Last Updated: 2/4/25

What this article is about

This article will help you understand corrective exercise, how it fits into a holistic approach, and how it can be useful in pregnancy/postpartum. Using concepts like coherence, it also begins the discussion of how to use holistic principles in your practice. Part 2 then gives you a basic overview of where to go for more education, from various corrective exercise organizations around the world. It also wraps up what it means to fit your corrective exercise practice into a holistic approach.

———-

If you’re a fitness professional, applying corrective exercise & stability practices allows you to get far better results, setting you on a faster path toward financial freedom. It is also incredibly fundamental to be able to discern when your client needs to address his or her larger lifestyle factors alongside their exercise habits. That’s often how the most lasting and profound results occur.  And, if this is your profession, you also need to be able to further develop your skills.  Therefore, it’s important for you to understand some of the basic similarities and differences between some of the various professional “corrective exercise” methodologies around the world.

• For those of you who are thinking about fitness as your profession, this article will give you the entire overview, so that you can understand clearly if and how this might be good for you.
• For those of you who are already Fit For Birth graduates, you’ll already be familiar with the Corrective Exercise basics, but will find an entirely new holistic lesson on “Using breathing & movement to create coherence.” Jump there, and if you’re wanting to know what your next Corrective Exercise education should be, check out all the “Types of corrective exercise methodologies!” in part 2.
• For those of you who are already fitness professionals, but unfamiliar with Fit For Birth, welcome! This article will give you a solid understanding of how we recommend that corrective exercise should be synergizing with holistic health principles.

Why the pregnancy & postpartum timeframe is critical for corrective exercise

The 40 weeks of a baby growing inside a woman’s torso is a timeframe of such dramatic musculoskeletal change, that mothers who are not already in solid muscle balance are at big risk of having a miserable pregnancy. Muscle imbalances can also correlate with complications during childbirth. 

In many cases, you can single-handedly fix this.

But then, the postpartum period arrives with an even more dramatic impact. The transition to the “sudden” absence of that baby in the womb (via childbirth) is an even greater physical shock to the inner core mechanics. See, the pregnant core had spent 9 months learning how to rely upon the relative firmness of having a “filled belly” as a way of stabilizing for activities of daily life. The removal of that baby equates to a removal of the intra-abdominal pressure that was creating core stability. This radical shift happens literally within the span of minutes. 

Being confident in choosing exercises that most help your postpartum client also gets you better results. Better and faster results put you in the kind of demand that can give you financial freedom as a personal trainer. 

This article will help you take a big step forward in your understanding of corrective exercise & stability. It will also teach you how to apply these concepts, so that you can feel more confident in designing exercise programs for your pre & postnatal clients…so that you can have one very good problem: being so filled with clients that you can raise your rates, and start earning commissions from referring excess clients to other trainers. 

Here’s how this article will unfold:

1. Define a few of the most important concepts in Stability & Corrective Exercise.
2. Review the most well-known methodologies & assessment practices.
3. Understand how movement relates to holistic wellness parameters like nutrition, sleep, mindset and stress management.

What is Corrective Exercise & Stability Training?

Using the correct muscles at the correct time is the primary recipe for avoiding the aches and pains of pregnancy and postpartum motherhood. As a fitness professional, you have to be able to tell clients what muscles to strengthen, and which ones to stretch – since every person has different needs. 

There are some areas that nearly all humans need to address, like glute & core strengthening (primarily due to sedentary habits that are relatively “new” on the evolutionary spectrum). For pregnant bodies, those universal needs include pelvic tucking and transverse abdominis (TVA) corseting. It would be wise to become a master of teaching your clients how to do these things. We will teach you some of that in this article. 

But many other areas are completely unique to each individual. In order to design meaningful programs that immediately create change (often life-changing via eradicating pain), you’ll have to learn how to assess those areas. We will discuss those options in this article as well. 

Corrective Exercise 101

The first concept in corrective exercise is that you must stretch what’s tight and strengthen what’s weak. You should not stretch what is already overly-stretched or loose. You should also not continue to allow your clients to keep feeling a burn in already chronically over-activated muscles. Read that last sentence twice.

One of the properties of muscle cells is that those that are neurally activated – whether purposefully or not – will tend to hold more tension. As this continues, they will eventually shorten under that tension. These are “over-active” muscles and will often need to be stretched. 

Muscles that tend to be over-active in the pregnant body include:

• Hip Flexors
• Lumbar Erectors

Conversely, muscles that are not receiving enough neural activation will tend to grow weak. We are grossly simplifying here, but for our purposes today, those weak “under-active” muscles generally need to be strengthened. 

Muscles that tend to be under-active in the pregnant body include:

• TVA
• Glutes
• Lower rectus abdominis 

Now, there are also some areas that can throw practitioners for a loop. One example that can pop out during the kyphosis that often happens during pregnancy is that the mid-thoracic extensors will tend to be both elongated (and therefore potentially in need of activation or strengthening) but simultaneously over-active in “rubber-band syndrome.” This level of complexity requires a more delicate approach in your programming, like having your client rest vertically on a foam roller in order to take the “rubber-band about to snap”-like tension away from the mid-erectors. This exercise may be needed for multiple sessions before later trying to strengthen those erectors. (Don’t let your exercise programming burn them out via over-use on top of an already over-used muscle.)

Isolate, then Integrate

Once you have identified some of the muscles that are underactive and some that are overactive, you then design a program that reinforces what is needed. Again, we will generally be instructing just one of two things for most muscles in the body, during each exercise:

1. Turning ON: Increasing the neural drive of the under-active muscles.
2. Turning OFF: Reducing the neural drive to the over-active muscles.

The basic ways to turn on a muscle are to:

1. Start by telling your client which muscle they should be feeling/activating when they do the exercise.
2. Try to select exercises/positions that are naturally more helpful for the muscle we want to activate. 

Isolate, then Integrate Example:  Glute Activation using Glute Bridges vs Squats For example, most people, including pregnant and postpartum women, need their glutes to be activated.  Selecting a squat as the first exercise, however, will often be too complex. This is true even though squats should naturally elicit a strong glute response, since glutes are the primary mover in that exercise.  The challenge with a squat is that the knee joint is also moving, and 30+ years of a neuromuscular program for “knee-loading” makes it challenging for many clients to get a good amount of glutes during squats.  For the sake of this example, we will consider squats to be more “integrated” with the rest of the body, so it would be useful for us to select a more “isolated” exercise first.  So, we can choose a Supine, lying on the floor, Glute Bridge Exercise, because this position is naturally more helpful for glute activations – at least in most cases. In this position, the glutes are more likely to naturally activate (“turn on”) because there are simply less moving parts. The hips go up and the hips go down, and the knees are mostly fixed. In other words, we have selected an exercise that has a good chance of isolating the glutes. Note that it is still necessary for you to check in with your client to make sure that she is feeling the glutes.  It’s relatively common for people to continue to feel quads, hamstrings and knees, even lower back, rather than pure glutes. Telling your client to “try to feel the glutes” – either by repositioning or by purposefully squeezing – is necessary.  And in this way, we are being the guide that their brain needs. This is how we, as professionals, begin carving the neuromuscular programming for more glute activation. Finally, after they’ve been able to feel their glutes burning a bit in the Supine Floor Glute Bridge, we can try the squat again, and see if it makes a difference.  In many cases, the client will now be able to feel more glutes during the next set of squats! In this example, we have just “isolated, then integrated.”

 

Your client must be present throughout the day

How do we make sure that your exercise programming carries over to your client’s activities of daily life? There are two ways for this to happen:

1. Their exercise program brings enough intensity and strength and mobility, etc, that there is a natural carryover, without them having to think about it.  This is the “ideal” that we are eventually looking for.
2. You remind them that they need to actually remember to apply these concepts throughout the day: their breathing, glutes, shoulder blade muscles, core, etc. This is where you will have to start with each new client. 

We’ve been discussing a lot about “neural programming” in this article. Every human brain is constantly sending signals for the muscles to activate and deactivate, at various intensities, throughout the day. It is constant. Every moment of every day, muscles are either being “programmed” to be ON or OFF. 

However “good or bad” your client may begin your training program, they will have various pre-existing neural programs, for better or for worse. In most cases, there will be at least some neural programs that are not ideal and causing problems, like pain.

Your new client has spent years “training” themselves into their current muscle activations. This has happened every time they spent 8 hours sitting down in chairs, being sedentary, squatting down only to the height of a toilet or couch (rather than squatting all the way down to their heels), holding their toddler dominantly on one hip (and not the other), and many more programs.

They have trained themselves into dysfunction. 

Let’s assume that the average person sleeps 8 hours per day, and therefore is awake for 16 hours each day.  If a person has a perfectly designed corrective exercise program for one hour of each day, then there are 15 other hours each day that the client may be returning to their old program. 

In other words, one hour of great neural programming daily still pales in comparison to 15 waking hours of poor programming. You must remind your clients to be evermore present with their bodies, their breathing, their glutes, their core, and whatever other corrective exercises that you are working toward with them.

True Core Function of Pregnancy

The true “inner unit” core is made up of 4 muscles. These can be thought of as a box inside your torso:

1. Diaphragm (DPH): top of the box
2. Pelvic Floor (PF): bottom of the box
3. Transverse Abdominis (TVA): front and lateral sides of the box
4. Multifidi (MF): rear “side” of the box

These muscles must work in harmony together in order to create the intra-abdominal pressure that is necessary for proper function without pain. 

In short, the DPH and PF should work together, both descending on an inhale and then ascending on the exhale. (The DPH should concentrically contract into descension, while the PF should concentrically contract into ascension. Note that although this “should” happen, in most modern humans, it usually happens only a small fraction of what is considered proper function.) Simultaneously, the TVA should expand during inhale and then literally get smaller – like a corset – during the exhale. Meanwhile, the MF should be naturally managing the segment to segment rotations and flexions of each spinal vertebrae. 

In practice, and due to the extreme breathing dysfunction that most people have, you need to teach your clients to inhale into their torso for the first weeks/months of your training program. 

One caveat is that during the third trimester of pregnancy, you should talk with your client about not overdoing the inhalation into a bigger belly. This is to minimize the already-existing outward pressure that can cause the micro-tears of diastasis recti. The third trimester, therefore, is the perfect time to transition your program into lateral rib breathing. This means less “filling the belly” and more “filling the sides/ribs, as well as lower back.”

In nearly all programs, the tummy should “corset” smaller during each exhale. The amount of TVA contraction should be correlated to the difficulty of the exercise. (i.e. heavier weights should elicit a stronger TVA contraction.) The same is true for the activation of the PF muscles.

Nose breathing, even on the exhale, will generally elicit better inner core function all around. This will happen partly because air cannot be let out of the nose as fast as the mouth, so intra-abdominal pressure can remain more constant. Being that nose breathing is our primary and “non-stressful” evolutionary design, there are likely strong innate forces that further allow better core function when not opening the mouth. (One of them is that this is the physiological “balanced” position of the jaw/tongue/mouth.) 

However, heavier lifts can benefit greatly from an exhale with “pursed lips, like exhaling through a straw.” Pursed lips exhales provide resistance to the exhale, and additional intra-abdominal pressure to stabilize big weights.

When it comes to using these kinds of “Core Breathing Belly Pump” mechanics, the inner unit is supposed to activate in preparation to whatever movement is at hand. One way to gently train this in your clients is to ask them to intend to “breathe just before they begin the challenging portion of each repetition.” 

While there are beneficial applications for both inhaling or exhaling just prior to each repetition, note that most clients will initially select inhaling to accomplish this(because their TVA is stronger eccentrically than concentrically). Eventually – but usually not immediately – they should learn to exhale during the exertion. (People should generally only be asked to apply one new concept at a time.)

One final thing to note is that the true inner unit core does not include the usual-regarded abdominal muscles, like rectus abdominis, obliques nor erector spinae. These are considered the “outer unit” muscles. 

What is Appropriate Flexibility during Pregnancy?

It is important to stretch the correct muscles, rather than just stretching whatever you think is important, or what your client tells you “feels tight.”

When it comes to pregnancy, one example is women with a tail-up posture (pelvic anterior tilt) who feel like their hamstrings are tight, and therefore want to stretch them. But whenever the tail-up posture is what’s causing the hamstrings to feel tight, the solution is not to keep elongating the hamstrings. It’s another “rubber band syndrome” like we discussed earlier. The hamstrings may feel tight because they are like a rubber band at the end of their range of motion, “ready to snap.” Although it is not likely that a woman’s hamstrings will snap from doing hamstring stretches under this condition, there are a number of other exercises that would be far more beneficial for her to balance her body. These other exercises could actually keep the hamstrings in an appropriate length, and therefore completely remove the feeling of tightness without having to stretch them at all.

In the case of lordosis, you can learn to “see” the obviousness of an anterior tilt, and potentially over-stretched hamstrings. However, most kinds of flexibility programming need an assessment. 

There are many methods for assessing flexibility, and Fit For Birth has a course, Pre & Postnatal Corrective Flexibility Assessment (PPCFA), that helps you add this to your pregnancy and postpartum programs.

The woman whose pain disappeared when she stopped stretching I once had a postpartum mother of two arrive for her first training session, and initial assessments. Her complaint was that of severe pain in various joints of her body, pain that had been going on for 20 years actually. She was a yoga enthusiast, and had several yoga poses that she did every day, often twice per day.  She said that these yoga poses felt good while she was doing them, and that they would relieve the pain, at least for a while, but she was still suffering day by day. After completing a flexibility assessment, I noticed that she had several areas that were unusually overly flexible.  These were areas she was proud of, but I told her that they were beyond usual norms, and could be part of her challenges. Our session was coming to a close, so I needed a quick solution to send her away with, knowing that I would not see her again for several days. I asked her to show me the three yoga poses that she was doing every day, and – what do you know – these poses correlated exactly to her hypermobile areas.  I told her just to stop doing those three stretches until I saw her again (which was scheduled for 3 days later).  She was hesitant to alter the routine that had been “keeping her hanging on” for these years, but she also knew that she had taken the time to hire a professional, and so should give that a chance. She agreed to not do the stretches. Two days later, prior to our follow-up session, she sent me a text that said, “I can’t tell you what it’s like to NOT have pain after 20 years.”   In her case, she needed to stop doing the exercises that were causing her hypermobility. My flexibility assessment told me clearly what I needed to know.

 

What is Mobility?

Mobility can be defined as usable flexibility. It is often confused with flexibility, but while they are related, they aren’t identical concepts.

It’s one thing to be able to place one’s leg up high on a counter, or get into the splits position (flexibility)… but it is entirely another thing to be able to slowly – and with control, without holding one’s breath, tensing one’s upper trap/neck, hyper extending the knees, etc – to be able to lift one’s leg and place it upon a high counter without a thud (mobility)…or to lower oneself down into the splits without using your hands, and then stand back up from the splits without using your hands (also mobility). 

Strength + Flexibility = Mobility. 

Flexibility is more about achieving passive length of the muscle. Mobility involves flexibility with strength, which means aspects of control and stability are present. 

Good mobility is crucial for optimal performance and injury prevention in everyday activities and sports. It ensures that movements are smooth and coordinated, with adequate stability around the joints to support dynamic activities. 

Proper mobility training combines stretching for flexibility with strength training the correct muscles. 

Since mobility in many ways is really just another term for corrective exercise, it will be no surprise that it can be particularly important for pregnant and postpartum women for several reasons, including:

1. Handling a new baby: Maintaining mobility helps ensure that daily activities, such as bending, lifting, and carrying a new baby, can be performed more easily and with less risk of injury.
2. Alleviating Common Pains: Joint restriction is such a prevalent cause of joint aches & pain that increased mobility can help alleviate common pregnancy-related pains such as lower back pain, sciatica, and pelvic girdle pain.
3. Labor and Delivery: Enhanced mobility can be crucial for effective labor management, as in providing access to more comfortable birthing positions, thereby helping to prevent labor exhaustion and even reducing time spent in labor. 
4. Postpartum Recovery: After childbirth, mobility exercises can assist in the realignment of the pelvis and spine, and reinforce overall good posture. This helps the postpartum mom return to more solid fitness and function after birth.

Connecting Breathing to Movement

Just because someone breathes diaphragmatically does not automatically mean that they are able to connect their “proper breathing” to their movements. As a corrective exercise specialist, you will have to train that. 

We’ve written a lot on proper breathing, so won’t go into the basics here. This article, How to Breathe During the Pushing Phase of Childbirth, will tell you everything you may want to know, including sections on “Breathing during Life & Exercise”, “Open vs Closed Glottis,” and the “4 Stages of Breathing Progression During Exercise.”

When walking, with every step a person takes, pregnant or not, there should be a rhythmic harmonious connection between their breath and their step. It might be to inhale as the left leg steps, followed by an exhale when the right leg steps. Or it might be to inhale for 3 or 4 steps, followed by an exhale for the next 3 or 4 steps. And it could be other cadences as well. There is not a right or wrong cadence – but if there is not a rhythmic harmony, then it is disjointed inefficient movement. Rhythm must be present.

This same principle applies to literally every single movement that a person does. It is either connected rhythmically to breathing, or it’s not.

It’s like rocking a baby to sleep. Each baby has its own distinct preferred soothing rhythm for being rocked.  A parent instinctively tunes into this rhythm when they choose their gentle pattern of swaying back and forth. Well, unless the parent is exasperated or in a hurry, in which case they may not intuitively be able to achieve a soothing rhythm.

Rhythm & harmony in movement needs to be trained for most clients, because most clients have become completely unconnected with their bodies. This means that it needs to be written into your programs as “the purpose” of various exercises.

How to train rhythm & harmony into your clients In order to train a connected rhythm, you’ll have to start developing an eye for watching how your clients use their breathing during any particular movement or exercise.  One “rhythm building” exercise that we use at Fit For Birth is having the client lay supine with knees bent, feet on the floor. And we ask them to simply “breathe as you alternate leg lifts.” (To minimize hip flexor and periphery muscle dominance, we ask that the lift is very minimal, “one piece of paper from the floor.”) Most clients will move prior to breathing, and generally hold their breath for some portion of the movement, which is not ideal. This is one of the things you’ll need to keep an eye out for, and coach them to “breathe before you lift.” This is a common first step in connecting breathing to movement.  It can be helpful, as a practitioner, to think of breathing as 4-parts. Rather than just inhaling and exhaling, there is also a momentary pause as the person transitions from inhale to exhale, and then again as the person transitions from exhale to inhale. It is at these transition points that the person is more likely to hold their breath. (These transitions are often right at that challenging moment that the external resistance is also transitioning from eccentric to concentric.) Once you start to look for this as a corrective exercise specialist, you will see that it is most common for people to hold their breath momentarily in practically every repetition of every moderately challenging exercise that you give them.  There is a whole lesson on this in the Pre & Postnatal Corrective Exercise Specialist (PPCES) course, but suffice to say here that most people are holding their breath because their neuromuscular system has become accustomed to “holding on for dear life.”  The average person uses the breath-locking valsalva maneuver just to tie their shoes – a sign that their body believes that tying shoelaces must be a “One Rep Max” event.  We have a very core-deficient population. When it comes to pregnancy, these tiny breath holds are the most common reason why diastasis recti develops during pregnancy. The slow 9-month micro-tear build toward diastasis recti is why so many newly postpartum clients never see it coming. Your corrective exercise programming can make a tremendous difference.  Back to the alternating leg lifts…In many cases, that client will naturally fall into a relaxed pattern of inhaling to lift the legs. This is a great first step. At the same time, you should remind them to “breathe before the movement” at each step.   Eventually, often a few weeks & sessions later, you should also see if the client has the same amount of abdominal connection to “exhale to lift,” followed by “inhaling to lower.” This is commonly the second step in connecting breathing to movement. Most of the time, your clients will need to be reminded to slow down. They are so accustomed to moving without a breath connection. Remind them to slow down, and that it is most important to match the rhythm of their movement to the breath. This may force them to slow down to several seconds in each direction: several seconds of lifting the leg, and several more seconds to lower the leg.  Matching movement to breath-rate is very different from trying to match breathing to the rate of movement. This is the essence of connecting breathing to movement.  Again, at Fit For Birth, we usually have our clients do this exercise while vertical on top of a 3-foot foam roller, so that their head is on one end, and pelvis is on the other end. This adds an ideal amount of instability, and therefore core-breathing activation. You’ll also be more likely to be able to see their dysfunction more obviously.

Using Breathing & Movement to Create Coherence

Ever wonder how flocking birds and schooling fish move in perfect harmony? The unified interactions of parts of the whole is an example of spontaneous synchronization, otherwise known as coherence. This phenomena takes place in many systems of nature, as well as technology. Some of you may know of the spontaneous synchronization that occurs when metronomes, pendulums, or clocks that have started swinging at different times or speeds, ultimately come to synchronize over time. (Video 32 Metronomes) (Video 5 Metronomes)

Spontaneous synchronization is the natural and self-organized process by which individual systems, initially operating independently and with varying rhythms or phases, come to operate in unison. Various physical and biological systems, like heart cells or social groups, can become coherent when the individuals naturally align their states or behaviors to function as a unified whole.

Within these various physical and biological systems, there are what’s called biological oscillators, including:

• Circadian rhythms
• Heartbeats
• Respiration
• Cell cycles
• Neural spikes
• Reproduction cycles
• Physical Exercise[1,2]

Biological oscillators are able to generate spontaneous synchronization or coherence by providing the intrinsic rhythmic patterns that can align with similar patterns in other oscillators. This leads to coordinated behavior across a biological system, such as cells, organs, or organisms. One example is the circadian rhythm that regulates sleep-wake cycles. 

In the human body, two very powerful biological oscillators are breathing and movement. 

Individually, both breathing and movement have the potential to align other systems, especially if the breathing or movement shows up as a powerful consistent harmonious rhythm. But together, as can be taught inside your corrective exercise session, these two have the exponential power of entraining other systems. 

Finding this kind of natural coherent rhythm is what “being in flow,” or “in the zone” is.  And we can help our clients to become aware of this inside their own bodies.

Coherence is a term that can be applied across various disciplines, each with its distinct context and implications:

• In physics, coherence describes the correlation between waves at different points in space or time. This concept is foundational in fields such as laser optics, where coherent light has the same frequency and phase.
• In quantum mechanics, coherence is a measure of how much wave-like behavior a quantum system exhibits, important in studies involving superposition and entanglement.
• In signal processing and telecommunication, coherence involves the correlation between signals or data sets. It’s often used in the analysis of various kinds of data points.
• In neuroscience and psychology, coherence refers to the degree of synchronicity between different parts of the brain, which can be measured using techniques like EEG. High coherence between brain regions is often interpreted as regions working in a synchronized manner.[3]
• In wellness, coherence often refers to a harmonious state that promotes physiological efficiency, emotional stability, and resilience. This is frequently discussed in the context of heart rate variability (HRV) coherence, where the variability in time between each heart beat is considered an indicator of health or disease.[4] And – surprise surprise – better HRV balance is achieved through exercise[5], mindfulness, sleep, healthy nutrition, and breathing exercises[6]. 

In each discipline, the concept of coherence describes the relative harmony, correlation, or synchrony. This is the case whether the coherence is affecting waves & signals, or systems of health & disease.

Coherence can be a significant factor during pregnancy

To the degree that coherence is able to align systems into greater harmony, reinforcing coherence is worthwhile during pregnancy. At the same time, incoherence between bodily systems could contribute to pregnancy-related complications. 

• Physiological Coherence: During pregnancy, HRV coherence symbolizes maintaining a balanced nervous system. Balance between the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous systems, can help manage stress levels, improve cardiovascular functioning, and support overall health, which is important for both the mother and the developing fetus.
• Emotional Coherence: Coherence in emotional regulation during pregnancy – achieving a stable emotional state through practices like mindfulness, meditation, or biofeedback – can help expectant mothers manage anxiety, stress, and mood swings, leading to a more comfortable and healthier pregnancy.
• Cognitive Coherence: Clear and organized thinking can help expectant mothers make informed choices about their health, birthing plans, and postpartum care.
• Inter-System Coherence: Pregnancy involves significant changes in various body systems. Coherence between these systems may integrate them. For example, coherence may allow hormone-producing organs to interact more effectively with physical changes, like how much hormone is needed for the precise amount of pelvic ligament relaxation – not too much nor too little. This may contribute to a smoother pregnancy and prepare the body for delivery. 

Enhancing coherence in these areas will certainly improve the health and well-being of the mother while also positively impacting fetal development, and the overall pregnancy experience. Techniques that promote coherence, such as rhythmic breathing together with exercise is absolutely instrumental during the perinatal time frame.

This is the deeper first step for what it means to be a Holistic Pre & Postnatal Corrective Exercise Specialist. You are not only prescribing the very powerful drug known as exercise….You are also prescribing coherence between your client’s body systems.

Assessment is important for a personal trainer’s practice

If you’re a personal trainer, then you are likely performing an intuitive “assessment” of some sort, during each repetition of each exercise. This is likely the case whenever you are focusing on your client’s body, as opposed to having a  conversation that takes away from the sensations in the body, or paying attention to other things. This is one of your superpowers. And it’s a huge step ahead of most people, which is why you’ll be capably training them.

The next step is to formalize your method for assessment. Formalizing means repeating the same exercises, while looking for a particular set of criteria in each exercise. Doing this time and again with multiple individuals is what makes a confident corrective exercise specialist. 

The fun part is that you can actually create your own formal assessment, using whatever set of exercises that makes sense for you.  If your objective is to make your clients as good as a Cirque du Soleil performer, for example, then your assessment could actually include doing back-flips, and muscle-ups using Olympic rings! (Not the usual stuff of assessments, I know!)

At Fit For Birth, our Movement Assessment focuses on the 6 primal movements. The two main criteria that our practitioners are taught to notate are: 

1. Whether or not the “primary muscles” are indeed the primary activators, and also,
2. If there is any core breathing present in the movements. 

This is our focus because our clients are typically in need of learning how to “perform” in movements of everyday life, like bending over to pick up toddlers, etc. 

While this is one thoughtful way of assessing, there are MANY different methodologies, as the corrective exercise revolution explodes around the world, and we will share some of these with you next!

Part 2 Here!

Click HERE for part 2 in order to get a basic overview of where to go for more education, from various corrective exercise organizations around the world. (These organizations include: DNS/Infant Development, PRI, FRS/FRC, MAT, Mckenzie, Alexander, Feldenkrais, Peter Attia, CHEK, and FFB.) Part 2 will also more clearly explain what it means to fit your corrective exercise practice into a holistic approach!

—————————–

If you love fun & research-based guidance as a fitness professional, or during your own pregnancy & postpartum, please check out these Fit For Birth offerings:

• Fitness & Wellness Professionals:
  • FREE 1-hour CEC
  • CEC/CEU Courses, including our Pre & Postnatal Corrective Exercise Specialist (PPCES), the world’s first holistic perinatal CEC/CEU!
  • Monthly Elite Membership – Community. Monthly education. Business mentorship & work opportunities. $27/month.

• Pregnancy, Pre-conception & Postpartum:
  • Zoom virtual personal training
  • Online Pregnancy Self-paced Program 

—————————————————-

James Goodlatte is a Father, Holistic Health Coach, Corrective Exercise Practitioner, Speaker, Author, Educator, and the founder of Fit For Birth and Exercise For Longevity. Since 2008, when he found out he would be a father, his passion for holistic wellness shifted to children and families. Today, he is a driving force in providing Continuing Education Credits for the pre and postnatal world, with Fit For Birth professionals in 52 countries. James is a member of the First 1000 Days Initiative at the Global Wellness Institute, and professional longevity researcher & educator.

References

[1] 2022. Weinert, Dietmar. Gubin, Denis. The Impact of Physical Activity on the Circadian System: Benefits for Health, Performance and Wellbeing. Applied Sciences. Retrieved 12/17/24 from https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/18/9220

[2] 1993. Yom-Tov, S. Golani, I. Oscillators in the human body and circular-muscle gymnastics. Medical Hypothesis. Retrieved 12/17/24 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8231989/

[3] 2016. Bowyer, Susan. Coherence a measure of brain networks: past and present. Neuropsychiatric Electrophysiology. Retrieved 12/17/24 from https://npepjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40810-015-0015-7

[4] 2024. Harvard Health Publishing Staff. Heart rate variability: How it might indicate well-being. Retrieved 12/17/24 from https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heart-rate-variability-new-way-track-well-2017112212789

[5] 2010. Routledge, et al. Improvements in heart rate variability with exercise therapy. Canadian Journal of Cardiology. Retrieved 12/17/2 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2903986/

[6] 2022. Chaitanya, et al. Effect of Resonance Breathing on Heart Rate Variability and Cognitive Functions in Young Adults: A Randomised Controlled Study. Retrieved 12/17/24 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8924557/