Trends come and go in the fitness industry, and currently one of those trends happens to be corrective exercise. Simply put, corrective exercise is any exercise that is meant to correct an aberrant movement pattern in some fashion. Of course, there are numerous ways to correct anything, but the famous industrial engineer Harrington Emerson said it best: “As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble." There are plenty of methods to choose from such as, Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS), Postural Restoration Institute (PRI) exercises, Functional Movement Screen (FMS) as well as the Select Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA). At the end of the day, all of these methods seek to correct what they consider “dysfunctional” movement patterns in their own unique way. Whether you’re a coach or an athlete, if you understand the principles, you can transcend beyond the alphabet soup of certifications, and find your own way to help improve your performance or that of your athletes. All you need now is an assessment so that the principles can shine through.
 
The Importance Of Assessments
 
If you aren’t continually assessing your or yourself athletes, then you’re just guessing.  Sometimes the assessment is objective, and sometimes, it’s subjective. Both are necessary in the long-term process of developing an athlete in sport or fitness. Of course, one of the most common questions I get is, “What do I assess?”  The answer is pretty straightforward. Look at what is required of the sport or goal and assess it.  For example, if you’re an Olympic weightlifter, do you need to look at head rotation? Maybe you do if you’re snatching 200kg and wanting to hold it up moving your head back and forth like a boss staring at the judges.  Otherwise, head rotation is probably not that important in the sport. What about sports like soccer? You need to assess rotation a bit more because the sport requires it. In general, though, a pretty good starting point that covers just about everything is an inline lunge, a single leg step-up, a scratch test, an air squat, a toe touch, and push-up.
 
Assessing Olylifters
 
Let’s break down corrective exercise even more. What do you do if you are an Olympic weightlifter or you coach those who love to throw big things over their head?  Odds are that an athlete can’t snatch if they can’t get the bar overhead properly. As mentioned, good assessments look at movements athletes use in their sport. In this case, you can start by looking at their overhead squat. Then you can break it down from there. Maybe you want to look at their shoulder movement by isolating the shoulder and assessing it via the scratch test. Maybe you want to look at their ankles, in which case you’d isolate the ankles and test dorsiflexion. One of my favorite ways to assess ankles in isolation is to simply go to the bottom of a lunge, and push the front knee as far as you can forward and see if you can get 45 degrees of dorsiflexion. Odds are, if you can, then your ankles are probably good.  The same can be said for any other sport as well. Look at the movement an athlete seems to struggle with, and break down the parts of it.
 
How to “correct” for problems in general
 
Usually, athletes and coaches come to me with the knowledge that something just doesn’t look right. Generally speaking, if something doesn’t look athletic, it probably isn’t.  Even without having ever having swung a golf club or lifted barbell in your life, if you see someone perfectly snatch 130kg or drive a golf ball 330 years, you can just know that they look athletic.  The issue most coaches (as do athletes that have to self-maintain their movement or performance) have is they don’t know where to start with the correction. As a general rule of thumb, you should enhance the mistake. In other words, if your knees cave in during the squat, cave them in even more.  This tends to create awareness around the movement fault and allows the athlete to self-correct all on their own. The same can be said for just about every movement. Over time, the best way to correct anything though is to make someone stronger. So once you make a movement look athletic, get strong in that movement! For example, when you can finally get into a great rack position and can get a barbell overhead really well, start incorporating more advanced drills like jerk dip squats, jerk balances, and jerk recoveries.  For multi-directional athletes, maybe it’s not jerk dip squats. Instead you might go with various heavy lunge exercises to help reinforce quality deceleration in order to help teach them how to absorb force in turn to produce force in another direction.  The principle still remains the same no matter what.  Simply improve mobility when necessary, feed into the mistake which creates the necessary bodyweight strength to hold the position necessary for performance, then load the heck out of it.
 
When not to correct
 
What happens if you take someone who has just the right amount of mobility can snatch 120kg and you mobilize them even more? You might screw them up! Be careful what you correct, because sometimes what is bad for one sport is actually really awesome for another sport.  Let’s look at baseball pitchers for example.  Pitchers are known for having a lot of external rotation in the shoulder of their throwing arm. This is relatively necessary for their sport but also tends to come with a bit less internal rotation in the same shoulder. The total arc of range of motion though is generally going to be the same as the non-dominant throwing arm.  Here is where you can get into trouble: if you try to give someone more internal rotation in their throwing arm when they don’t need it, you might hurt their performance as well as increase their potential for injury.  It’s important to understand that every athlete and non-athlete alike is an n=1 case study with their own specific needs. An individual assessment is actually the only way to address this, because no two people are exactly alike, so no two programs should be identical.  It’s something similar to percent based programming; what’s 90% to you might feel like 97% to me because I might be a shift worker who didn’t sleep well, and you got to sleep 10 hours through the night.  So before you go about correcting, make sure you control the variables.  Improve one thing at a time, and make sure to always test and re-test what you’re trying to improve. Another great way to determine if what you’re doing is the right thing to do is check to see if there was any positive progress. If not, then you might be barking up the wrong tree.
 
Instead of thinking of the term “corrective exercise,” think of what you’re really doing.  You’re simply improving movement to improve performance and reduce the likelihood of an injury.  It’s really just that simple.  It doesn’t necessarily matter if you attend a DNS, PRI, FMS or SFMA course.  In the end, people get success with each of those paradigms, but the best coaches are the ones that know how to use the principles of each system, to create their own method. FMS uses a lot of Reactive Neuromuscular Training, which is a fancy term for enhancing the mistake. DNS does the same thing more or less, just with different tools. PRI likes to focus on getting people breathing a lot, which is massively important for improving performance. What happens when you breathe right? You generally turn on stabilizers and you more or less turn off big mobility reducing muscles. That’s not all that different than DNS or FMS or even SFMA.  So the next time you hear someone talking about all the corrective exercises you need, don’t be afraid to challenge them with, “How will that improve my performance?”