What a solid group of professionals attended the PRI Integration for Fitness and Movement course this past weekend in Fort Collins, CO.  

 
It was a sold out class! Jam-packed with fitness professionals, DCs, PTs, ATCs and Strength Coaches -  additionally all having a diverse background in PRI – some were VIP newbies attending their first course while others were certified in PRI or had 17-19 PRI courses under their belt. I’m grateful to bring these diverse backgrounds together and offer something for everyone! I was really impressed with how the VIP newbies were catching on to the science so quickly.

This weekend I focused on breaking down our “5 steps” to building core stability and tri-planar movement variability through a PRI lens. Day one focused on sagittal plane organization and obtaining to maintain a symmetrically balanced ZOA on each half of the body. Day two focused on building strength and function with good positioning and grounding, emphasizing unilateral work to keep the axial frame unlocked and integrated for contralateral patterns of rotation – gait, reaching, rotation, throwing, jumping, running. Day 2 emphasized a lot of frontal plane for “functional fitness”- I call the frontal plane, the most neglected plane in many traditional exercises programs. It’s important that people learn how to integrate, program, coach and cue this plane more intentionally to help clients break through plateaus and stay symmetrically balanced.

This course is lab intensive!! And we even got to take lab outside this weekend to enjoy some 80+ degree sunshine midday.  

 
Thank you to our PRC lab assistants - Karen Hoyt and Megan Bollinger. You guys were a big help, thanks for helping me out and guiding attendees to set up and cue positioning better!

Lastly, it was great to have many of the staff members from Rebound Sports and Physical Therapy there in attendance. Thank you all for your hospitality and hosting this weekend!
I think it’s great that a team comes together to learn, grow and collaborate – plus it supports learning and integrating PRI more effectively. Can’t wait to hear how you guys integrate the material over the next few months. I hope to get back to Fort Collins one day – such a cool outdoorsy town and I didn’t get to explore enough of it!
 
Till next year #PRInation! Look out for our 2020 schedule. The Affiliate Courses are a great place to start and refine your practice with PRI.

This past weekend, the Affiliate program got presented in the southern hemisphere as the PRI  integration for Fitness and Movement was hosted in Sydney, Australia!!  I traveled over 10,220 miles (or over 16,447 km) and the very long plane ride across the south pacific was well worth it! Sydney was such a fun city, and it was a pleasure to spend some time with the PRI Australia group.

 I am beyond grateful to have had the opportunity to share the PRI science with this area of the world.  It is exciting for me to watch attendees connect to a deeper dimension of PRI because I believe it’s in those deeper dimensions of PRI that the magic happens and gaps are bridged.  Attendees from Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Georgia and various parts of Australia were all represented. Chiropractors, Osteopaths, Physiotherapists, Pilates, Yoga, and Exercise Specialists were all in attendance, with the class being about half and half. Half being exposed to PRI before and the other half were brand new to the science. Needless to say it was a diverse group --- yet all united to learn more about the diaphragm and its influence on posture.

Regardless of credentials and training, this course is enlightening to help us all remember how to program Respiration and Alternating Reciprocal Activity to enhance Tri-Planar performance patterns (i.e “Functional Fitness”)

 We hit the ZOA hard and discussed it’s role in managing hyperactivity and unnecessary muscle tension. The exercises I introduced focused on shaping the ZOA three dimensionally with respiratory abdominals, along with promoting  expansion, movement and flexibility of the ribcage.  I then emphasized the 5 steps of programming for shaping adaptation and better integration for symmetrical compound lifts.

  The 5 steps in this course are presented to help create a framework for programming and organizing how exercises are presented to clients and patients. The 5 steps also help in organizing core stability and symmetry from the diaphragm level outward.

I loved seeing the passion and ah-ha moments as attendees connected with the material and got new resources and insights to help progress their clients and patients. I think we will see PRI quickly continuing to grow in this area of the world. Thank you to Mark Obrien and Jason Thomson for hosting. Special thanks to Mark for the hospitality and opening up his brand new facility for us to use. Fit Plus Well is such great hidden gem just south of Sydney. And Jason, thank you for sharing your passion, your insights (nuts, I will always remember your nuts cue) and helping with much of the logistics of the weekend! 

My visit to Australia was fun and I hope to get to come back one day! I could definitely live in Sydney - beaches, city and mountains were all right there. Beautiful coastline. Thank you to all who helped organize the event! Cheers!!

We got to kick off the first course for PRI in 2019 at the University of Arizona in Tucson! Special thanks to Ben Crawford and the Sports Medicine Team for hosting! Amazing facilities and amenities and this was a perfect site to kick of the year. I have confidence the PRI minds are going to be growing after this course as we had a very engaged group. I’m excited to hear how they will be growing and using the material over the next year!

 The PRI Fitness and Movement Course is an advanced 2 day course geared to address the integration of dynamic thoracic posture and axial frame asymmetry. It’s a principles based course to empower fitness and performance patterns through respiration and alternating reciprocal activity. Our manual is full of exercises to get clients moving and optimizing dynamic postural relationships, so that their workouts can help them better adapt in a stressed, technology driven, and progressively changing world.

There is so much intangible value of understanding the empowering benefits of how to coach and train a diaphragm and pelvic/hip complex to work together. This knowledge is foundational for all fitness and movement professionals, including Personal Trainers, Strength and Conditioning Coaches, Athletic Trainers, and Physical Therapists. I’m excited to be entering into our 3rd year of teaching this course. This year we have some new focuses on screening and programming. Some of the “exercises” taught in this course can be used as screening techniques and/or as training techniques. A true test to an athletic body in balance is when clients can move in and out of a good diaphragmatic position and “feel” the correct family of muscles working… automatically… without excessive effort. Can the right things work together? Can relationships stay intact?

Lastly, it wouldn’t be a complete trip to Tucson, without a stop at one of James Anderson’s favorite restaurants Café Poca Cosa. Classy, delightful experience and such a yummy surprise plate of food. I have no clue what I ate, but it was good and I hope to return one day!

 Want to progress your PRI understanding or get introduced to the science of Postural Restoration? Then this is a great course for you! Hope to see you at one of our courses this year! Next month, we will be teaching at a private host site, then off to Brunswick, Maine - Syndey Australia - Boston, Massachusetts - Dublin, Ohio - and then Fort Collins, Colorado. Visit the PRI Affiliate Course section for more details.

Thanks to hurricane Florence, I got to fly into Chicago early and explore downtown. What a great city! So much to do I wish I could have stayed another 3 days! This was the second time we taught in the Chicago area, as this was one of the very first host sites to the PRI Integration for Fitness and Movement course back in 2016. It’s fun to reflect back on how far we have come and how much the course has evolved to help the PRI science progress. We were lucky to have some attendees return for a second time and their post course reviews reported great improvements and positive comments on how the labs were more integrated, practical, and helpful. Some quotes from the course evaluations were:

“This manual is a treasure. Instructors artfully simplified all 3 primary PRI courses into a clear and continuous narrative. This course helped integrate and synthesize the more abstract concepts of other PRI courses. This was an amazing course and I am so grateful!”

A Pilates Instructor says: “The instructors kept my attention the entire time! Amazing! I never found myself daydreaming. This course will help me better screen clients and create more individual focused programs for each client.”

Another Strength Coach says “Super valuable course. Powerful material to help guide fitness professionals from driving dysfunction and pathology. The details and variations of exercises will help me better work with clients with dysfunction and pain patterns”.

I am very grateful to the fabulous hosts: Mark Cibrario, Wynne Conklin, and Kyle Cibrario at The Trainers Club. Thank you for being so welcoming and gracious and we were lucky they hosted this course because the space was perfect and their passion for fitness and movement was spot on!

We had a great mix of PRI trained attendees along with first timers and it made for a fun group. PRI experienced people appreciated how we simplified complex principles, avoided rabbit holes, and taught practical application, and new attendees got exposed to the big picture and application to start using key principles and to help facilitate better retention in subsequent courses. I’ve gotten to a point in teaching where the diverse audience we tend to attract is something that excites me and I love the challenge of uniting minds and professionals and helping all attendees look at axial movements and hyperactivity patterns for trunk stability through a different lens. Every course I learn something as we can all learn from one another!

The brain reflexively searches and identifies patterns for motor learning, just as we learn components of larger movement patterns, its mastering some of these basic micromovement patterns that creates the stability and motor control many of our clients are searching for to move painfree. Motor control and instability issues are not always a problem of weakness or lack of strength. People waste time and energy trying to strengthen muscles that don’t need to be strengthened and then create misuse patterns further complicating the movement sequencing. This course is one of the only courses that breaks down three planes of movement of the axial frame into the micromovements that clients need to maximize output in larger movement patterns. This is a lab heavy course, as we break down components of foreign movements and get people practicing feeling them and coaching them right away. Organizing components of axial movement in the sagittal and frontal plane for proper loading and lateralization is so crucial for todays perception of postural health. On day 2 we discuss key neurorespiratory principles as related to larger movement patterns like the squat and deadlift, as well as single legged movements like the RDL, Bulgarian split squats and steps ups.

 If you have any interest in attending, don’t hesitate and sign up today for the Philadelphia course October 6-7. It will be our last course of this year and you don’t want to miss the distribution of this year’s course manual!! Its not too late to sign up! Sign up today to attend PRI Fitness and Movement at The Training Room Physical Therapy at Maplezone Sports Institute in Philadelphia, PA. See you there!!