<b><i>Intrinsic Biomechanics for Personal Trainers, Pilates and Yoga teachers</i></b>

You as Personal trainers, Pilates or yoga teachers and other exercise professionals 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?

Do you have the tools to assess your clients to identify which are the best gym and free 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?

Do you feel you need a simple system to fill this critical gap and answer some of those common questions?

<b>The Health Continuum</b>

You need to identify where your clients are on a ‘health continuum’, which is a scale from, potentially illness/injury to wellness and on to higher performance over time. Your clients will be somewhere on this scale and you need to find out where they are before you can prescribe their conditioning exercises. Most exercises are suitable to most people; the problem is that invariably they are prescribed at the wrong time. For example, lunges can help some people and hurt others.

If someone has a rotated pelvis and a leg length discrepancy with associated muscle spasm in their hips, then lunges will most likely not be good for them. 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.

To be able to identify where your clients are on the health continuum, you need to perform an intrinsic biomechanical assessment. These assessments are simple to perform and can take as little as 10 minutes. Once you know where they are on the health continuum then you can progress them through a sequence of exercise progressions.

<b>The Biomechanics Coach™ System</b>

In the Biomechanics Coach™ system, these progressions start by improving your clients inner system by ensuring their fundamental pelvic and spinal mechanics are ‘Normalised’ and level to provide the foundation for normal movement.

In this first phase any muscle imbalances are corrected with simple release techniques and tight nerves are sorted out using nerve mobilisations. This phase is 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 Pilates helps some people and hurts others.

Many Pilates Instructors are recognising they dont want to stabilise someone in a biomechanically incorrect position. So 'Normalise' them first, then 'Stabilise' them. If we are not careful all we are doing is training people to compensate for their biomechanical problems rather than training correct movement patterns.

So, once the Normalise 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 the ‘Stabilisation’ phase. Here they are progressed through a series of isolated stability exercises and then work towards more functional stability patterns.

The final phase is where they learn 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 and velocities that are relevant to their ‘purpose’.

<b>Philosophy</b>

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.

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.

We should focus our attention to real issues, and using all the proven methodologies available to us, answer questions like,:

•    How do I know which exercise to give to my clients – how do I know which will help them and which will hurt them?

•    Apart from increasing the number of reps and sets, how should I be progressing my client’s exercise programmes?

•    Why choose one particular exercise over another that seemingly does the same thing?

•    Should I be using gym balls in their training and if so, when?

•    Should I be using machines anymore? Are they ‘functional’? Does that matter?

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.

Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions?

Are you a PT?

Do you teach Pilates or Yoga?

Would you like to experience some of the Biomechanics Coach™ System?

<b><a href="https://www.biomechanicseducation.com/biomechanics-coach/">READ MORE </a></b>