What is Corrective Exercise?

Corrective Exercise is a blend of personal fitness training with physical therapy.

It is the perfect choice if:

• You want to feel your body’s abilities and overall function improve, rather than decline, as you age.
• You want to start a fitness program that focuses upon posture, alignment and optimal muscle activation.
• You are completing physical therapy and want to make sure that you do not cause the same injury to recur in the future.

Corrective Exercise teaches you how to move with the correct muscles, enabling fluid joint movement and the potential avoidance of nearly any joint or muscle pain. With corrective exercise, you are less likely to use pain-relieving medications. This focus on joint alignment ultimately reduces the likelihood for surgeries.

Personal Training (and fitness in general) focuses upon “feeling the burn” and making you sweat.  The notion for using “good form” often exists, but easily gives way to the industry psychology for pushing you to do more repetitions.  It is relatively common for those who start exercising to develop chronic injuries, including back pain, knee pain, or shoulder pain.

In Physical Therapy, the specialized focus of the therapy handles the immediate need for healing the musculoskeletal injury. However, it is also common for the therapy to end immediately after rehabilitation and pain reduction, which doesn’t always address the underlying cause. This can lead to re-injuring the same area, injuring the area on the other side of the body, or injuring another area of the body as it tries to compensate for the underlying issue that was never addressed in therapy.

Corrective exercise is the no-side effect, long term solution.

Why is Corrective Exercise Necessary Today?

Did you know that something as innocent as chair-sitting can cause a tremendous amount of hardship? That is, unless you have the tools to counter-balance.

When chair-sitting, the muscles in the front of your hip (your hip flexors) “practice” being short and over-activated.  And the muscles on the back of your hips (your glutes) practice being long and under-activated.  Every moment you spend in this position literally trains your muscle-activation patterns to behave with an altered neural program in all your other activities.

Humans have evolved to need certain stimuli in order for our bodies and minds to function optimally.  Consider, for example, that our ancestors didn’t sit on chairs for 6, 8, 10, or 12 hours every day. Instead, our ancestors would have sat on the ground in “Tailor Style” (“Indian Style”), or Double Hurdler position, just like young children naturally do today.  Instead of toilets, our ancestors squatted to their heels.  Many westerners are surprised to visit some bathrooms in Japan or Europe, and find holes in the ground instead of toilets.

Sitting in a chair is an act of misalignment to the human body.

What does this mean to the average person who has spent years chair-sitting, starting from kindergarten onward?

Next time you go to gym, walk to your car, or just stand up, you will over-use the front of your hip and under-use the back of your hip.  This does three things: (1) it places excess strain and tension on your joints, (2) sets you up for a disc herniation or other “sudden” musculoskeletal injury, and (3) it means that your butt will soon be flat.

Corrective exercise helps elicit the right muscles at the right time, so that a person is more likely to use them in his or her daily activities.  This allows for movement to feel easier with more flexibility and increased strength.  It has the distinct ability to naturally eliminate many aches and pains, which reduces ones’ need for pain-relieving medications, which ultimately reduces ones chances for being slated for joint surgeries.  Corrective exercise offers incredible access to rejuvenate one’s vitality through movement.

 

 Fit For Birth’s Pre & Post Natal Corrective Exercise Specialist Course teaches health professionals how to use corrective exercise easily and simply for your clients.  For current fitness professionals, the course has been called an “incredible simplifier” in an industry where complexity is starting to grow.  For doulas, massage therapists, and other non-fitness professionals, the course offers an easy-to-learn starting ground for adding an incredible service-niche to your current practice.  Sign up now at GetFitForBirth.com