IOL Strength and Conditioning

Justin Price, a corrective exercise specialist and former IDEA personal trainer of the year, was a main attraction for me at this year’s conference. He’s one of a few guys who had an enormous impact on where my training interest has traveled this past year. (Until Suzie Lundgren, ace Feldenkrais practitioner, came along, the folks who’ve been generating this year’s corrective exercise obsession have all been men).

I had two IDEA conference sessions with Justin this year, so let’s cover those together: Keys to Successful Corrective Exercise Design and No More Back Pain; Getting a Grip on the Lumbo-Pelvic Hip Girdle. He also taught myofascial release, but I’m pretty good with a foam roller and a long list of tough implements, so I passed on that in order to take another class I had my eye on.

Let’s get at the easiest tips first, in no particular order:

1) You know that tennis ball you’ve been using underfoot? Justin wants you to quit fooling around and retire that in favor of a golf ball. Ouch is right!

Oh, and 1-A: Work on foot and toe strength.

2) Ease your way from running shoes and cross-trainers into flatter shoes over time. The heel lift in our traditional trainers is causing a lesser version of the problem high heels cause in women who dress up for work. That raised heel changes the dynamics of the skeletal system from the heels all the way up, causing potential trouble every joint along the way. The “ease your way” part is a warning to make the change slowly so the spine can adapt to the new position. Jumping right into a flat shoe full time will just give you a different pain instead of, or maybe in addition to, the one you have now.

3) If you sleep on your side, put a pillow between your knees to help loosen the hip socket. Otherwise we spend the nighttime hours in constant internal hip rotation, not the best way to train the body toward good habits.

4) Don’t cross your legs when sitting. It’s the easiest way to sit when our hips have an excessive anterior tilt, which most people have, but it makes the problem worse.

5) Move around more if you have a job that keeps you seated. When we sit, we train our glutes to be inactive. Inactive glutes lead to a lot of problems, one of them being anterior pelvic tilt.

Most of us have excessive anterior tilt of the pelvis; Justin’s estimation in a room full of fitness professionals who were in far far better shape than the average American was 85%. Not many of the attendees admitted to being in pain that day, to which Justin noted they (I wasn’t one of the claims to pain-free) still have a dysfunction that hasn’t yet reached the pain threshold. Fix it now, before it’s a chronic problem or causes accelerated aging.

Tip: If your feet are over-pronating, it means you’re in excessive anterior tilt. I have it right here in my notes that Justin used the word “always.” Over-supinating indicates excessive posterior tilt. I, to be difficult, had one of each prior to this year’s focus on corrective exercise.

Many people – again, myself included – have been diagnosed with scoliosis, a slight or severe bend in the spine, and even more people have it and don’t know it. But as it turns out, unless it’s of the severe variety, there’s a real good chance it’s a *functional* scoliosis the body created as a compensation for lack of hip mobility.

If that’s the case, you can fix it by regaining your hip mobility and re-aligning your pelvic girdle. I’m living proof – it took a few months, but it worked: The scoliosis that I was diagnosed with about 40 years ago no longer exists. No kidding: It’s gone.

That leg length discrepancy you think you have? Only about one in six people have a physically longer leg; the rest of us have an elevated hip issue that can be fixed in short order. This, too, I can personally verify.

As you can tell, me sitting in a Justin Price lecture is part education, part reinforcement, part reminder. Getting two sessions in one week is all parts beneficial.

Personal trainers interested in learning more about hands-on structural assessments and corrective exercise recommendations will find more in his Fundamentals DVD set.