Discover how the top 1% of fitness and movement professionals are using this innovative method to eliminate pain and movement limitations, stand out from the competition, and turbocharge their businesses.
"I feel like I’m learning the most advanced and expert training available, it’s the best. Things are taught here that I would never get introduced to anywhere in the world. "
Will Baird
Personal Trainer | Dynamic Wellness
This online video course is approved for CECs by NASM/AFAA (1.9 CECs), ACE (2.5 CECs), Yoga Alliance (20 hours), and NCBTMB (4 hours in self-care) for massage therapists/bodyworkers. It fulfills the 2-year re-certification CEC requirement for personal trainers and group fitness instructors.
Do you find yourself at a loss when clients or students come to you with a pain or movement impairment? Or develop a problem during exercise?
What do you do when a modification or exercise regression doesn’t help?
Do you end up telling them perhaps they need to avoid certain exercises or take some time off? Or refer them to someone else, and hope they come back someday?
Your client suffers, your business suffers, your confidence suffers.
Discover the true sources of pain and how to coach your clients in restoring pain-free movement with our proven methods so you can help your clients and your business thrive.
Nope. Although acute trauma, like a fall or collision, can damage tissues and cause pain, most pain is actually from trigger points in muscles. This has been proven by studies at pain clinics, research at the NIH and in our own clinical experience. Trigger points are small areas of stagnation in muscle tissue that develop in response to chronic or acute stresses on muscles. Trigger points aren’t injuries, and they commonly send pain to other areas (pain referral) in a way that can very much feel like an injury. This fools everyone - doctors, PTs, most practitioners.
Nope. You can’t “strengthen” yourself out of pain. That’s why traditional physical therapy often fails or even makes pain worse.
There is a common misunderstanding of how and why a muscle becomes “weak”. Weakness is often the result of trigger points in muscle fibers. These fibers cannot contract on demand of the nervous system -- they are in a stuck contraction known as a contracture. Putting compromised muscles with trigger points under load, stretch or shortening often leads to a larger pain response from the nervous system, and more trigger point fiber development, exacerbating the problem.
In Coaching The Body® methods, the trigger point fibers are first reduced, and pain-free movement restored, before any strengthening work. Restoring the ability of muscle fibers to contract on demand brings them back “online” to the nervous system. The muscle regains strength immediately and then can be further conditioned with incremental strengthening exercises.
Nope. Although stretching can feel great after being immobile in front of computer or driving for too long, it can also light up pain issues. And for chronic, recurring pain, stretching is borderline useless, unless you understand where the pain is coming from in the first place (and it's usually not where you might think).
The issue comes down again to most medical and fitness professionals not understanding muscle trigger point physiology. When trigger point fibers are stretched without first being treated, the nociceptors in the muscle will send danger signals to the nervous system which will then engage the muscle and shut down the stretch to protect the body from perceived danger.
In Coaching The Body®, we use knowledge of pain referral and functional relationships to understand the true sources of pain. We then use muscle energy techniques and neurological distraction to resolve trigger points in muscles to gain strength, length and pain-free range of motion.
The result is fast, dramatic change--sometimes within minutes.
You’ve studied anatomy, know what muscles are being worked in any particular exercise, but if a client develops a pain issue, you can only suggest they foam roll the area and maybe stretch the muscle and hope that will make a difference, and it just doesn’t? Or it comes right back?
You’ve taken courses on anatomy, biomechanics and corrective exercise, and have accumulated a lot of exercise variations, but still can’t help clients with pain and don’t understand the true pain sources for specific movement impairments?
Your clients or students come back every session with the same problem, or keep “re-injuring” the same area?
You’re tired of wasting time and money on courses from “experts” that sound great, but offer no specific solutions to specific problems?
As a yoga teacher, you have students that struggle with pain or limitation in particular poses, but can only suggest modifications that take them off their barriers, and they struggle with poses for months or never improve?
You feel like you’re just imitating other instructors or trainers? Or like you are just throwing ideas and exercises at a wall to see if they stick? Or like you are on a hamster wheel, round and round, without going anywhere?
You lose clients when you have to refer them to other practitioners, and they don’t come back to work with you?
You have elite training clients that hit a plateau, and can’t seem to make further performance gains?
Look, there may be a looming recession on the horizon. Inflation has recently been at historic highs and people’s budgets are being squeezed. Some are hesitant to come back to in person training after being remote. Pain is at an all-time high, and your inability to help gives them one more reason not to work with you. Your income and clientele suffers. You get up in the morning without the pride and satisfaction that comes from being able to help your people and change their lives. You blend in to the masses of less competent practitioners instead of being able to call yourself an expert in the top 1% of your field.
But you can transform your practice from a luxury into a necessity by learning to help people with pain. And in our society, that is a gigantic demographic.
Fitness and yoga professionals that can provide unique coaching and solve pain issues will thrive in any economic environment, and make a real difference in people’s lives.
As a martial artist and serious yoga practitioner, I've always been fascinated by the power of movement--and I've had my share of pain and setbacks.
Most of us don’t understand pain (and neither did I), but we all experience it. The Western medical system sees pain as a sign of something broken that needs fixing, some manifestation of injury or disease—an inevitable consequence of damaged tissues. This pathology model of pain is both thoroughly inculcated into popular thinking and unfortunately wrong in a high percentage of cases.
Oddly enough, pain is a mystery to the medical profession. Our medical system is still in the middle ages in terms of understanding pain, which is why we have over 100,000 people a year dying of opiate overdose in the US. Many of those sad outcomes began with seemingly innocent prescription painkillers.
When I started out as a Thai bodyworker over 20 years ago, I quickly became frustrated at my inability to reliably help the many clients who came to me with pain. I was shocked at how many well regarded practitioners had failed them as well prior to seeing me.
Setting out on my journey with trigger point therapy in 2002 gave me hope that I could develop a repeatable system for treating pain. I discovered the reasons why this brilliantly conceived system had a spotty track record and had never gained mainstream acceptance. I spent years analyzing the functional anatomy behind common Thai and yoga poses, training and movement exercises and began recasting them in terms of updated trigger point principles.
I taught the first course in my new system, Coaching The Body®, in 2005 and I've spent the intervening years refining it--until we now can reliably address the vast majority of pain complaints with speed, permanence and efficiency. CTB combines trigger point knowledge, modern neuroscience and neuroplasticity research with a range of manual therapy and self care techniques. It works.
CTB is a uniquely effective framework--and now with this new course, CTB Master Instructor Doug Ringwald and I have brought this powerful system to the world of corrective exercise, movement and yoga. Doug first came to study with me as a yoga teacher who wanted to truly understand pain, and now this new Pain-Free Movement course has brought him full circle--bringing this groundbreaking knowledge to a field that he is truly passionate about.
You understood the muscular sources of shoulder pain and could confidently guide your clients to health and movement freedom in a few sessions?
Every session with clients enhanced your reputation and referrals?
You understood the muscular sources of most lower body and hip/sciatic pain, and could confidently coach your clients to move again with ease and fluidity?
You could create unique exercise and yoga sequences based on Coaching The Body® principles that were immediately impactful for specific issues?
You never again would have to fall back on modifying or avoiding certain movements because that's all you had to offer?
By coaching them to resolve specific pain and movement impairments. Keep them moving, improving and happy, and watch your clientele explode.
By making yourself indispensable in an increasingly competitive and challenging market. As your reputation for resolving pain and hindered movement “sky rockets”, so will your referrals and business.
And elevate your practice to the top 1% of fitness and wellness professionals. Solve problems that baffle other professionals and therapists.
This course offers practical techniques and strategies to help you improve your clients' movement patterns, enhance their body awareness, and optimize their overall health.
In the first module, you will learn the true sources of most pain and the principles of CTB. This is an in-depth look at pain science, understanding muscle function/dysfunction, trigger point physiology and the how and why the CTB interventions work:
Neuroscience (pain is an output of the CNS).
Most pain is not from injury.
How trigger points refer pain to distant areas.
The importance of "satellite" referral in understanding pain sources.
CNS using trigger points to "splint a joint" to reduce movement.
CTB methods for reducing trigger points and retraining pain-free movement.
PIR (contract/relax) stretching, neurological distraction.
The first section of this module demonstrates how to use the Mighty Body Band or other bodyweight/strap systems such as TRX in CTB corrective exercise. Besides these being very efficient exercise systems, in CTB we also use them to facilitate contract/relax stretching and targeted compression for neurological distraction.
The second section covers other useful tools for coaching self care trigger point work: compression balls, theracane, vibration tools.
In this module, you learn to coach your clients using the CTB Work Cycle to facilitate trigger point release.You also learn key insights into shoulder pain and dysfunction such as the scapular stabilizers are often the source problem in perceived rotator cuff issues (serratus anterior/low-mid trapezius).
You learn to assess scapular rotation and coach your clients in trigger point release for the scapular stabilizers, as well as the arm rotators and adductors/abductors using compression, vibration and contract/relax stretching.
This module goes further in-depth into functional anatomy and muscle identification for the shoulder. It includes detailed video presentations (with 3D models) and demonstrations for the scapular stabilizers and rotator cuff muscles. For each muscle we show:
Muscle location and extent.
Muscle function, actions and prominent antagonists.
How to palpate the muscle clearly across fiber direction.
Techniques such as isolated contraction that can be used to distinguish the muscle from its neighbors.
Common diagnoses and referred pain caused by the muscle.
How to passively shorten, actively contract and stretch the muscle.
In this module, you learn to coach your clients in hip/sciatica self care. Although not understood by most medical professionals, gluteal muscles are responsible for most sciatic and lower body pain issues via their pain referral patterns.
You will learn to identify and assess the source problems in the hip muscles that are actually responsible for most IT band pain, knee pain etc. and how to coach your clients in effective self care for these issues.
This module goes further in-depth into functional anatomy and muscle identification for the hips. It includes detailed video presentations (with 3D models) and demonstrations for: quadratus lumborum, tensor fascia latae, glutes min/med/max, adductors magnus and longus. For each muscle we show:
Muscle location and extent.
Muscle function, actions and prominent antagonists.
How to palpate the muscle clearly across fiber direction.
Techniques such as isolated contraction that can be used to distinguish the muscle from its neighbors.
Common diagnoses and referred pain caused by the muscle.
How to passively shorten, actively contract and stretch the muscle.
The CTB corrective exercise model is a breakthrough in corrective exercise. You will learn the components of this model and how to apply them to restore and maintain pain-free ROM while increasing functional strength in your clients.
You will learn why "weak vs. strong" muscles is a false paradigm in the light of the CTB understanding of trigger points and functional movement, and why trying to strengthen perceived "weak" muscles often backfires.
You will learn how to implement the CTB corrective exercise loop in corrective exercise sets for the scapular stabilizers and hip muscles. You will also learn to coach clients in applying the CTB Work Cycle (partial and full) pre and post sets to inhibit trigger point development during exercise.
These concepts can be applied throughout the body in all strengthening and balance work.
In this module, the CTB methodology is applied and demonstrated in yoga.
By applying a CTB analysis of functional anatomy and trigger point referral to yoga asana, one can understand the pain sources in any particular pose
Then a CTB partial Work Cycle of contract/relax can be coached right in the pose in real time, or an adjustment using compressive feedback or vibration on the right muscles can be performed by the instructor in real time. This will help a yoga student therapeutically, through a ROM or pain issue, instead of the student being stuck avoiding the restriction indefinitely.
This module covers in-depth how pain perpetuators setup pain and movement dysfunction, how to assess the pain perpetuators and how to coach your clients to address the issues.
The pain perpetuators include: breathing dysfunction, foot hyperpronation, lateral asymmetry and anterior/posterior postural distortions.
The Coaching The Body methodology is built upon a completely different understanding of pain origins and movement dysfunction than mainstream sports medicine or traditional wisdom. Our approach has proven highly successful in over 20 years of clinical practice, with thousands of clients helped, even in cases of severe pain and movement dysfunction such as “frozen shoulder”. Standard biomechanical and corrective exercise models cannot adequately explain the origins of pain.
If one doesn’t understand the source, one cannot coach appropriate interventions. Our trainings are built upon a rigorous foundation of functional anatomy, biomechanics and emerging science. Some enlightened models incorporate the “bio-psycho-social” model of pain, and have a more sophisticated understanding of pain from a central down-regulation perspective.
But these models still fall short in understanding how the brain is bombarded with inputs from peripheral nociception--and consequently take much longer than necessary to achieve results.
Coaching The Body® is the state of the art in retraining pain-free movement, and incorporates insights of modern pain neuroscience, trigger point therapy, and peripheral down-regulation techniques not taught anywhere else.
Coaching The Body® principles are equally effective in wide range of practical application--from a hands-off coaching model to fully hands on manual therapy. There is no need to work outside of specific scope of practice requirements to be successful.
Your course includes two PDF workbooks on self treatment of shoulder pain and sciatic pain. These workbooks are full of valuable treatment information to pass on to your clients.
Two concise, easy to use reference manuals (Printable PDFs)
Covers anatomy, trigger point referral, self care design, protocols, perpetuating factors and more.
Great resource to reference when working with clients.
Sandy E.
Personal Trainer, Group Fitness Instructor
Julianne H.
Founder, KC Yoga Coach
Brooke A.
LMT
Marshelle Joseph
CEO
Hey, Doug here…and I just want to say that I was in your shoes 10 years ago. I was a yoga teacher and personal trainer struggling to help my clients (and myself!) with pain and movement limitations.
I personally experienced bouts of low back pain that were crippling, even though I was a conditioned soccer player and yoga practitioner.
I was frustrated. I did not understand functional anatomy and pain well enough to help myself or my clients like I felt in my heart had to be possible. And I and many of my clients had been failed by a long stream of therapists, doctors and surgeries.
I turned over every rock. I studied corrective exercise. I read books on physical therapy, anatomy, biomechanics, neuroscience, pain…”alternative” modalities like Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method…and came to the shocking conclusion none of the “experts” actually understood pain and movement in anything more than a general and ambiguous way. No one had specific solutions to specific problems.
Then I found Chuck Duff. A man that could solve pain problems in minutes with clients and students, because he had discovered the faulty assumptions underpinning the medical pain paradigm and came to understand the true muscular sources of pain. And not just theoretically, but through 20 years of clinical bodywork and movement retraining with clients, to find what works most efficiently.
I had found my mentor and spent the next 10 years apprenticing, building my clinical practice, refining and teaching Coaching The Body methods.
Those 10 years of experience resolving pain with hundreds of clients and teaching the CTB methods to hundreds of students, have now been distilled into this course.
Regular price for Coaching the Body Out of Pain in Corrective Exercise, Yoga and Movement: $647 -
We stand by our training and products 100%! If you are unhappy with your purchase for any reason, you may return it within 30 days of the purchase date for a full refund.
This online video course is approved for CECs by NASM/AFAA (1.9 CECs), ACE (2.5 CECs), Yoga Alliance (20 hours), and NCBTMB (4 hours in self-care) for massage therapists/bodyworkers. It fulfills the 2-year re-certification CEC requirement for personal trainers and group fitness instructors.
Unique and detailed lectures on: the true origins of pain, trigger point physiology, muscle function/dysfunction, shoulder pain, hip/sciatica pain, coaching self care, in-depth functional anatomy of shoulder and hip muscles, CTB Corrective Exercise model, CTB Yoga, pain perpetuators, assessments and corrections.
Two concise, easy to use reference manuals (Printable PDFs, 16 pages/each). Covers anatomy, trigger point referral, treatment design, protocols, perpetuating factors and more.
Videos demonstrating coaching self care for shoulder and hip/sciatica issues, use of self care and exercise tools, implementing the CTB Corrective Exercise model for shoulder and hip issues, in-depth hands-on anatomy: identification, isolated contraction, cross fiber palpation, cues for contraction, and stretching.
You can download our slideshows and review offline.
Ask questions and get answers directly from the instructors, through the included online forum.
Get the answers you need to make an informed decision about the Coaching the Body Membership
The Coaching the Body Out of Pain in Corrective Exercise, Yoga and Movement course is a 20 hour online video course. It provides unique knowledge in understanding movement impairments, trigger points, pain referral and functional anatomy. It instructs fitness, yoga and movement professionals how to recognize and understand common movement impairments, as well as how to coach clients in resolving impairments at the source through self care techniques and the CTB corrective exercise model. For details of the information provided in this course, see the above section titled "What Exactly Do You Get In This Course".
This course is for professionals in the fields of fitness, yoga, personal training, athletic training and coaching, corrective exercise, pilates, dance and other sports and movement modalities. It greatly expands one's knowledge of functional anatomy and training pain-free movement in clients at all levels of fitness and athletics.
Our courses are hosted on the Kajabi platform, which has been optimized for modern devices, including mobile. By downloading the Kajabi mobile app, you can view your courses on your phone with a high quality, great performing user experience.
This course is approved for CECs from NASM, ACE, AFAA, Yoga Alliance and NCBTMB. CE approval by other certifying and licensing agencies is also possible by petitioning your agency for approval.
Yes! You will have access to the online support forum, to interact with other students, ask questions and get answers directly from the course instructors.
