It is always comforting to be teaching PRI regardless of location, but last weekend I was in Detroit, MI. My wife’s family are all from just west and south of the Detroit area, so I was in very familiar surroundings. And the host group of Team Rehabilitation was an excellent bunch to host Myokinematic Restoration.
With a full room of nearly 40 health care professionals and movement specialists, and nearly all in attendance having never heard PRI previously, it was an awesome learning environment for everyone. This group was very dynamic and asked great questions. As this course evolves, we end up adding more and more lab time. This past weekend, 1/3 of the course was lab based, so we had ample opportunity to learn from each other.
We started our dive into the difference between normal pelvifemoral mechanics around the normal neuromechanical presentation that is the L AIC pattern. Then we went deeper into normal compensation vs. pathological compensation patterns. We transitioned into muscular ramifications of the inability to get out of the L AIC pattern, which highlighted the importance of having a "good boy band" rather than a "bad boy band."
We had ample time to practice the positional testing as we were able to determine what patterns we all had inside of us. Low and behold, every single one of the attendees proved to be in a PEC pattern. Based on this group of attendees all having the same extended pattern, we had to have the "Batman vs. Bruce Wayne" conversation. I was in a room of "Batmans”, and we all needed to be more like "Bruce Wayne." This necessitated a demonstration of how to get someone out of a PEC pattern and into a L AIC pattern, so the rest of the weekend had an opportunity to resonate with the attendees. With two activities, we were able to take a very strong PEC individual, and turn them into a L AIC pattern. Because underneath the bilateral extended patterns of the PEC lies a L AIC pattern.
The "PEC busting" demonstration helped us proceed into the management of a L AIC pattern. Nearly the entire afternoon on Sunday was lab time, where everyone had the opportunity to find and feel hamstring, IC Adductor, gluteus medius, internal obliques, and gluteus maximus activity. Reports of "feeling different" and "feeling my hips" were common comments after our lab.
My thanks to Team Rehabilitation for their hospitality. They know how to host a course! My thanks to Shelly DeRuiter and Craig Stasio, who were awesome lab assistants. Thank you to Cyril Shuster, Alexandre Vieria, Todd Cummings, and Michele Weis for your excellent questions and re-states. Thank you to Michelle Shrader and David Selak for allowing us to learn from you in our demonstration portions of the class. My hat is off to Alexandre Vieria, as he traveled from Brazil to hear PRI! I greatly appreciate our conversation around tennis players and the necessity to have excellent frontal plane integration. Thanks to everyone for great weekend!
