How Corrective Exercise Helps Clients Reach Fitness Goals

Corrective exercise is an often overlooked part of the fitness industry. It's not glamorous like HIIT workouts or powerlifting, but it is essential for hitting fitness goals more quickly and for the optimal performance and well-being of all your clients.

There are many reasons to make corrective exercises a part of each client's training routine:

• Pain relief,

• Greater mobility,

• Injury prevention,

• And injury recovery.

These are all important, and what most people think about when considering corrective exercise, but what many trainers don't realize is that corrective work isn't just for people already in pain or suffering an injury

Corrective exercise is also great for improving athletic performance and getting to fitness goals faster. Here's what you need to know about the importance of corrective exercise and implementing it with your clients.

What is Corrective Exercise?

Corrective exercise is very much like how it sounds. It is any type of exercise that helps correct some faulty movement or positioning in the body that contributes to or causes pain, injury, or other dysfunction. If your clients are not moving correctly or have poor form, you can use corrective exercises to modify and fix it.

The overreaching goal of corrective exercises is to improve movements and positioning of the body to improve both athletic performance and everyday life. A practitioner of corrective exercise identifies poor patterns in movement and looks for the underlying causes. With an understanding of this, the trainer can then determine the simplest exercise that will correct them.

The actual corrective exercises you might use to help a client are numerous and vary depending on individual needs. Some examples and types of exercises used for correction include:

• Foam rolling for stretching and myofascial release.

• Corrective breathing exercises to promote optimal motor learning.

• Structural alignments for trunk stability, such as exercises to align the pelvis and trunk stability rolls.

• Postural stability holds.

• Hard style plank to activate multiple muscles, including those that are underactive.

• Reverse lunges with a band to take pressure off knees and strengthen muscles for lower back pain relief.

• Exercises to correct hip hinge posture.

• Postural stability holds with head movements to correct shoulder and arm dysfunctions.

• Activating the posterior tibialis for correcting foot alignment.

• Exercises to correct posture and form while standing and sitting at a desk.

These are just a few examples of the many different corrective exercises you can use with clients to improve form and movement and to develop fitness while relieving pain and preventing injuries.

Check out this ISSA blog post on how sitting too long negatively impacts posture, and what you can do about it.

Beyond How Corrective Exercise Helps Clients Reach Fitness Goals - Quality of Life

As a personal trainer, your responsibility to clients goes beyond hitting fitness goals. Fitness is important, of course, but correct movements, reduced chronic pain, and fewer injuries are other factors you can help clients improve. Using corrective exercise to work on these allows you to help your clients enjoy an overall better quality of life.

Relieving Pain

Many of the aches and pains of daily life can be attributed to tight muscles, movement dysfunctions, and similar issues. A sore lower back may be related to weakness in core muscles, while neck pain can be caused by poor posture, for example. If you can assess your client and figure out what kind of dysfunction is causing the pain, a few targeted, regular exercises can fix it.

Restoring Mobility

Chronic pain, motor dysfunction, tight joints, and other similar issues that correction can address often restrict mobility. Pain and mobility especially go hand-in-hand. If you can correct one, you can fix both. Corrective exercise has the potential to allow your client to move more freely.

For instance, if you have an older client who is finding functional movements more difficult, strengthening key muscles can make everything from getting into the car to lifting groceries easier and less painful.

Recovering From and Preventing Injury

Injuries hold us back in so many ways. Even for non-athletes, being injured means being sidelined from life. A good corrective exercise program can prevent injuries by fixing dysfunctions of movement. A well-designed program can also help a client recover more quickly from an injury by balancing muscle strength and improving joint movements.

The Benefits of Corrective Exercise for Fitness

A corrective exercise program that is targeted to an individual client's needs, deficiencies, and goals can help improve their overall fitness. It can also improve specific areas of fitness and help them reach their goals more quickly, whether the goal is to be able to work out with less pain or to run a marathon.

How Corrective Exercise Helps Clients Reach Fitness Goals by Improving Efficiency

One of the simplest ways you can implement corrective exercises with your clients is by fixing how they perform specific training moves. For instance, if you have a client who cannot complete a lunge without bringing their front knee past their toes, it's fairly easy to make a correction.

Show that client the right form and have them practice the move keeping the knee in the right position. With time and focus and they will correct it and be able to do lunges correctly and get all the strength benefits from them.

This kind of corrective exercise work is usually the first thing to try. If poor form continues, there may be an underlying issue that will require other corrective moves, such as stretches, foam rolling, or the strengthening of specific muscles.

But, it's ideal when your corrections of form can improve how a client performs actual exercises that improve their strength, flexibility, power, or conditioning. You are training your client more efficiently by not taking time away from these important exercises or spending more time than is needed on stretches and other corrective moves. With more focus on actual workouts and more effective movements, your client should be able to reach fitness goals more quickly and efficiently.

Corrective Exercises Gets Clients off the Bench

Clients suffering from injuries need corrective work to get them back into the game sooner. Your client cannot meet their goal if they are unable to work out or practice due to an injury. The quicker you can get them back to normal functioning with corrective exercises, the closer they will be to achieving those fitness goals.

For some clients, a fitness goal is simply being able to be active without pain. That pain may come from an old injury, or it may come from muscle imbalances and dysfunctional movements. In any case, you can help them meet that goal using corrective exercises to relieve pain and improve mobility.

Preventing Injuries in the First Place

It's not possible to prevent all injuries, or to assure your clients that if they follow your program they won't get hurt. However, with corrective exercise work it is possible to reduce the risk of injuries. This is because the work you do will make a client's body more durable, more able to withstand the wear and tear of daily life, of athletics, and of accidents.

You can do this for your clients by working on strategic areas of corrective exercise: strengthening key muscles and those that are comparably weak, strengthening joints, increasing joint and muscle flexibility, improving mobility, and improving the ability to activate and control muscles and body movements.

Improving Performance

Anyone, from athletes to newbies in the gym, can improve their athletic performance. Whether it's the CrossFit champ you're coaching to a new goal or new runner looking to do a sub-30 minute 5k, everyone can improve.

Corrective exercises help improve performance in several ways. They can be used to strengthen weaker, underutilized muscles; they can improve poor motor control in specific types of movements; and they can relieve stiffness in joints and increase range of motion. Depending on your client's sport and individual goals, choose the right exercises to correct what holds them back from peak performance.

If your client is a runner, read this ISSA post about the importance of strategic strength training

Who Can Benefit from Corrective Exercise?

Literally all of your clients will benefit from this. The way most of us live our modern lives is a recipe for functional movement disaster. We spend hours at a desk or hunched over a smartphone. Then, many of us jump into action doing some pretty extreme sports, like CrossFit and powerlifting.

The sedentary lifestyle with poor posture alone is enough for most of us to be able to benefit from corrective exercise. But this, combined with extreme exercise sessions, means everyone will see improvements in movement, pain, injury, performance, and fitness goals.

Bad Posture

Inactivity is one of the leading risk factors for poor overall health. But what makes modern sedentary lifestyles even more damaging is the fact that we tend to combine inactivity with very poor posture. Many people spend hours a day with computers or devices, shoulders anteriorly rotated, spine rounded, and head tipped forward, putting tremendous pressure on the neck, shoulders, and spine.

Explosive Physical Activity, Followed by Inactivity

Another modern phenomenon is that many of us spend an hour or so per day engaged in explosive athletic activities. High-intensity workouts are popular, so many of us go from sitting with poor posture for hours on end to engaging in these complex movements for which our bodies are not really prepared.

The meeting point of inactivity, poor posture, and intense workouts leads to a high degree of movement dysfunction. But, of course, as a trainer you know that this can be fixed. Anyone can benefit from some type of corrective exercise to improve posture during inactive hours and form when working out.

Using corrective exercises to help your clients is a skill. Basic form adjustments are within the wheelhouse of most certified trainers. But to really delve into helping clients move better to perfect form, prevent injuries, reduce pain, and perform better athletically, consider becoming a corrective exercise specialist. And always keep in mind that some clients in certain situations will need a doctor or physical therapist. Trainers, unfortunately, cannot fix everything.

If you want to become an expert in helping clients with corrective exercises, consider getting certified. Check out the ISSA's certification program for becoming a Corrective Exercise Specialist.