BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN MOVEMENT IN FITNESS AND SCIENCE
Bridging the gap between health professionals and fitness coaches with OPEX’s new Programming: Movement course
If you have been coaching for any period of time, you probably faced frustrated and confused clients.
Confused because what their chiropractor told them about their incorrect movement pattern conflicts with what their physiotherapist said. And what their physiotherapist said about their shoulder mobility and how to improve it is different than what their fitness coach told them, and is different again from what the other fitness coach told them. And on and on.
As a result, many people remain injured and in pain, or at the very least they simply don’t ever improve their quality of movement. Years go by and, well, their squat still sucks and their back still hurts.
This is the impetus behind OPEX’s new Programming: Movement course: To develop a consistent language—a basic level of communication—that can put fitness coaches on the same page with other health professionals like chiropractors, physiotherapists, RMTs, osteopaths etc. The ultimate goal being to help unconfuse the confused by raising our understanding of movement and communication skills to a higher standard, so our clients can heal their injuries and improve their movement efficiency.
About Programming: Movement
OPEX is excited to announce that our new course, Programming: Movement, has been released.
What is Programming: Movement?
Programming: Movement is our newest specialty course that teaches you how to coach movement with purpose and bridges the gap from the academic model of human movement to the practice of coaching clients in the real world.
What’s included in this course:
92 videos on the science behind movement to support implementation
How to assess movement and link faults with their fixes
82 pages of detailed coaching notes
How to design training programs based on movement discrepancies
26 lessons teaching you how to coach and cue patterns of movement
“That’s the underlying theme: Create a language so we’re all on the same page,” explained one of the course creators Whitney Reese, a BigDawgs coach, who also coaches at OPEX Round Rock in Texas.
A lack of consistent language is a big gap Reese said she sees in the health and fitness industry today.
“It’s an ever-increasing gap in the healthcare model. It’s a broken system,” she said. As a result, patients and clients aren’t experiencing the success they should.
“We need to create more educated, professional coaches to get people back to health and function for wellness and longevity,” Reese added.
And this starts with “bridging the gap” between physiotherapists and chiropractors and coaches so we all “speak the same language and look at movement from the same perspective,” Reese said.
While creating a consistent language in the industry makes up the first part of the Programming: Movement course—a course Reese said is designed for health professionals, as well as fitness coaches and personal trainers—there are also two other big pieces of the course.
The second part of the course teaches how to both observe and describe movements more effectively, while the third part of the course is about understanding what you’re seeing so you can better prescribe a solution for your clients.
For example, we often assume that people can’t get into a certain movement because they lack mobility or range of motion, Reese explained.
“But it’s not just range of motion that stops someone from being able to attain a position. It could be a lack of stability why they can’t sustain a load in a certain position. Or it could be because they lack coordination,” she said.
“Sometimes a lack of mobility, stability and coordinating the movement can all look the same in terms of how the flaw presents itself, but all three stem from a different problem.”
This is ultimately what the course is designed to do: To help you figure out why your clients’ movement patterns are limited, which will then help you figure out how to fix them more effectively.
The course format:
The work-at-your-own-speed course is entirely online and includes case studies and a number of videos that range between 45 seconds and 3 minutes. Moreover, the course also includes an in-depth written manual for those who want to dig deeper.
More specifically, there are five larger modules that are covered:
Understand
Describe
Assess
Incorporate
Implement
This course is like no other in the industry today, Reese explained.
“I think part of what is unique about it is that it’s not based on one dogmatic perspective of movement, so even though there are influences from multiple researchers, it is based on various principles known about movement,” she said.
As a result, coaches and health professionals will acquire a common language, a deeper knowledge, and critical thinking skills to help them fix movement patterns in their elite athlete client as well as in their 70-year-old grandmother client.
This will go a long way in moving the health and fitness industry in the right direction, Reese said.
“Nobody owns movement, but we all need to know how to assess it, how to coach it, what the problem is and how to fix it. And having a consistent language that drives the conversation will eventually bridge the gap between other health care professionals and (fitness) coaches,” she said.
Start learning how to assess, coach, and fix your clients’ movement today with our newest course, Programming: Movement.