only see what they’re prepared to see.”
So we see that misalignment in our clients, then we think that there’s going to be one solution, which is to release the tight muscles (hip flexors, erectors) and activate the glutes and abdominals. However, that ends up causing the exact opposite problem: clients who are in thoracic extension and posterior pelvic tilt because we’ve overcorrected a problem that we thought happened, and because we were looking actually at the wrong thing.
There’s not one problem that our clients have, and there’s not one solution that will fix everybody’s problems.
So our goal with corrective exercise is to assess our clients and help them develop a more optimal strategy for posture and movement, but we must do so in a completely individualized way.
A lot of our clients will present with similar types of issues. They will have alignment issues, breathing issues, and control issues, and many of them will have similar postural dysfunctions or movement dysfunctions.
However, the strategy and approach we use with each client has to be different based upon our clients’ histories, what they’ve learned, what they’re currently doing, what they expect to happen, and what their goals are. This is the challenge of using a corrective exercise strategy, but it is also the benefit of using it because so few fitness and health professionals want to take this on and create individualized programs to help their clients develop a more optimal postural and movement strategy.
How do we teach clients how to breathe better, align better, and control better?
How do we take alignment, breathing, and control and incorporate these into the corrections to release the right areas and activate the right areas?
What is the proper way a client should move, and what is normal and optimal movement?
How do we blend what our clients are currently doing into what they want to do and what they need to have happen during their sessions?
Answering these questions is what corrective exercise really is all about, and that’s why we developed a special program to address those specific needs!
How do we help our clients develop a more optimal strategy for posture and moving that’s not cookie cutter?
Cookie cutter is easy and helps you work with a lot of people, but in order to be a specialist, you must have a specific approach, and that’s a program that we’ll talk about in our next video.
So I hope you enjoy this video series. I hope it helps you and enlightens you about what corrective exercise is not, busts some of the myths around it, and explains more of what it is.
Corrective exercise is a postural and movement strategy. It’s an approach to helping your clients develop a more optimal postural and movement strategy so that they can accomplish their health and fitness goals.
You can be the specialist that your clients need, want, and will seek out.
We’ll see you for the fourth and final myth…
