Corrective exercises have become a popular training tool for many personal trainers in recent years, but do they work?

The corrective exercises are often found in programs in the movement preparation part of the workout, which I like to jokingly say is just a fancy way of saying the warm up. In fact it is a specific warm up, one that literally is intended to get your body prepared for movement. Some of the corrective exercises are basic stretches and activation exercises that manual therapists (I use the term manual therapist to refer to any of athletic therapist, chiropractor, massage therapist, osteopath, or physical therapist) have been using for years. Others are more integrated, born of functional training philosophies, such as the Functional Movement Screen.

I am actually a big fan of corrective exercises. Every client I see who has some movement dysfunction or limitation does them. In other words, all of my clients do them.

But do they work? It depends.

I believe there are three major factors that determine their effectiveness:

1. Are you using an appropriate corrective exercise? I hope this is a widespread yes, but alas I don’t think it is. I won’t go too negative here, but if you are a trainer please honour yourself, your profession, and your clients by attending conferences, reading books and articles, and discussing training with other professionals.

To get back on topic, the reason continuing education is so important for trainers, is that sometimes great new ideas arise that debunk old ideas. When this happens, it’s nice to be in the know. I encountered an example of this when I saw a trainer using the wrong corrective exercise recently. The trainer asked me if there was a small rubber ball at the gym that they could use to put between their client’s knees during a leg press to keep them from caving in (I’m not a fan of the leg press, but kept that to myself). I suggested that instead of the ball between the knees, that a band around the knees was a much more appropriate correction. The correction she was about to use would have had the opposite effect that she was looking for: The muscles that squeeze the ball are the same ones that collapse the knees. Conversely, the band around the knees will temporarily force the knees further into collapse, but the body will sense that this new position is wrong and will send a message to resist the band – or move the knees apart. This super cool corrective exercise approach is called RNT or reactive neuromuscular training.

2. Are you coaching the exercise? I’m going to be blunt here: As an industry, trainers and manual therapists are failing at coaching and cueing exercise. Very often when I introduce a corrective exercise, the client tells me that they know how to do them. Depending on my mood that day, I either go ahead and demonstrate it anyhow, or I try to contain my smile and ask them to show me. More often than not, what they show me is a very poor version of the exercise.

I think there are a few reasons for this:

• The manual therapist only spends 5 minutes demonstrating and coaching 5 to 10 exercises and then provides a one-pager featuring microscopic stick drawings of each exercise.
• People need to be coached through an exercise more than once to really get it, but often they only get one shot;
• People pick up exercises from magazines or websites and don’t quite catch the nuance of what they are doing;
• People attend bootcamps where the ratio of instructor to student is 50:1, so there is no time for proper coaching.

I’m sure there are more reasons. It’s really a big problem. Without proper cueing and instruction, it’s entirely possible that the exercise given to correct a dysfunctional movement will encourage that dysfunctional movement if done poorly. One exercise where I see this all the time is the bird dog. At least half of the clients I give bird dogs to tell me that they know how to do them. Fewer than 5% actually know how to do them. The purpose of a bird dog is to improve rotary core stability, to work on glute strength, and to work on lat strength. Yet more often than not, the bird dogs I see involve a lot of flailing. Now I’m not a linguist, but I’m pretty sure that there is no root commonality between the words flailing and stability. For those reading this who think they know how to do a bird dog, here’ s a video of how it should look. Note the distinct lack of flailing.

3. Is your client feeling the corrective exercise where they should? Let’s assume that you picked the right exercise, and you coached it properly. Does that guarantee it will be felt where it should? Absolutely not! The human body is an incredibly complex system with built-in redundancy. Virtually every movement you can do with the body has a primary muscle and at least one backup. The backup, is like the spare tire in your car: It is there when you need it, but it isn’t as good as the primary muscle. But unlike the spare tire, it’s not always easy to turn off the backup muscle and give control back to the main muscle. This is a common problem with corrective exercises. Your client may do it perfectly, but the backup muscle won’t let go. In this case, the corrective exercise is actually reinforcing the poor movement.

In some cases you can see it, but not always. Truthfully the most effective way to know if your client’s body is doing the exercise correctly is to ask.
“Where do you feel this?”
I find this is a particularly big problem with corrective exercises for the hips and shoulders.I shot a video that explains this and provides a few examples:

The key is that you have to understand what the exercise is supposed to be targeting. If it is not hitting that area as you would expect, try a couple of different ways to position it and to cue it. If that still doesn’t work, try a different exercise.

Elsbeth Vaino is a personal trainer in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

If you’ve read my stuff before, then you know that I am, well, a big geek. I think I probably took fitness geek to a whole new level with my bench press assessment article, talking about the work value of a bench press based on arm span. I think this article will further raise the bar on geek in the fitness industry.

This article is about what typical problem areas I see based on the Functional Movement Screen (FMS for those who like to keep things short) assessments that I perform. Not familiar with the FMS? Check out functionalmovement.com, or read on for a brief overview. Then follow the article to see an overview of the results I’ve seen in terms of what functional movements tend to cause the most problems, and how the results are different based on gender and whether someone is an athlete.

Lastly, I’ll share my take on what this should mean for your training (or programming for trainers) if you do not have access to the FMS or other assessment options to help guide you.
Read more…

Low back pain is a very common problem, and is a topic that comes up often when I talk with, well people. I have written a couple of articles about this in previous years, but I want to address it again, this time with a more practical approach. I realized recently that I have developed a bit of a template for clients who have low back pain, or who have a history of low back pain. The program for each person is different, but there are six exercises that I include for almost everyone who talks about their back when I first meet them. I am going to share these 6 exercises for low back health with you.

Before I begin though, I must point out the following: If daily living causes you low back pain, I strongly suggest that you look to a health care practitioner as your primary source of guidance for your back health. I won’t suggest what type of professional you see, just that someone who is a doctor, osteopath, physical therapist, chiropractor, athletic therapist, or massage therapist sees and hopefully provides some treatment for your back.

With that said, I’m going to share the 6 exercises that I have found to be most important and effective for helping people improve their low back health. Strangely I feel a need to qualify that again. I think that is because it makes me uncomfortable suggesting that I can help “cure back pain” when I am not a health care professional. I’m a trainer. And before I was a trainer, I was an engineer; not a doctor or a physical therapist. But here’s the thing: I help people’s low back pain by avoiding their back pain, not by working on it. Read more…

The title of this post is a quote from the blog article linked below. If you have a minute, please give it a read. It is a great reminder about the true value and meaning of yoga.

Yoga is such an interesting topic. There are many devout followers, but there are also detractors – many of whom are leaders in the strength and conditioning and biomechanics fields. The primary reason these professionals do not often recommend yoga is exactly because of what James MacAdam describes in his blog article titled “Confessions of a Type-A Yogi”. But if more yogis would have the same philosophical transformation about their practice that James has, I suspect most of them would become yoga-supporters.

It’s very well-written and insightful, so if you have a moment, give it a read: http://jamesmacadam.com/2011/02/28/confessions-of-a-type-a-yogi/

If you enjoyed this blog article, please share it by clicking one of the links below.

This article was written after I had the pleasure of attending a two-day seminar with Dr. Shirley Sahrmann, author of Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes. Throughout the course, and then on the eight hour drive home, I had a lot of opportunity to really think about what I learned and its relevance. This article presents a combination of what I learned from Dr. Sahrmann, as well as some of the thoughts it provoked.

I don’t care how much you don’t move
This was a statement she made repeatedly throughout the course, and reflects the premise that it is usually the place that moves too much that is the problem. This is in keeping with her belief of exercise instead of manual therapy as the best approach for addressing movement disorders, because manual therapy typically addresses shortness.
Read more…