<span style="font-weight: 400;">As Personal Trainers, we are well educated in HOW to teach exercises. There are many courses available to learn this critical skill, however I bet sometimes you feel anxious about whether you chose the right exercises for some of those tricky clients, right?</span>

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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Do you have the tools to assess your clients to identify which are the best gym, body weight or free weight exercises to perform relative to their personal biomechanical needs? And when the client has low grade back pain for example, do you feel confident about training them safely? Maybe you are looking at some clients and wondering why on earth they move that way or which part of their body is the limiting one?</span>

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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Do you feel you need a simple system to fill this critical gap and answer some of those common questions?</span>

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<h2><b>The Health Continuum</b></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">First, we need to identify where our clients are on a ‘health continuum’, which is a scale from, potentially illness/injury to wellness and on to higher performance over time. All of our clients will be somewhere on this scale and we need to find out where they are before we can prescribe their conditioning exercises. Most exercises are suitable to most people; the problem is that invariably they can be prescribed at the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">wrong time</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. For example, lunges can help some people and hurt others. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">If someone has a rotated pelvis and a functional leg length discrepancy with associated muscle spasm in their hips, then lunges will most likely not be good for them….at the time. </span>

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<span style="font-weight: 400;">If they are functioning correctly around the pelvis, then lunges shouldn’t encourage injury or pain. That is one simple example demonstrating why some of your clients can do some of the exercises you prescribe, but others can’t.</span>

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<span style="font-weight: 400;">To be able to identify where our clients are on the health continuum, we need to perform an assessment of their body or an intrinsic biomechanical assessment. </span>

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<span style="font-weight: 400;">These assessments can be super simple to perform and can take as little as 10 minutes. Once we know where they are on the health continuum then we can progress them through a sequence of exercise progressions.</span>

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<h1><b>The Biomechanics Coach&#x2122; System</b></h1>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">In the Biomechanics Coach&#x2122; system, these progressions start by improving our clients' inner system by ensuring their fundamental pelvic and spinal mechanics are ‘normalised’ and level to provide the foundation for normal movement. </span>

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<h2><b>Phase 1: Preparation &amp; Capacity (or Before The Core) </b></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">In this first phase, any muscle imbalances are corrected with simple muscle energy techniques and tight nerves are addressed using nerve mobilisations. This phase can often be referred to as 'Before the Core', because typically people will start their early exercise programmes with core stability-type exercises and they are simply not ready. That is why (core training) </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">helps some people and hurts others (McGill) </span></i>

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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Many PT’s are recognising they don’t want to stabilise someone in a biomechanically incorrect position. So if we prepare their body first giving it some capacity back, then train stability and control it would make sense, right? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">If we are not careful all we are doing is training people to compensate for their biomechanical problems rather than training correct movement patterns.</span>

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<h2><b>Phase 2: Stability &amp; Control</b></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">So, once the preparation and capacity phase has been completed the client is then progressed to the next stage which gives them the ability to consolidate and learn new motor programming strategies in this stability and control phase. Here they are progressed through a series of isolated stability exercises and then work towards more functional stability patterns, in effect reprogramming their reflex core control.</span>

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<h2><b>Phase 3: Function &amp; Performance</b></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">The final phase is where we teach them to use their new motor programming strategies in a more functional way and then progress on to functional velocity training. Here they work towards the functional patterns, velocities and tissue tolerances that are relevant to their ‘purpose’.</span>

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<h3><b>Philosophy</b></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">We should always be challenging the latest 'current' thinking. Just because something new, like functional training and perhaps Pilates comes along to the industry, does that mean all the work you’re doing at the moment doesn’t work anymore? Of course not, it just means we have something else to integrate into what we are already doing, not necessarily discredit them.</span>

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<span style="font-weight: 400;">The industry is often seduced by the 'next big thing', but invariably this is simply another way of achieving certain targets for your clients, not necessarily the ONLY way and it certainly doesn’t mean you should be forgetting what you were doing - unless it’s been directly disproven. Nothing should ever be done in isolation, as the exercise model suggests, a series of progressions is the most effective way to progress exercise.</span>

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<span style="font-weight: 400;">We should focus our attention to real issues, and using all the proven methodologies available to us, answer questions like:</span>

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<ul>
 	<li><span style="font-weight: 400;">   How do I know which exercise to give to my clients – how do I know which will help them and which will hurt them?</span></li>
 	<li><span style="font-weight: 400;">   Apart from increasing the number of reps and sets, how should I be progressing my client’s exercise programmes?</span></li>
 	<li><span style="font-weight: 400;">   Why choose one particular exercise over another that seemingly does the same thing?</span></li>
 	<li><span style="font-weight: 400;">   Should I be using gym balls in their training and if so, when?</span></li>
 	<li><span style="font-weight: 400;">  Should I be using machines anymore? Are they ‘functional’? Does that matter?</span></li>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">It is often difficult to answer these questions for all our clients with any degree of honesty and accuracy with the assessments that are in place at the moment. Until the industry’s understanding of intrinsic biomechanics and its implications to exercise prescription is better understood our exercise prescription will not be as good or as safe as it should be.</span>

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If you would like to find out more about the <a href="https://biomechanicseducation.clickfunnels.com/biomechanics-coach-l4-low-back25799549">Biomechanics Coach Diploma, then click here</a>, enter your details and let's get on a call to see if its right for you. Or if you would like to dip your toe in and start with a <a href="https://www.biomechanicseducation.com/product/intrinsic-biomechanics-taster/">1-day workshop you can check those out by clicking here</a>.

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