IOL Strength and Conditioning

My part of this blog has trended toward corrective exercise strategies over the past couple of years as I began to learn chronic pain wasn’t just a part of aging and  I didn’t have to live with in decline. Many of my IronOnline forum pals have also moved off the strength path temporarily in order to reclaim lost movement, and others probably would if they knew where to start without having to go back to school to learn anatomy and kinesiology.

Often people ask for the simple solution—you know… hey, just tell me what book to get and I’ll read it. But until now, it hasn’t been that easy. In fact, that’s the reason we started collecting names for our corrective exercise specialist database, which you’ll find at this link; by the time we hit our 40s, 50s and 60s, we’re so jammed up it takes an expert to sort it all out.

The thing is, even if we can part with the bucks to pay someone to help many of us are not in driving range of such a person. The field has grown hugely the past couple of years, but the personal trainers who know more than an introduction to assessments and corrective strategies are still few and far between.

So what are you going to do? Today we actually have a viable do-it-yourself option, Keith Scott’s Unbreakable Body Program.

First, a non-disclaimer disclaimer: I get nothing for the referral, and if you click on any link you won’t find an affiliate number attached. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I decided to buy and review the program. There’s a fair number of people “selling” Keith’s new program, and if you get a few weight training newsletters and follow a few blogs, you’ve probably seen a write-up today. I thought we might have a non-referral look for ourselves, although I don’t mean to suggest the other writers have financial motives. Quite the opposite; the ideas in the program are certainly good enough to stand alone.

Plus, if it happens to offer what my buds need to get out of pain and to move better, I really wanted to know about it. I’ve come to trust Keith’s material after reading his blog, and figured there was a real good chance this and a few weeks work might be our golden ticket to a pain-free life.

Guess what? It was a good gamble! Keith holds a Master’s Degree in Exercise and Sports Science with a concentration in sports medicine, and coupled with his eighteen years in the field working with individual athletes and general population in pain, he’s put together a complete program to get us on the recovery path at home.

Read the material over the weekend, spend an hour sorting through your self-assessment tests, make notes on a tablet, couple your test results with his corrective strategy suggestions and prepare for your 16-week personalized program. 16 weeks is nothing—just knuckle down and follow instructions Put away your doubts and confusions created by too many options and take this time to get your body back in good working order.

Here’s what’s in the package. For your $77, you’ll get a downloadable winzip file with ten pdf e-reports, 374 pages, as follows:

• Intro, 40 pages
• Self-Assessment, 65 pages
• Corrective Exercises, 82 pages
• Corrective Exercise Descriptions, 76 pages
• 16-Week Strength and Fitness Program, 14 pages
• Exercise Description for the Program, 36 pages
• Soft Tissue Work for Optimal Physical Health, 27 pages
• Recovery and Regeneration, 9 pages
• Nutritional Guidelines, 15 pages
• Fat Burning with High Intensity Interval Training, 10 pages

A quick scan over that list will tell the knowledgeable reader there’s nothing outstanding here. Where it really shines is the completeness of the material. Everything in the downloads is available elsewhere; I didn’t learn anything I hadn’t seen before. The thing is, it’s all in one place. It took me about a year of blog, newsletter, book and website reading, podcasts listened to, plus a heck of a lot of trial and error, a few seminars and conferences and some hands-on help to learn all this, yet today it’s available right here in one package, for $77. Believe me, I don’t even want to think how much more I’ve paid for the same learning (nor would I tell Dave, if I even could remember).

In the intro, Keith explains how compensations work, and how an aching elbow may turn out to be a problem stemming from the hip. The very thorough assessment section (using both descriptions and photos) will help you determine your specific issues; one of the main problems with getting started on a corrective exercise program is not that people are unwilling, it’s that they don’t know where to start. This section will help you discover your biggest issues so you can tackle them first; you’ll make notes and the next section is going to tell you what to do to fix them.

By the time you’ve worked your way through the reports, you’ll understand where your key spots are, and whether they’re problems of flexibility or stability, or if you have strength imbalances one side to another. These are the factors you’ve heard about, but perhaps don’t understand, and possibly this is where you’ve jumped ship and gone back to your old standby workout programs, complete with chronic daily pain. Let Keith explain this big picture for you once and for all, whydontcha?

The corrective exercise and general workout programs are in separate booklets from their exercise-description counterparts. During the initial read, that might seem a little annoying, but once you understand how to do the exercises (described in clear bullet points with photos), you’ll be real glad you have the programs written up cleanly for easy review or printing.

The workouts take about 30 minutes, plus an extra ten for individual specifics, and you can split the correctives from the main workout if that suits your schedule better.

If you’re intrigued enough to get the material package in your shopping cart but didn’t read the miles of sales copy, you may get stumped by the $19.95 free membership comment. Since that’s what happened to me (I didn’t read more than a quarter of the sales text, probably less), I had to go back and see if I was signing up for a long-term deal. Answer: No. Unless, of course, you have such a great experience with the premium membership site that you want to continue, in which case it’ll be $19.95 next month. However, you do have to cancel—failing that, your credit card will be charged automatically.

Cut to the chase, already! My overall impression after a single day’s review and without having done the 16-week program: Both thumbs up.

In fact, to be honest, I bought the program merely to find out if this would be a place to send forum members and blog readers who ask where to learn this stuff or how to get started with corrective exercise. I’m happy I did, because not only can I recommend it, but I’m also going to start on the 16-week program on Monday.

The negatives:

That horrid sales page. Yes, I know people respond to that style; I personally would have clicked away automatically had I not gone there specifically to purchase the material for this review.

The automatic billing for future membership months. I suspect that option will be gone after the first automatic billing month. He’ll get so many complaints and have to refund so many of the automatic charges (or risk losing all credibility should he choose to stand on the fine print on the previous page), it just won’t be worth it to him. My guess… gone soon. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, you’ll have that first month prepaid access to the premium section, and with that comes Keith’s private email for questions in his Ask Keith forum. Given today is the first sales day, there are only a few questions answered, but I suspect this will be fleshed out as things settle down. If you buy the program and get stuck anywhere along the line, log in, go to the Ask Keith forum and click on the Contact the Author link to email Keith direct.

The positives all boil down to one thing: This could give you back your life. $77, a few hours of reading and 16 weeks of effort is *nothing* when compared with that aching shoulder and elbow, the pain in your low back, those hips that barely move, those rickety knees, unbendable ankles and pain in your feet. Good grief! Get with the program already: Your Unbreakable Body.

Oh, and you will have to order a foam roller if we haven’t convinced you of that by now.