This is a 4-part blog 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: [You Are Here] 3 Myths of Corrective Exercise: It’s NOT about Correcting Dysfunction
Part 2: 3 Myths of Corrective Exercise: Strength Prevents Injuries
Part 4: 3 Myths of Corrective Exercise: The Solution—Your Corrective Exercise Program System
Hi there, this is Doctor Evan Osar, founder of Fitness Education Seminars and developer of the Integrated Movement System™. Welcome to this 3-part series on the 3 myths of corrective exercise. Corrective exercise is one of those terms that’s been thrown around the industry for quite a few years (just like “functional training,” “sports-specific training,” “core training,” etc.), and it means a lot of different things to different people. So what we want to do in this 3-part series is actually define corrective exercise and uncover the 3 myths that surround it and muddle the concept of corrective exercise.
Myth #1—Corrective exercise is designed to correct a certain dysfunction.
Corrective exercise is often thought of as a series of exercises: “You’ve got to release this. You’ve got to put the body part in the right area. You’ve got to just squeeze this and activate this muscle. Everybody’s got the same dysfunction.” It’s not about correcting dysfunction.
So what is corrective exercise?
Corrective exercise is a systematic approach to identifying and developing a more optimal postural and movement strategy. Our clients come to us with a certain strategy for their posture and their movement. They stand in a certain way, and they move in a certain way, and often their posture and movement don’t allow them to accomplish their health and fitness goals. Even worse, postural and movement issues often can lead to direct problems, chronic tightness, chronic discomfort, and lack of results.
Our job as corrective exercise specialists is to help identify our clients’ current strategy. We need to figure out the answers to questions like, “How do they stand?” and, “How do they hold themselves?” Then, we need to figure out how that static posture relates to their movement habits, and we need to discover how their posture and movement relate to why they’re having chronic discomfort, why they’re having chronic tightness, and/or why they’re not performing at a level that they want to.
It’s an approach that incorporates things like releasing where they’re holding tension and are gripping, activating muscles that are inhibited, and/or altering movement patterns that aren’t contributing optimally to better posture and moving, and then incorporating these changes that we’re creating in our clients to help them move and hold their posture in a better place so they start to move towards accomplishing their health and fitness goals.
Our clients develop a certain group of habits. They’ve developed habits for posture, and they’ve developed habits for movement because of injuries, surgeries, traumas, and/or things they’ve learned. For instance, maybe they’ve been told to stand up tall, pull their chest up, and pull their shoulder blades down and back. Or maybe they’ve been told to squeeze their glutes as hard as they can, like they’ve got a million dollars between their cheeks, and tuck under, which has changed their alignment and changed how they function in the squat and other movement patterns.
They’ve been taking these habits and creating their posture and movement around them. Some of them are conscious—they’ve learned them, they’ve adapted them, they’ve read about them, somebody taught them to them—and some of them are subconscious. It’s the nervous system’s reaction to not having the proper control, not having the right connection, having sustained an injury, or needing to make a process more efficient.
Our job as specialists, through using this corrective exercise paradigm that we’ll be discussing, is to help identify our clients’ current strategies for posture and movement and helping them develop a more optimal strategy for posture and movement.
It’s not about correction, and it’s not about perfection; it’s about helping them move from where they are into a more ideal place, and that takes knowledge and skill, which is exactly what we’ll talk about in a future video.
Stay tuned for the second myth of corrective exercise.
