IOL Strength and Conditioning

In an email, a personal trainer wrote to ask about a certification for corrective exercise. In particular, she wanted to know which is the most research-based. I’m not a personal trainer, nor am I certified in anything, corrective or otherwise (certifiable from time to time), so I put the question out via Facebook and Twitter. There was a terrific response, and I don’t want to waste the input to a lost Facebook thread; instead let’s archive it here, and continue the discussion if there are more comments later.

The bolded text represents live links to places where you can follow up on the short answers, including links to the sites of the contributors when I could find one.

John Izzo:
I always liked the NASM-CES. That is actually next for me. The Resistance Training Specialist (RTS) is also a good one.

Chris McClinch:
For corrective exercise, I’ve got to agree with John here.

Patrick Ward:
Why bother spending money on a certification? Just buy books and read. People don’t know what NASM-CES is anyway. Everything you want to know can be purchased on amazon.

[Edit: Great idea for next week’s blog post. I’ll put together my list of top reads, and if we’re lucky, maybe this great group will have a moment to add to the corrective exercise book selections.]

Keith Scott:
Great question. I honestly could not answer…

Chris McClinch:
The value of a certification isn’t so much in marketing to people; the average client doesn’t know the difference between ACE and a CSCS. The real value of a certification is in a systematic curriculum, even if a good trainer ultimately uses it as a jumping-off point.

Patrick Ward:
That is true. Good point.

Mark Roozen:
Nothing better than the NSCA; CSCS or CPT…they have great certs and also education material from the leaders in the industry – can get them al ot of info on corrective modlities and exercises.

Russell Jones:
Does that mean that all other exercise is in-corrective?

Mike Demeter:
Attend one of the Perform Better Summits . .spend time with Gray Cook, Mark Versteegen, Bill Hartman, Eric Cressey, Mike Robertson, Stu McGill and Mike Boyle . . accelerated learning ;)

[Edit: I highly recommend personal trainers sign up for the $1 trial membership of Mike’s strengthcoach.com site. The information there will transform a personal trainer from average to outstanding.]

Laree Draper(yours truly):
How about one of Gray Cook and Lee Burton’s Functional Movement workshops? Do they cover what exercises to do once the assessments are complete? I was thinking of something to do while studying the books.

Patrick Ward:
Yea. That is good stuff. Every time I have seen Gray speak I have enjoyed it. He and Lee Burton (separately) are doing some clinics at the NSCA National Convention this year in vegas. Will you be attending? I’ll be there for sure (just booked my trip).

[Edit: You don’t have to be an NSCA member to attend the conference.]

Mike Demeter:
Ironically Laree, the movement screen is the corrective exercise. By merit of recruitment, if you fail to perform it well . .barring flexibility issues, practicing the screen will activate the muscles that need activation ;) Good material.

Laree Draper:
Mike, I knew from Gray’s Athletic Body in Balance the self-screen has the corrections sort of built in. I assumed the workshops went into more detail and personalization/coaching options.

Get on Gary Gray’s free video newsletter list, and consider buying some of his dvds so you can listen again and again. He talks fast and I often have to go back and ponder. The price has come down significantly on some of them.

Patrick Ward:
Regarding the Functional Movement Screen, yes, there are corrections for all the movement patterns as well as a bunch of other “break out tests” that are not in the 7-specific tests, that you can use to confirm things, and then there are other corrections for those as well. Gray says not to do the test as the correction, but rather use the test to determine movement asymmetry and limitations, use the corrections to fix the pattern and then re-test to make sure you chose the proper corrections. Always start with the most basic dysfunctional pattern. For example, if the squat pattern is poor and the Straight leg raise pattern is poor, try and correct the straight leg patter first, as that may also correct the squat pattern.

Rachel Eisenman:
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I’ve got some reading to do. :-)

Laree Draper:
Patrick, my one long conference this year is IDEA, Anaheim in August. Because I’m not a practicing trainer or a coach of any type, IDEA had the best variety selection of material for my “fun learning vacation” this year.

At last year’s IDEA conference, I had eight hours with Fraser Quelch, six with Chuck Wolf, four with Justin Price and a couple with Anthony Carey, all incredible sources for corrective exercise learning. This year’s offerings look just as incredible, although in addition to my old favorites, I’ll make sure to see other presenters such as Evan Osar, Rodney Corn, Michol Dalcourt, Peter Twist, Don Bahneman, Todd Durkin, JC Santana and Greg Roskopf. While not a certification, it’s an incredible opportunity for introduction to a wide variety of corrective exercise thinking, and as with the Perform Better conference Mike mentioned earlier, new learning can be used with clients the day you get home.

Daniel Kirsner:
I’m curious as to what exactly this is…I mean, how does it differ from conventional rehabs or PT.

Patrick Ward:
You aren’t rehabbing an injury with this stuff. You are simply assessing your clients and fixing movement problems…rather than just training a client who is a biomechanical train wreck and doing more harm than good.

[Edit: Keep your eye on Mike Robertson and Bill Hartman’s Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training site, where you’ll occasionally find day- and weekend-long personal trainer seminars like the one recorded in this six-DVD set.]

Bill Hartman on ankle mobility, a sampling of how corrective exercise works

Rachel Eisenman:
Does any of this work have more than anecdotal support? Nothing comes up in my ACSM or PUBMED searches. I’ve read PT on the Net articles and NASM guides - they have great ideas, but the scientific rationale is always lacking real research.

Patrick Ward:
Rachel, great question! There is only one study I am familiar with that was conducted on the Functional Movement Screen: Core strength: a new model for injury prediction and prevention. Peate WF, Bates G, Lunda K, Francis S, Bellamy K. J Occup Med Toxicol. 2007 Apr 11;2:3

They used the screen in this study as a pre-test for firefighters.

One of the tough things may be that the screen and corrections are an attempt to try and correct or “fix” something that hasn’t happened yet – which is difficult to show since we don’t know if it (the potential injury) would have ever happened! You are more just banking on the fact that, “if said athlete can’t perform movement x,y, and z properly, there is probably a good chance they will sustain and injury. So we need to try and correct x,y, and z before it becomes a bigger problem.”

There is even research suggesting that just becomes an individual has a certain postural deviation (for example, an excessive anterior tilt of the pelvis, which people obsess about) that it may not even create a pathological problem. I am less concerned with the static assessments than I am with how the athlete looks when they try and put it all together and move. You can have someone that has an excessive anterior pelvic tilt and a positive Thomas test, yet they can still control that posture in dynamic situations and perform the tests on the movement screen and do an overhead squat, etc…

This is of course if the client is not someone with current pain or injury. Just the run of the mill person who comes in off the street and wants to train and we see in our test, “oh, they can’t perform a squat properly”, which leads us to say, “wow, we need to do something to better prepare them to squat.” Certainly nothing revolutionary there.Gray just has his corrections for navigating those problems (you can’t squat, or lunge, or do a “step over” a hurdle, etc), just like Mike Clark (NASM) has his own corrections for those who can’t do the overhead squat and others have their own.

These are all just fancy ways of packing up the fact that you client can’t perform a certain task, so you have to give them the tools to perform that task. Does that make sense?

This stuff wasn’t designed to rehab an injury or anything like that.

There is a lot of “gray” area (no pun intended) with all of this stuff and it isn’t as black and white as people like to make it out to be, which is why I started my podcast. Sometimes you just have to embrace that gray area and move forward.

Laree Draper:
Rachel, you’ll have a lot of fun reading the scientific conversations at SomaSimple, but note these are physical therapists, not personal trainers.

More in your field, if you haven’t done this already, why don’t you swing by Mike Boyle’s StrengthCoach.com site and sign up for the free trial. You could ask your same question about certifications there and will get a great response, too.

Patrick Ward:
SomaSimple is one of my favorite sites. Lots of forward thinkers and they will make you question what you do and how you think big time! If you are a person who is 100% married to an idea or methodology and you have a hard time trying to see the other side of the coin and letting go of your emotions when debating, don’t go there, because you will get extremely frustrated with the discussions, as they challenge you to really open up.

Laree Draper:
John, I took a look at the RTS site, and see it’s Tom Purvis’ group. I lost track of him a dozen years ago. Back in the early ’90s we bumped into him from time to time at Thom Plummer events or with the original Cybex engineers. Very sharp guy.

Heading off topic a touch to recommend a Thom Plummer seminar to anyone who owns or wants to own a gym or personal training facility. Unrelated to corrective exercise, but it’s important to learn how to work the business end, too. Most personal trainers miss the boat here, seems like.

Jen Waak:
For the most-researched corrective exercise program, you know I’m going to vote for Eric Cobb’s Z-Health.

Laura Pasik:
The NASM-CES certification is very good for assessing movement dysfunction and troubleshooting before there’s an injury. It’s proactive. The basic NASM-CES protocol is inhibit and lengthen overactive, tight muscles through self-myofascial release, stretching, then isolated strengthening for weak, underactive muscles, and finally, integrated “functional” exercise to re-educate the muscles. To the trainees reading, I’d add f you even suspect an overuse injury, you should go to a physical therapist or orthopedist, not a personal trainer.

Eric Beard:
If you are looking for a credential, the NASM CES is probably the most marketable; 7/10 of largest US health club chains require an NASM credential, the Department of Veterans Affairs has recognized NASM’s offerings as approved education programs, 93% of NBA ATCs have one of NASM’s credentials etc. As far as content goes, there is a host of fantastic information available through many individuals, organizations, texts and websites. I would encourage anyone to draw from an eclectic sampling of information.

The system that NASM teaches is easy to follow and evidence based. The system that one uses is what makes the techniques powerful. If not, the process is not reproducible. The live 2 day workshop that NASM offers is invaluable from a practical application standpoint. No matter or who some one goes to for their education, there should be some sort of live component to the experience. NASM’s methodologies and systems have helped me to organize much of the information that I have garnered through experience and formal education. A great place to start for corrective exercise!

[Edit: For an example of the type of learning taught at NASM’s Corrective Exercise Specialist workshops, here’s Eric with a corrective exercise case study on ankle impairment.]

Robert Taylor:
The NASM-CES certification is a good specialization cert that doesn’t require further CEU’s to maintain. Definitely would recommend athletic trainers, personal trainers and strength coaches looking into this organization and certification.

Mike T Nelson:
I think a better question is which system gets you the best result in the least time based on physiologic principles. Don’t get me wrong, I am a HUGE proponent of research, but corrective exercise is as much a science as an art.

Review: The first criterion is achievement of an advanced certification from either the American College of Sports Medicine or the National Strength and Conditioning Association. Sorry to the pretenders that I carefully excluded from this list. These two organizations represent the highest standards of the profession and offer numerous opportunities for increasing knowledge of exercise science.

Jessica:
I second the Mark Verstegen and ACSM recommendations. I also like Stott Pilates certification for postural analysis and corrective exercise. I’ve found that no one method/cert seems to be better than the rest, but a combo works best.

Laree Draper:
Tangentially related, high school or junior college trainees interested in a future in health and fitness should spend a weekend clicking around this review of college degrees in exercise science. An overview of the various types of personal training certifications is here. Another suggestion sent for your consideration: University of Michigan’s Division of Kinesiology.
States are beginning to rumble about personal training licensure. It’s sure to happen in the not-too-distant future. This article in Club Industry’s Fitness Business magazine discussed the current state of affairs.

If you’re on Facebook and you’d like to connect with some of the above contributors, here’s the original thread on my Facebook page.

I have two more quick thoughts for personal trainers who’d like to begin their education in the corrective exercise field.

• IDEA Corrective Exercise Design: Eliminating the Guesswork, Anthony Carey and Justin Price. 370 minutes, 2 dvds covering functional anatomy, motor learning principles, static assessments, advanced assessments, dynamic assessments and sample program design progressions from the 2009 IDEA Personal Trainer Institute conference.
• Grab Anthony Renna‘s StrengthCoach podcast episode 30.5, in which Gray Cook discusses the progression a trainer would go through when following his Functional Movement Screen dvds and workshops.

That oughta be enough to keep a busy trainer clicking around all weekend. Still, if there are more contributions later, I’ll certainly weave and link them into this for a nice archive for future readers. Thanks again, everyone, for your great comments.

Now that Dan John’s book, Never Let Go, begins to settle into its new spot on nightstands around the world, the reviews are starting to roll in.

Why, my mom, who appreciates the benefits of her gym training but who wouldn’t recognize many of the tools Dan uses in his, wrote to tell me she’d gotten so caught up in Dan’s prose she was late for an appointment this morning. Now that’s saying something!

Let’s keep these reviews together here in the blog for future readers — I invite you to write a review comment or leave a note for Dan in the comments section below.

Writes Lyle McDonald: Dan John has been in the lifting weights since about the history of recorded time. He’s seen it all, done it all, and tried it all. His knowledge and experience is encyclopedic… coupled with his willingness to share that information with anybody who cares to show interest For just about anybody involved in the field, I really can’t recommend this book too highly. For those who are old and jaded like me, Dan may give you an insight into some decidedly old school approaches to training that flat out work. Click here to read his entire review.

In her review, Krista Scott-Dixon wrote, “I started reading Never Let Go while sitting on a deck with a friend who was reading a newspaper. By the second page in, I was exclaiming, “Let me read you this funny bit!” By the fifteenth funny bit, I gave up on interruptions and just read it out loud for several hilarious pages. We followed Dan’s adventures through crappy workouts, the Velocity Diet, ridiculous contests of strength, and coming to terms with his belly devouring his belt. We plowed through programs to get strong, programs to get fast, programs that would probably, in the end, make me a better person for doing them as well as a better lifter.”

And via Twitter and Facebook, I’ve spotted some fun one-liners, such as:

Eric Beard: Love never Let Go by Dan John, great pearls of wisdom mixed with humor, dedication and experience! Great common sense, training nuggets and humor mixed with philosophy. Will try a few ideas today.

Zach Even-Esh: I CAN’T put this book down!!

Click here to order your copy of Dan John’s Never Let Go.

Click here to read an excerpt from Never Let Go.

Yesterday afternoon we were startled by the arrival of a huge delivery truck; the driver hopped from his seat and promptly offloaded three pallets of Dan John’s new book, Never Let Go. Now check this: The pallet delivery arrived two hours before we received our UPS 2nd Day Air first-off-the-press publisher’s copy! UPS, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do.

I always enjoy delivery days. There’s no fake workout on those days; it’s real-deal work, unloading, hauling and re-stacking 3,500 pounds of book cartons. My non-gym friends don’t get the fun in that, but I know you all will.

Pre-ordering customers: Your copy went out yesterday, along with our thanks and Dan’s appreciation for your eagerness to get your hands on his book. To those slower to push the Buy Button, may we put one in the mail to you today?

Click here to buy Dan John’s Never Let Go, or to review the book’s contents.

After you’ve had a chance to look it over, we’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ll start a thread in the blog where we’ll archive your review comments for potential buyers to consider, and for Dan’s future enjoyment and pondering.

Oh, and to be completely honest, I really don’t have many non-gym friends. Where would I meet them? I meet all my friends at the gym, just like you do.

There are a few people in every profession who can be considered great at what they do, and a few who rise above greatness and approach legendary. In the fitness and conditioning world, Dan John is one of the greatest of all time. A true professional, and an expert in every sense of the word: Dan John is a legend in this field. ~ Alwyn Cosgrove, Alwyncosgrove.com

You know how it is when you’re reading an article, you come to the end and even though the author’s points were made — the story’s complete — you just don’t want it to end? That’s how I am when I read one of Dan John’s articles. Just like when I’m reading Dave’s writing, with Dan I just want to sit on the deck and ponder his stuff forever. And that’s why I was so thrilled to be a part of bringing his new book to life.

… which is where we are today, sitting in anticipation of a call from the trucking company to schedule delivery. The books shipped from the printer, and should arrive late next week.

Already the word has slipped out and the eager are lining up to be first to get a copy. And we’d love to add you to the list of enthusiastic readers, too. This is a book I consider a big contribution to our field, Dan John’s Never Let Go: A Philosophy of Lifting, Living and Learning. I am sincerely so thrilled. Thanks for letting me be a part of this, Dan.

In Dan John’s new book, Never Let Go, you’ll learn…

• How to get stronger, faster and leaner
• Simple steps to great conditioning
• What it takes to compete at high-level athletics
• Dan John’s top training tips
• Effective workouts to carry you through your training seasons
• Variations of the classic 5×5 workout
• Sample kettlebell and barbell workout combinations
• Outdoor cardiovascular training options for athletes
• And much more…

Dan John’s deceptively simple training plans cover a great many fitness attributes, safely and quickly, and are always a hit with athletes. When it comes to teaching strength, Dan John has no superiors and only a handful of equals.  ~ Pavel Tsatsouline, author of Enter the Kettlebell

You’ll be…

• Motivated beyond belief! It’s that simple. Dan’s teaching and his coaching is unique and tremendously educational, but what will touch you the most is how fired up you’ll be at the end of each chapter. Read a section before you head for the gym—your training will be transformed; on those days when you’re dragging, his words will make the difference between a victory at the gym and a trip to the couch!

After listening to Dan John lecture or reading his work, I envy his athletes not only for the good fortune of receiving his coaching expertise, but also for the lessons that will carry them along through life. Dan is a common man, but an uncommon motivator. ~ Dave Tate, CEO elitefts.com

In Never Let Go, Coach Dan John breaks down the most complicated concepts of strength training and high-performance athletics in a no-nonsense, yet clever and motivating manner. Workout routines, Olympic lifting guidance, Highland Games, track and field and Strongman events are all covered, in addition to weight training philosophy for the general public.

Coach Dan John is one of the premier instructors in the world of movement, strength and athleticism. His lectures on athletic training have revolutionized the thinking of thousands, and his new text, Never Let Go, will set the standard in safer, smarter, more productive training methods. ~ Dr. Mark Cheng, L.Ac., Ph.D., RKC Team Leader, Contributing Editor – Black Belt Magazine 

Never Let Go, published June 2009, contains 416 pages, includes individual 42 articles revised from T-Nation material, and is carefully indexed to make finding workouts and training ideas an easy task.

If mastery takes 10,000 hours, Dan John has mastered the art of teaching and coaching many times over. He renders the complicated simple, and the simple clear. The hours I have spent learning from him changed my life. ~ Mark Twight, Gym Jones

Inside the book…
Foreword ~ Introduction ~ Preface ~ Free Will and Free Weights ~ The Rule of Five ~ The Velocity Diet Experience ~ The Rest of the Story ~ The One Lift a Day Program ~ The Tabata Method ~ Fat Loss in Four Minutes ~ A History of Dieting ~ The Classic Top 10 Tips ~ Systematic Education for Lifters ~ 5 X 5 Variations ~ Three Mentors, Lifetime Lessons ~ Geezer Wisdom ~ The AIT Formula ~ Self-Evident Truths ~ What You Know Versus What You Do ~ PVC and Presuppositions ~ The Litvinov Workout ~ The Gable Method ~ Strong Eye for the Weak Guy ~ The Best Exercises ~ My Secret Coaching Methods ~ Nautilus, Crossfit and High/High ~ Blood on the Barbell ~ A Religious Studies Professor’s Review of HIT ~ New Associations, New Muscle ~ Coach Pain’s Slosh Pipe ~ Lessons from Southwood ~ Recovery Methods 101 ~ That Guy ~ Are You Making Progress? ~ Distain Medium ~ The Big Five ~ Secrets to Long-Term Fitness ~ One Hard Thing ~ Principle Lessons ~ Three Basic Concepts ~ Goals and Toilet Seats, A Men’s Room Epiphany ~ Goal-setting for Motivation ~ The One-dumbbell Workout ~ The Journey to Excellence ~ The Philosophy of Physical Capital ~ Improve Your Fitness Literacy ~ Afterword ~ Suggested Reading ~ Index

Extraordinary power, marvelous skill and masterful technique have been earned through years of training and practice and scrutiny, failure and success. A generous servant, a giver of gifts, his words come alive with experience and fact for the reader, the hungry student, the one bound to learn. Dan doesn’t paint by number and help you pick out the colors. He draws a picture and invites you, encourages you, inspires you, to become a part of it.~ Dave Draper, author of Brother Iron, Sister Steel

Did you catch the power behind those endorsements?
Dan’s work in coaching and training others garners the respect of titans in our industry. You can trust them. Let us get this transformative book on the way to you; click here to place your book order.

My part of this blog has trended toward corrective exercise strategies over the past couple of years as I began to learn chronic pain wasn’t just a part of aging and  I didn’t have to live with in decline. Many of my IronOnline forum pals have also moved off the strength path temporarily in order to reclaim lost movement, and others probably would if they knew where to start without having to go back to school to learn anatomy and kinesiology.

Often people ask for the simple solution—you know… hey, just tell me what book to get and I’ll read it. But until now, it hasn’t been that easy. In fact, that’s the reason we started collecting names for our corrective exercise specialist database, which you’ll find at this link; by the time we hit our 40s, 50s and 60s, we’re so jammed up it takes an expert to sort it all out.

The thing is, even if we can part with the bucks to pay someone to help many of us are not in driving range of such a person. The field has grown hugely the past couple of years, but the personal trainers who know more than an introduction to assessments and corrective strategies are still few and far between.

So what are you going to do? Today we actually have a viable do-it-yourself option, Keith Scott’s Unbreakable Body Program.

First, a non-disclaimer disclaimer: I get nothing for the referral, and if you click on any link you won’t find an affiliate number attached. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I decided to buy and review the program. There’s a fair number of people “selling” Keith’s new program, and if you get a few weight training newsletters and follow a few blogs, you’ve probably seen a write-up today. I thought we might have a non-referral look for ourselves, although I don’t mean to suggest the other writers have financial motives. Quite the opposite; the ideas in the program are certainly good enough to stand alone.

Plus, if it happens to offer what my buds need to get out of pain and to move better, I really wanted to know about it. I’ve come to trust Keith’s material after reading his blog, and figured there was a real good chance this and a few weeks work might be our golden ticket to a pain-free life.

Guess what? It was a good gamble! Keith holds a Master’s Degree in Exercise and Sports Science with a concentration in sports medicine, and coupled with his eighteen years in the field working with individual athletes and general population in pain, he’s put together a complete program to get us on the recovery path at home.

Read the material over the weekend, spend an hour sorting through your self-assessment tests, make notes on a tablet, couple your test results with his corrective strategy suggestions and prepare for your 16-week personalized program. 16 weeks is nothing—just knuckle down and follow instructions Put away your doubts and confusions created by too many options and take this time to get your body back in good working order.

Here’s what’s in the package. For your $77, you’ll get a downloadable winzip file with ten pdf e-reports, 374 pages, as follows:

• Intro, 40 pages
• Self-Assessment, 65 pages
• Corrective Exercises, 82 pages
• Corrective Exercise Descriptions, 76 pages
• 16-Week Strength and Fitness Program, 14 pages
• Exercise Description for the Program, 36 pages
• Soft Tissue Work for Optimal Physical Health, 27 pages
• Recovery and Regeneration, 9 pages
• Nutritional Guidelines, 15 pages
• Fat Burning with High Intensity Interval Training, 10 pages

A quick scan over that list will tell the knowledgeable reader there’s nothing outstanding here. Where it really shines is the completeness of the material. Everything in the downloads is available elsewhere; I didn’t learn anything I hadn’t seen before. The thing is, it’s all in one place. It took me about a year of blog, newsletter, book and website reading, podcasts listened to, plus a heck of a lot of trial and error, a few seminars and conferences and some hands-on help to learn all this, yet today it’s available right here in one package, for $77. Believe me, I don’t even want to think how much more I’ve paid for the same learning (nor would I tell Dave, if I even could remember).

In the intro, Keith explains how compensations work, and how an aching elbow may turn out to be a problem stemming from the hip. The very thorough assessment section (using both descriptions and photos) will help you determine your specific issues; one of the main problems with getting started on a corrective exercise program is not that people are unwilling, it’s that they don’t know where to start. This section will help you discover your biggest issues so you can tackle them first; you’ll make notes and the next section is going to tell you what to do to fix them.

By the time you’ve worked your way through the reports, you’ll understand where your key spots are, and whether they’re problems of flexibility or stability, or if you have strength imbalances one side to another. These are the factors you’ve heard about, but perhaps don’t understand, and possibly this is where you’ve jumped ship and gone back to your old standby workout programs, complete with chronic daily pain. Let Keith explain this big picture for you once and for all, whydontcha?

The corrective exercise and general workout programs are in separate booklets from their exercise-description counterparts. During the initial read, that might seem a little annoying, but once you understand how to do the exercises (described in clear bullet points with photos), you’ll be real glad you have the programs written up cleanly for easy review or printing.

The workouts take about 30 minutes, plus an extra ten for individual specifics, and you can split the correctives from the main workout if that suits your schedule better.

If you’re intrigued enough to get the material package in your shopping cart but didn’t read the miles of sales copy, you may get stumped by the $19.95 free membership comment. Since that’s what happened to me (I didn’t read more than a quarter of the sales text, probably less), I had to go back and see if I was signing up for a long-term deal. Answer: No. Unless, of course, you have such a great experience with the premium membership site that you want to continue, in which case it’ll be $19.95 next month. However, you do have to cancel—failing that, your credit card will be charged automatically.

Cut to the chase, already! My overall impression after a single day’s review and without having done the 16-week program: Both thumbs up.

In fact, to be honest, I bought the program merely to find out if this would be a place to send forum members and blog readers who ask where to learn this stuff or how to get started with corrective exercise. I’m happy I did, because not only can I recommend it, but I’m also going to start on the 16-week program on Monday.

The negatives:

That horrid sales page. Yes, I know people respond to that style; I personally would have clicked away automatically had I not gone there specifically to purchase the material for this review.

The automatic billing for future membership months. I suspect that option will be gone after the first automatic billing month. He’ll get so many complaints and have to refund so many of the automatic charges (or risk losing all credibility should he choose to stand on the fine print on the previous page), it just won’t be worth it to him. My guess… gone soon. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, you’ll have that first month prepaid access to the premium section, and with that comes Keith’s private email for questions in his Ask Keith forum. Given today is the first sales day, there are only a few questions answered, but I suspect this will be fleshed out as things settle down. If you buy the program and get stuck anywhere along the line, log in, go to the Ask Keith forum and click on the Contact the Author link to email Keith direct.

The positives all boil down to one thing: This could give you back your life. $77, a few hours of reading and 16 weeks of effort is *nothing* when compared with that aching shoulder and elbow, the pain in your low back, those hips that barely move, those rickety knees, unbendable ankles and pain in your feet. Good grief! Get with the program already: Your Unbreakable Body.

Oh, and you will have to order a foam roller if we haven’t convinced you of that by now.