3 Myths of Corrective Exercise Part 4
This is a 4-Part Blog and Video Series put together by Dr. Evan Osar to help you uncover the 3 myths of 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 4: [You Are Here] 3 Myths Of Corrective Exercise: The Solution- Your Corrective Exercise Program System
Your Corrective Exercise Program System
An important fundamental concept about this Integrated Corrective Exercise Approach™ is that corrective exercise is not intended to make up for improper or bad training.
Unfortunately, fitness professionals get hung up on corrective exercise. They do all the specific releases, prescribe specific activations, and put everybody in the right position, but when they go train, they forget about the fundamental components.
Then what happens is the client will come back, and they’ll have to do corrective exercise. Corrective exercise gets a bad reputation because clients aren’t being taught how to move properly, and they do not develop an optimal strategy for posture and/or movement.
Keep in mind throughout the Integrated Corrective Exercise Approach that we’re not trying to make up for bad training. An intelligent and effective corrective exercise approach should incorporate the proper assessment so you can determine your client’s current postural and movement strategy.
How do they hold their body? How do they relate posture into how they move? How do they move? Do they carry the same pattern into all their movement patterns and all the ways they move? These questions must guide our assessment.
Furthermore, we must have the skill level and the knowledge to know what to look for and how to treat the dysfunctions. We must be able to use a corrective exercise strategy to release or activate movements, movement patterns, or muscles, and we must know when to isolate and when to train a movement pattern using the 3 principles of the Integrated Movement System: align, breathe, and control.
The goal with this strategy is to help clients align, breathe, and control and be able to take that newfound alignment, breathing, and control and incorporate these changes into the fundamental movement patterns.
With your clients, whatever you do to release and/or activate, most likely you’re going to take into consideration the concepts of their fundamental movement patterns. For example, if we had to release their posture in the hips because they’re gripping their hip too much and have too much myofascial tension in that area, and you’ve taught them how to release that area, then you’re going to need to teach the nervous system how to keep that level of release once they get into the upright position. Furthermore, you then must incorporate it into the fundamental movement patterns themselves.
We want to think about doing is to incorporate those cues and concepts into their fundamental movement patterns so there’s more long-term carryover than there would be without them.
Many of our clients go through the same unfortunate pattern. They are releasing and/or activating through a corrective exercise strategy, but it all falls apart when they get into their fundamental patterns, when the load gets too hard, when the volume becomes too great, when the frequency becomes too high, when they’re not recuperating well enough, and/or when fatigue sets in. At those points, they revert to their gripping strategy, their holding strategy, or that chronic pattern that they’ve developed.
So what we want to do, and how we can be most successful as an Integrative Corrective Exercise Specialist is by taking this information here from the assessment about your client’s current strategy, using the principles of alignment, breathing, control, take that release and activation into, and integrate it into the fundamental movement patterns of pushing, pulling, squatting, bending, rotating, and gait.
Teaching them how to integrate these concepts, alignment, breathing, and control, as they move through progressions you take them through so that you marry your client’s needs.
- What do they need?
- What do they need to release?
- What do they need to activate?
- Do they need a different cue?
What do they want to accomplish, what do they need to do to accomplish their health and fitness goals?
You marry that with what their goals are and that’s how you use this paradigm to its greatest effect.
Teach them how to develop a more optimal postural and movement strategy in the realm of their health and fitness goals.
That will enable you to be the specialist that your clients need, want, and will seek out, and that’s really what the Integrative Corrective Exercise Approach is in a nutshell.
Teaching you how to develop the skill set, knowledge, and the tools that you need to help your client develop a better postural and movement strategy.
