"Corrective Exercises" shouldn't be a thing
When I was a PT student I had the opportunity to complete a clinical rotation with EXOS (which had just rebranded from Athletes’ Performance a couple months before I arrived). Upon entering the rotation, I remember wanting to learn as much as possible from my CI, Zach Cohen (if you’re in the DC area, you need to check this guy out- www.cohenhp.com). Specifically, I was interested in developing more tools to implement and develop “corrective exercises”. When I told him this, he looked at me and said “every exercise should be a corrective exercise”. At the time, this was a profound thought for me. I had always thought of exercises as grouped into strength, power, plyometric, endurance, corrective, etc.
Exercises should be designed to address, enhance, or “correct” a physical characteristic that is deficient. This may or may not be what comes to mind when thinking about exercises, but in reality all exercise should be correcting some deficiency. If you have programmed an exercise that abuses an athlete’s/client’s body, what is the point? Nascar engineers don’t take their car to the track, tear up the engine, bald the tires, and say “okay she’s good to go”. They fine tune the engine and the body, test, refine, re-test, refine and so on. Human beings are way more intricate than an automobile, so why dumb down the science and philosophy behind the training?
This is not a mind blowing concept, and the emphasis is more on semantics, but if you take this to heart, it will really affect your coaching and program design. Per the Oxford dictionary, exercise is “an activity requiring physical effort, carried out to sustain or improve health and fitness”. Therefore, if your programming is deleterious in nature, you have not programmed an exercise, just counterproductive activity. All exercises should be “corrective” in nature; thus “corrective exercises” should not be a subcategory of exercise.
Consider why your client/patient/athlete is performing your program, and how they are responding to it. Are you providing a program design that is corrective in nature? Are you addressing movement deficiencies and counteracting muscle imbalances produced from their sport? Or are you blowing out their pistons and balding their tires before you send them off to the race?
No degree or certifications are needed to design a workout that runs your athlete/client into the ground. Every thick skulled football coach since the dawn of time can do that without any energy wasted on thought. There is a time and place for building fortitude, but the saying “work smarter, not harder” is very true for exercise and training. I encourage you to try and design a program that is corrective in nature: correct movement patterns, correct mobility deficits, correct stability deficiencies, correct muscle imbalances, correct strength/power deficits, correct endurance deficits, and promote longevity!