Corrective Strategies
By Anthony DiLuglio, AOS

I’ve seen the future of fitness and I must say it worries me a bit. The trend as of late, it seems, and one that I’ve personally been a witness to, is the denunciation of certain exercises as being too dangerous or unsuitable for certain individuals. These individuals, who’s only ailment is sometimes nothing more than a loss in their range of movement, are being held back from performing beneficial exercises, exercises that could actually break through their range deficit, simply because they’re trainer and in some cases physical therapists aren’t willing to explore other avenues to their rehabilitation - leaving them with the simple and dismissive diagnosis that “they’re as good as they’re going to get”.

As a trainer, I’ve always viewed my job as a way to enable. You can enter this field with the intent to help people but if all you do is train them are you doing them any good. For me the difference has always been finding a way to allow my clients the abilities they were born with through personal training. I’ve never viewed my profession as an assembly line where I worked with one client after another on some kind of conveyor belt. Every client, regardless of their abilities and level of fitness always requires a level of attention that many trainers today don’t allow for. This I find to be one of the biggest injustices in our business. I’ve had numerous referrals where clients come to me, the end results of countless months of other’s personal training and physical therapy in a state, physically, that’s no better than when they started; having been dismissed or discarded as “good enough”. So the question is, what should one do with a client, who requires more attention than most due to range of motion deficiencies, deficiencies that inhibit movement in even the simplest planes? For me, the answer is simple and quite basic; you do the same for them as you would do any other client. You train them – you enable them. Find their range deficiencies and address them, don’t avoid them – to work around them isn’t enabling them, it’s masking a problem that at the very best will always be there and at the its worse will spread as their body tries to compensate for it. Watching personal trainers today and you’ll see many of them dodge these critical areas, dismissing it as a range that they are incapable of reaching. Never should this be an option. There are ways to gauge your clients range of movement, and in so, uncovering ways in which to overcome said deficiencies. Remember, as a trainer you must find a way to enable.

One of my best methods for gauging a client’s range of movement is to put them through an exercise that requires them to be in as many planes as possible from start to finish. Rather than breaking it into its basic parts, keeping the client moving through a complete range allows me to see with better accuracy how their body moves together in unison. For this I rely almost exclusively on the Turkish Get-up, a routine that starts the individual off laying on their back and ends with them standing upright; because it requires my client to be in every plane possible it allows for the most comprehensive look into their form. From this I can determine a course of action into addressing their range issues, if they have any at all. This corrective strategy, as I‘ve coined it, is used throughout my gym on a daily basis – and is nothing more than an exercise or series of exercises used to correct their form allowing them to get the benefit of the initial exercise.

As I’ve said, my most important job as a trainer is to allow someone the freedom to move. Sure I have clients that come in and need next to no coaching at all; they’re already in fantastic shape, with all their range faculties intact and they’re in and out of the gym as soon as the session is over. Are these clients ideal, perhaps, if you’re looking to move as many bodies through your gym as possible but does that mean the client that requires your attention is any less ideal or important? Of course not, not if you’re looking to enable as many bodies through your gym on a daily basis. Address their issues and try to find ways in which you can correct their problems.

To better teach my corrective strategy method I’ve created a 4 part video series, called Corrective Strategies – the Anatomy of the Turkish Get-up where I go through my method of gauging someone’s range capacity and how I decide which corrective exercise best suites them. Corrective Strategies is the culmination of years of training clients through what many would believe to be impossible drills and routines. Initially, it was a way to get some of my more sever clients to perform exercise and in some cases everyday routines that anyone of us can do without thinking. It was only later that I realized it could be used with anyone who walked through my door with even the slightest break down in form. I realized that a slight dysfunction now, if left unaddressed, in time would turn into a major dysfunction.

Remember, enable through personal training, everyone has goals and dreams for themselves, whether it’s running a marathon or stretching the arm above their head, find ways to enable their goals to be met.