Correction: What If The Whole Way We’re Going About Corrective Exercise Is Completely Wrong?

What if the way we do correctives is totally wrong — not just "not quite right", or "in need of some improvement", but totally upside down and in need of a full replacement?

Normally, a corrective exercise regime is put in place when someone’s injured.

You’ll see a physiotherapist (a physical therapist stateside) and get a repertoire of movements that’s designed to improve the function of specific muscles or muscle groups that are at fault in causing the injury, or that are weakened or damaged by it.

I think there’s something wrong here.

The Trouble With Corrective Exercise

Corrective exercises seem to be oriented toward developing strength and mobility in individual muscle groups — but that’s like trying to get strong by building up strength in individual muscles. It’s ineffective and inefficient: a focus on compound exercises is more effective by far, which is why it forms the basis of every serious strength and athleticism program.

Additionally, the fault is rarely a directly muscular one. If a person has weak hip external rotators and a knee injury, it wasn’t his weak hip external rotators that injured his knee. It was his wacky motor patterns that gave him a) weak hip rotators and b) bad knees. So what should we address, the problem or the symptom?

If you’re looking for a way to build stronger hip external rotators, it’s not hard to find a program that will do just that. Measurable, repeatable, everything we love about science — except that it’s pointing the wrong way.

The word "holistic" has suffered by its association with herbal remedies, crystals, "infoceuticals" and other manifestations of woolly or wishful thinking.

"Holistic" means "of, or relating to, the whole". If you have a knee injury and weak external hip rotators, you’re not far from having a back injury too. Your weak base won’t support good spinal posture so you probably have some head and neck pain, and if your problem is unilateral or weighted to one side than you probably have unilateral shoulder pain to go along with your knee pain. Shall we treat all those things seperately?

Maybe, but we should always be referring back to the real problem: a person who’s in pain and can’t move properly.

Similarly, non-corrective exercise often takes no account of injury prevention until an injury actually happens, and this is a mistake too.

Read More: Decline And Fall: Injury Prevention For Older People

If you’re doing a movement that leads to better motor patterns, then, it’s a corrective exercise. If you’re doing a movement that leads to worse motor patterns, it’s the opposite — an injury-causing exercise. Think of it like a hill: some things go uphill, some things go downhill, not much stays put. In the same way, some movements or exercises improve your motor patterns, some make them worse, few make no difference.

Choosing Better Corrective Exercises

For the vast majority of relatively minor injuries — the kind we keep training on, but add in some correctives in the beginning for — we should totally rethink our approach to correctives. Instead, we should look to making the training itself corrective.

Sticking with our example from earlier about the guy with bad knees and poor external rotation, what can we do here? We can put some correctives into his warm-up, building up strength in his hip external rotators, then have him squat or deadlift as normal.

Can Anyone See What’s Wrong With This Picture?

It was the way he squats that gave him both weak external rotators and knee pain. While he squats the same way he always has, that movement is, for him, an injury-causing movement. He shouldn’t be doing it for three sets of ten, or whatever.

The solution to his injury is to treat it at its cause: motor patterning. Look at the way he walks and the way he sits - the two most common patterns we all use.

And most importantly, look at his squat.

If you want to fix his knees-in squat, band his knees and slash the weight of the bar. With a cue from the band pulling his knees in, he’ll develop more dynamic, functional strength in his hip external rotators than any number of dynamic, functional rehab exercises would give him — and he’ll fix his wacky motor pattern at the same time. (At about the same time, recurring problems in the low back, shoulders and neck should magically start to fix themselves — because they were part of the same problem: a wacky motor pattern.)

Making Correctives For Major Injuries Work 

Well, here we have to tread carefully — especially if it’s a bone in the foot (feel free to laugh. Or not). We can’t just throw this person in the weight room or on the bike. That’s obviously dumb. But as soon as it’s possible to begin movement again, we can look to do supported versions of basic movements with emphasis on the quality of those movements, gradually building up strength — and rebuilding motor control in the damaged limb.

A Final Word

You can’t pick up only one end of a snake. If we’re doing correctives wrong, we’re doing everything wrong. We need to program out training as well as our rehab to orient ourselves toward better motor patterns. Step away from the suspiciously regular PRs and build a solid platform of repeatable strength, good relaxed posture and strong mobility. That doesn’t mean replacing your squats, deads and benches with wimpy correctives (haven’t you been listening?). It does mean filling the gaps in athleticism to create a training system that will make sure you arrive at 50 or 70 years old with muscle mass, good hormone balance and not too much fat, not shot knees and chronic shoulder pain.

See Also: Pull Over: Why The Way You’re Doing Pull-Ups Is Wrecking Your Shoulders, And What To Do About It

If you think I've hit the nail on the head, or you'd like to bend my ear about something I've said, get hold of me in the comments below!