A Personal Trainers Guide To Movement Dysfunction Part 1

In this current era of ‘practical’ training, primary balance and balance-oriented training it’s easy to get carried away with learning what I call the ‘HOW’s’ of exercise. How exactly to balance on a swiss ball, HOW to integrate movement patterns and How exactly to devise exercise programs that have a high transfer into ‘real life’ situations.

After all, they are FUN elements that show a greater application of knowledge, skills and capabilities to our clients. Interestingly, when asked, a lot of my students (all qualified fitness trainers and therapists) had little real foundational knowledge of what makes their exercises ‘functional’ beyond “they have a carryover into true to life”.

I call this a ‘lack of WHY? This ‘lack of WHY’ is a ‘disease’ of almost epidemic proportions in your industry and one that, in my opinion, will keep us from achieving professional status if left unchecked ever. Simply put, way too many fitness instructors are prescribing exercise based on the latest trends, personal preferences and outright exercise mythology.

• Go Figure (2005)
• Increases your resistance to diseases
• Frontier Adjusters
• Other interesting facts
• Drink in the outdoors

This is like visiting your physician and being recommended medicine based upon ‘it works for me personally so let’s give it a go’. I’m sure you wouldn’t be too impressed if this happened to you, but think about your clients? The type of ‘professional’ service are they getting? The aim of this series is to offer the WHY’s necessary to make your exercise prescription much more than a ‘strike and miss’ process and flower your feet tightly on the path to professionalism. We start our trip with posture, the building blocks that our function, and all personal training is built ultimately.

That state of muscular and skeletal balance which shields the supporting constructions of your body against damage or intensifying deformity, irrespective of the attitude in which these structures are working or resting. The main element to the above statement is Balance, for this is balance or it’s antagonist imbalance that appears to be one of the major influences in creating structural deformation resulting in pain. Indeed there is much evidence to claim that persistent imbalance can lead to Postural Distortion Patterns that can perpetuate the cumulative injury cycle.

This appears to make sense, especially if the kinetic chain idea is applied to the equation. The kinetic chain is most beneficial described as a movement system consisting of myofascial (muscular), Articular (joints) and neural (motor) components with each being dependent on the others for optimum performance, both and dynamically statically. This movement system requires precision of movement based on the alignment and mechanics of each joint as well as how these joints are recruited to make a movement pattern.