Corrective Fitness, a locally owned personal training company, is about training for life and building long-term habits that help you perform at your best. Along with physical conditioning, Dave Smith the owner and personal trainer, focuses on education, goal setting, nutrition and teaching you how to optimize your body’s performance and function. Together you work on fixing pain by fixing movement and correcting bad habits by practicing good ones. He individualizes his training and prepares you both mentally and physically for life long activity and success. Through the use of foam rolling, static stretching and isolated strength training Dave teaches you to how realign your body and be conscious of its movement. To demonstrate this process we broke down the steps of correcting a common problem, good posture.
The first step, foam rolling, if done correctly helps to relax over worked muscles. My first experience with foam rolling left me feeling like I had a deep tissue massage! Dave focuses on the chest and lat muscles to begin correcting a habit such as hunching. Getting tight muscles to relax is the start of practicing good posture. Once your muscles are experiencing equal tension they can share the responsibility’s of any weight bearing exercise or activity equally.
To compliment the foam rolling we next focused on static stretching. One of the important aspects of static stretching that Dave teaches is how little movement is actually necessary. By properly aligning your body and keeping your shoulder joints in place the movement of the stretch is very small but enormously effective.
As you begin to prepare for weigh bearing exercises Dave starts you with YTA’s. YTA’s take you through the proper movement and range of motion so that you can practice and become comfortable using your muscles to create movement and not your joints. He demonstrates the importance of hand positing as well as proper muscle contraction.
The final part of correcting any bad habit is strength training. Balancing strength and flexibility is key to good alignment and conscious movement. The row, which I am sure everyone has done, is one of the primary exercises used to strengthen this area. Most often, rows are performed by grabbing a set of weights or bands and pulling your elbows back as far as possible at a 45-degree angle. The problem here is that your muscles become disengaged and you put stress on your shoulder joints. For a proper and effective row the movement comes from the muscles and does not extend your shoulder joints. It is important that shoulders are properly pulled back at the beginning of the move and that the contraction of your back muscles determines the distance of the move. This is how contraction for movement becomes an important motto and one that takes quite a lot of practice.
Dave’s approach is truly inspirational and unique. His own success overcoming physical hurdles is testament to his fitness and lifestyle practice. His approach to fitness can help relive pain and teach your body to run more efficiently. Dave’s genuine interest is in helping people build long-term habits that improve their quality of life is remarkable. His goals are not just to help you lose weight or get in shape. He strives to brake down what society teaches about nutrition and fitness and provide you a real education to help you live a balanced life.
For more information you can visit Dave’s website http://cfmcorrectivefitness.gotrain.me/. I could not recommend him more! He is an amazing teacher, trainer and coach! Thank you Dave for showing me what Corrective Fitness is all about, it has forever changed my view and I could not be more grateful.
