Science

Cervical Revolution - Lincoln, NE - Review

The first Cervical Revolution course of 2023 was presented at the Postural Restoration Institute to an international group of students. Attendees present were from all around the globe including China, Japan, Singapore, Canada, England, Ireland, Germany and Bulgaria as well as from every part of the U.S.A. Professions included physical therapists, chiropractors, strength and conditioning professionals, an osteopath and a medical doctor to learn PRI concepts of the cervical, cranial and occlusal system.

Cervical Revolution is the introduction to the PRI concept of "top down" while acknowledging that "bottom up" is always at play since humans need to manage upright posture, gravity and gas! One of the biggest topics is that if you lose the floor then a new ground up into the cervical spine, cranium and even jaw will occur. When this over reliance on the neck occurs, cranial torsion or pathology is almost certain. This course unlocks the path into the cranium and a deeper dive into neurology which is then presented in tertiary PRI courses.

During the weekend, PRI examination of the cervical spine was then integrated with repositioning techniques that addressed position of the cervical spine, occiput, sphenoid and temporal bones all at the same time. This is part of the magic of this course in understanding how to integrate many parts to restore alternation of the whole with oscillation of atlas and occipital bones, freedom of a sphenoid, wobble of temporal bones and jaws that can freely swing or truse! Louise Kelley, PT assisted me greatly in this endeavor with lab exam, PRI techniques and answering tough questions from curious students.

For over a year, Louise Kelley, DPT, has been training with me to teach Cervical Revolution. This past weekend was her last training course as she will be "flying solo" in May to teach this course on her own. During this time working with Louise I have been so impressed by her knowledge and dedication to the science of PRI. Over the weekend and over the past year I have watched her grow into becoming a stellar faculty member especially in her understanding of PRI principles as well as describing and breaking down techniques to restore alternating cervical and whole structure alternating function. I will miss spending time with Louise and she will be a brilliant Cervical Revolution teacher!

Robert George, Chiropractor

Posted March 9, 2023 at 4:32PM

Categories: Courses Techniques Science

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Postural Respiration - New York, NY - Review

I felt right at home with the clinicians at Finish Line Physical Therapy, all seasoned runners. Photos of their and their patients’ running accomplishments, all smiles at the completion of a race, adorn the space – and make for the perfect back-drop to discuss the impact of undesirable airflow patterns, habitual use of accessory muscles of breathing, and a restricted diaphragm on movement.

Asymmetry is the rule of the body and brain. As such, humans, by design, exhibit a right-sided preference, which is reinforced by a culture that favors sitting and a lifestyle made easier by technology. The result is a form of “hemi-neglect” of left sided muscles of grounding – hamstrings, gluts, and abdominals – needed for weight-shifting. Rib cages remain under the influence of muscles that don’t promote alternating internal and external rotation and the associated sense of expansion and recoil. The result is a form of left or bilateral COPD, with its distinctive hyperinflation.

Stiff, patterned rib cages and abdominal oblique disuse cause the diaphragm to undergo twist and torsion that, in many cases, cannot get out of. This twist of our respiratory system is a significant mechanism underlying the many syndromes and injuries that we confront in the clinic.

Many thanks to our weekend avatars, whose willingness to demonstrate and receive techniques enabled us all to better understand PRI concepts: Patrick Cronin, PT; Laura Gibbons, PT; Laura Loftus; Iris Platt, PT; RikkiLynn Shields. Thank you Yohei Takada, PT, PRC and Andrew Xenophontos, CSCS, PRT for your tremendous help in lab, coaching the attendees in the nuances of the manual and non-manual techniques, allowing them to experience the power and influence of these techniques on the neuro-muscular system. Finally, thank you to the physical therapists at Finish Line PT for being gracious hosts: Mandy “I WILL blow up a balloon” Fox, Connor Hesselbirg, Jaclyn Massi, Ryan Matisko, Timothy Waanders, and Jimmy Williams.

Finish Line PT is a clinic for runners and triathletes, people who strive to be their best selves. To all of the course attendees, I hope the material you learned this weekend will help take you to new heights in your careers and shift your stride to a new way of looking at, and improving, movement.

Louise Kelley, DPT, PRC

Posted March 9, 2023 at 3:37PM

Categories: Courses Science

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Pelvis Restoration - Valencia, CA - Course Review

Thank you Elizabeth Makous for the invitation to come to the Henry Mayo Fitness Center to present Pelvis Restoration this past weekend. Southern California saw snow, rain, and hail Friday and Saturday, but it didn't stop the quest for learning in this group!!!

I truly enjoyed teaching this past weekend with this group of clinicians. The questions, attention to detail, and intellect was fabulous and assisted the whole class in learning the material. We went into the "weeds" to understand the pelvic inlet and outlet position influencing neuro-muscular need for inhibition and facilitation of muscle for ascension and descension of the respiratory and pelvic diaphragms. This is desired for internal compression and decompression for forward movement. This material can be complicated, but worth the journey for improved patient and client outcomes.

Loc, thank you for being an amazing lab assistant. Thank you to all the course attendees spending a weekend with PRI and learning new concepts and being open to them. Again, thank you to Henry Mayo Fitness and Elizabeth for hosting.

I should note--I did return home to Nebraska to blue skies, sunshine, and 60 degrees!!!

Lori Thomsen

Posted March 7, 2023 at 5:49PM

Categories: Clinicians Courses Science

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Join us for our next free webinar! Mandibular Temporal Latero-Rotary Movement Influence on the Ankle and Foot

Join us for the second webinar of the 3 part MANDIBULAR Temporal LATERO-Rotary Movement Infleunces series on Friday, March 10th at 1pm CT. This free 90-minute webinar will include time for questions at the end. If you are unable to join us live, the webinar will be posted to the Webinars page on our website.

This webinar is titled "MANDIBULAR Temporal LATERO-Rotary Movement Influences on the ANKLE and FOOT".

If you missed the first webinar in this series, which was titled "Mandibular Temporal Latero-Rotary Movement Influence on Palatal, Occlusal, Glossal and Podal Orientation", you can click here to access the recording and handouts.

Please feel free to share this information with other colleagues who might be interested in attending.

CLICK HERE to reserve your seat today!

Jennifer Platt

Posted February 15, 2023 at 5:14PM

Categories: Science

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Human Evolution - Live Stream - Review

The evolution of the human being from an infant to an upright, alternating adult is a complicated and multifaceted, sequential, unstable, patterned process, requiring stages, challenges, and self-actualization for optimization.

From infants learning to roll, to toddlers walking behind a push toy, to a competent upright human walking down the stairs backwards (yes, backwards), we presented a 10-component, cumulative Postural Restoration Developmental Sensory Motor Sequence supported by 9 carefully chosen and explained Sensory Integration Principles that support attention to 7 Postural Restoration Developmental Processes. Incorporation of sensory awareness of these processes into the treatment of human beings, fortifies the sensorimotor outcomes that every parent, clinician, and human hopes to experience.

In front of an engaged audience of 7 in-person and a whopping 60 faces on the live stream, comprised of 17 PRC’s and 3 PRT’s, PT’s, ATC’s, personal trainers, massage therapists, an osteopath, an acupuncturist, a health coach, a yoga instructor, lots of familiar faces as well as welcomed new ones, from 9 different countries (Taiwan, Germany, Singapore, Ireland, Japan, France, Poland, Canada, and China), Ron Hruska and I presented the second offering of the Human Evolution course and the first live stream. We enjoyed the enlightening discussions fueled by insightful questions from the audience and I think it’s fair to say we ALL came away from the weekend with a little more to think about in our attempt to better understand the complexities of the developing human being.

‘Understanding how underlying developmental processing of information contributes to the development of sensory motor sequencing and the ‘sense of self’, will enable the caregiver to optimize the use of movement instabilities, without developing overdependence on the respiration or primitive adaptive motor ‘patterning’ for stability’ at any age.

Personally, I’d like to sincerely thank Ron Hruska for his gracious mentoring and for trusting me to deliver this complex and valuable information. (I could go on and on…) Further, Jen Platt was instrumental in assisting with content organization, publication, and is a technological whiz for ensuring we were on the same page, slide, and that the almost 100 videos came through clearly. RJ and Hannah were spectacular from behind the scenes and nothing short of enthusiastically supportive! THANK YOU!

Thanks to all of the attendees for your attention, contributions, thoughts, smiles and ‘thumbs up’ from zoom land. It sure was an honor, a timely opportunity and a very fulfilling experience to be with you all!

Until we meet or meet again….

Lisa

Lisa Mangino, PT, DPT, PCS, C/NDT, PRC

Posted January 24, 2023 at 5:39PM

Categories: Clinicians Courses Science

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Impingement & Instability - Live Stream - Review

Welcome to 2023! It's hard to believe that we have moved into an entire new year. With the turn of the calendar to a new year, we kicked off 2023 with the first PRI course of the year. Impingement and Instability has had a relatively new re-write a few years ago, and it is now a great introduction to other PRI Secondary and Tertiary courses, as well as being a clinician's course. It provides the clinician with integration strategies and lays a neurophysiological framework for why PRI is so effective as a science.

We were fortunate enough to have 53 people join us for Impingement & Instability, which is an astounding number for the first course of 2023. Our first several hours are spent delving into the neurological aspects of how and why PRI does what it does, and why it works. Since this is no longer a specific orthopedic-driven course, we started making integrated connections between the foot and scapula within the first 30 minutes of the course.

This course has evolved, not only in the last few years, but in the last several times I've taught this course. We've added more demonstrations and explanations of how to use the reference centers to change the emphasis of a non-manual technique, depending on what the client of patient requires to reduce their functional cortical dominance. And there are four unique non-manual activities that are discussed in this course and are not found in any other PRI course.

We had a great group of movement specialists from several countries. It was great to have Dana Hirsch, DC, Logan Thomas PT, Minh Nguyen OTD, PRC, Kurt Van Kuiken, ATC, Ryne Gioviano, CSCS, and Nora Harris, yoga instructor in attendance. We had so many great questions and participation from our live stream crowd. My thanks to Collin Kidwell, CSCS, Nick Rosencutter, CSCS, and Jack Wong, DPT for their attendance in-person and their willingness to help with our demonstrations. And thanks again to RJ Hruska for his exceptional assistance with the production of course. And on his birthday weekend, no less!

Dan Houglum, MSPT, ATC/L, PRC

Posted January 19, 2023 at 5:01PM

Categories: Courses Science

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Advanced Integration 2022

‘Timing’ means something a little different to all of us. Some look at time as it relates to acceleration, movement through space (speed), or muscle activation to name a few. But these biometrics often dominate the actual relationships at hand. These relationships are exactly what we at the institute spend our time reflecting on throughout the year. The best time to introduce a new technique, the amount of time needed to achieve a full exhale, the amount of time spent in one hemisphere, the best time of year to host a specific course, the timing of speaker availability to teach said course, the last possible time that the manuals must be shipped to host sites or your homes…….. and the time goes on.

In cyclical fashion this yearly passing of our daily expenditure of time, ends in 4 days, 30 hours or 1,800 minutes of Advanced Integration discussion. Reflecting on exactly how we spend our time rotating, reaching, reacting to, respiring, repositioning and hopefully resting, throughout our daily lives. The biometrics of it all are covered in depth, building upon the concepts discussed the days and months before. And by the last day, in the final hours, it is always hard to believe how fast our time together really occurs.

That’s the thing about time, it may seem daunting, sometimes nonexistent, or even endless at ‘times’, but until it has passed, until we are able to sense something new at its conclusion, we have no comparison, no metric, of how much of it was truly spent. As our time this year and every year concludes, it is this event that provides us as a PRI community with the sense of our time, being well spent, on and for, others in our lives.

Thank you to all of you who have spent time alongside us this year. And to our faculty who dedicate much of their time to help you, and us, fulfill ours. We look forward to spending renewed time with you all in the year ahead and are excited about the many opportunities available to do so.

May this time of year bring you and your loved ones, peace, rest and well-being.

To view the full photo album, CLICK HERE

RJ Hruska

Posted December 20, 2022 at 7:28PM

Categories: Courses Science

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Predominant Displacement - Foward Locomotor Movement - Review

This course outlines the functional cortical predominance that exists in all humans because of our inert need to move our “self” and our body forward. Our predominance precedes dominance, as our errors precede our successes. Our consciousness predominates our interest. And our brain hemispheric predominance predicts our natural asymmetric anti-gravitational behavior. This is a ‘introspective’ course. A course built off of research and examination, and appraisal of my own mental and emotional processes of human locomotion self-analysis.

Introspective courses can be difficult, very difficult to understand. Locomotor movement is not a simple act. And to fully appreciate how we displace ourselves, we need to relate the ascendency associated with visuo-spatial peripheral flow, chest decompression and compression behind vertical and horizontal displacement and predomination of handedness to the prevalence of unilateral ground control. I can appreciate anyone, who tells me they do not understand what this sentence just meant. But that is exactly what I hope to clarify in a course such as this, by relating concepts of displacement with movement, forward movement, that we all are programmed to do.

I believe, I have taught this course, six times, maybe, not sure. I feel like I have taught it 400, 4000 or more, times. Because I teach humans, guide humans and mentor humans on how to displace themselves to safely and subconsciously move themselves forward. Moving ourselves from our place of rest or position, or submerging ourselves, body or part of our body in a volume of space which would otherwise be occupied by gas in that space, requires progressional displacement of both air/space in and around our body. As obscure as this may sound, it is this acceptance of displacement by our visual optic regions of our brain, that gives us the freedom, the control and the orientation we use to move forward on our feet, through binocular, bi handed and bi lateral chest alternation of displacement.

Immediately after teaching this course I received two emails from course attendees, who said they “got it” and appreciated the course so much, because of this scientific based introspection. This course, in my opinion, helps us understand how important the upper extremities are when we move forward with chest and visual space suppression and displacement, for locomotor placement of the ground we are supported by and for locomotor placement of the environment we are moving through.

I would like to thank all of the attendees who were willing to reschedule this course because of my, and the PRI staffs, acquisition of COVID a few weeks earlier. I also am very grateful for Julie Blandin PT, ATC, CSCS, PRC and Mark Ragusa DPT who attended the course in person and helped with their acknowledgement and feedback of instructional material. It always helps so much to have someone present in the room when giving virtual courses.

And finally if you are hesitating to take this course in 2023, talk to someone who has. It should broaden your perspective on the visual, hemi-chest and upper extremity influences on the legs you use to move you, or your patients forward. I will only be teaching this course two times next year, May 5-6 and Nov 3-4. And both will be livestream. Thank you for taking the time to read this review.

Ron Hruska

Posted December 6, 2022 at 10:25PM

Categories: Courses Science

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Myokinematic Restoration - Lincoln, NE - Review

As the temperatures were dropping in Lincoln this weekend so were the femurs on the infamous Hruska Adduction Drop Test. We warmed up quickly in lab restoring patterned pelvis’ to neutral. The attendees learned the value of this test in order to identify the position of the pelvis and to confirm the Left AIC pattern was present. About half of the group of ATCs in attendance worked in the MLB/MiLB and pro soccer worlds so we discussed Myokinematic Restoration treatment and how to implement it within training sessions. Getting our patients the 4 Rs: reposition, retrain, reciprocate, and REST is the ultimate goal when utilizing these myokinematic restoration principles and programs!

Kasey Ratliff, PT, DPT, PRC

Posted December 1, 2022 at 8:00PM

Categories: Courses Science

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Myokinematic Restoration - Oakbrook, IL - Review

If there is one thing that is consistent in Chicago, it's the rapidly changing weather. With temperatures dropping 30 to 40 degrees in two days, it is a harsh reminder that winter is coming, sooner than later.

Change is constant and often beneficial. Of course, there are times in which change is bad, but a change in seasons is a good thing in this part of the country. And a change in the body is, more often than not, just what the body needs as well. That was the backdrop for Myokinematic Restoration in Chicagoland.

It was a great pleasure to have Craig Depperschmidt teach with me. We have known each other a long time (both of us are PRC Class of 2012), and we have co-taught this course a few times in the past. However, it was our first time doing it without also doing a live stream broadcast in Lincoln. It was a lot of fun to interact with everyone in the course as well as with each other.

Craig kicked off the weekend doing a great job of establishing the necessity of position and why position matters. As we moved onto testing for position, we were hopefully able to suggest a change to the attendee's perspective as to why the tests look the way they do given the influence of human asymmetry. As we discussed the necessity of changing the position of the pelvis and re-training the femurs, our discussion led us to the Hruska Adduction and Abduction Lift Tests and intervention. Our objective this weekend was to change pelvic position, change the job description of the femurs as necessary, and change how the body uses itself against gravity. To be a better Batman, we need to be a better Bruce Wayne.

My thanks to Sam Pare, DC, Nikki Galante, PTA, John Shostrand, Yoga Instructor, and Alexi Gniot, PTA, for spending even more time with me than they have already. We had so many great questions during the course that it is really hard to pick out a couple. It is really a sign of a great group of movement professionals that we could have such a diverse group and have such on-point questions. Thanks to Jennifer Carlotti, Jayme Keith, Cory Puyear, Jen Cohen, and Nikki Wierzbicki for letting us learn from you during demonstrations and Q&A.

It was a nice change to be able to talk about PRI with such a good group of in-person attendees. With the virtual changes we have had to push through the last few years, this was a welcome change, no doubt. I'm honored to call Craig a fellow Faculty Member of PRI. He makes all of us better. It was a unique experience for Craig and I, and I hope it was for the attendees as well.

Dan Houglum, MSPT, ATC/L, PRC

Posted November 29, 2022 at 4:12PM

Categories: Courses Science

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