NSCA Personal Trainer’s Conference 2010 Review - Part 1
March 30 2010
The 2010 NSCA Personal Trainer’s conference was held in Las Vegas on April 7 & 8. For people who are unaware of NSCA, they are the the world’s leading authority in strength & conditioning. In fact, NSCA sets the standards and guidelines in the strength and conditioning field and the rest just follows them like a good dog.
NSCA usually has a number of conferences year round. Their biggest one is usually held in Florida in Summer which is mainly for strength and condition specialists. Anyway, I felt like I should go since I would like to present a topic someday and wanted to meet some of the Trainer’s council members since I happen to be one of them.
So here I am off to Las Vegas.
The conference was for 2 days and went from 8.00 am in the morning to 5.00 pm and each presentation lasted for 90 min. They had 4 presentations each in the morning and evening. All the presentations were repeated several times during the days so that everyone can attend all the lectures.
I will go through each lecturer and a give a synopsis of their presentation..
Anthony Carey
Anthony Carey was the first speaker I attended at the conference. His talk was “ working with clients with musculoskeletal challenges”. He runs a company based on corrective exercises for pain and has a few DVD and books based on it. It was all about the usual how muscle imbalances, structural misalignments and altered movement patterns, all of which create undo stress on your body, resulting in pain.
I have written in the past about how there is very little causative role for the biomechanical model in pain. I wouldn’t say there is none, but the evidence is certainly nowhere to the level of what all these pain experts try to make you believe. In athletic population, the bio-mechanical model might have greater implications.
At the question-answer session, I asked him about the posture pain concept. I asked him why the posture-pain link is pretty weak in the scientific literature and if he has come across any studies which atleast shows you can change person’s posture. He said his “18 years of anecdotal experience has taught him..” But to give his due, he admitted there is not a strong link between posture and pain in the literature after all his talk.
Bill Sonnemaker
This was a hands-on presentation titled “movement preparation”. The concept is that the fascia is structured in the body to work globally(and not in isolation) to facilitate movements. So he had a lot of functional-stretching type exercises that supposedly targets the different fascia tissues in a global fashion. This is supposed to better performance, prevent injury and pain.
I don’t think these dynamic stretching sort of movements will make any changes to the fascia considering even the ability of manual therapists to change the plasticity of connective tissues by applying direct pressures is now seriously questioned.
Guido Van Ryssegem
And I thought my name was hard. The presentation was titled ” Return to Training after Shoulder Pain”. This was one of the best presentations at the conference. He talked about a very relevant topic and everything he had on his slides were referenced.
He talked about how all shoulder injuries have certain things in common such as postural dysfunction, scapular dysfunction, lower trap weakness, scapulothoracic weakness. There is some recent interest in scapulae dysfunctions in people with shoulder pain. But the interesting point is that even after the pain is fixed, the scapular dysfunction still prevails( nice example of correlative evidence) .And I asked his if he had come across any studies which showed the postural and scapulae dysfunctions to improve after the pain has resolved. I haven’t seen any and I was almost sure there wasn’t any. And he said he hasn’t seen any either (atleast he is up to date in his field I thought).
He made some comments though which cut right through his scientific approach and raised my eyebrows. One was about how the best test according to him to observe shoulder dysfunctions was to sit on a table and raise yourself by pushing your hands against the table. What about the validity and reliability of the test, sir?
Conclusion
The part that stood out the most about the conference ,even during the first day, was the lack of critical thinking among the trainers. None of them really bothered to question the science behind some of the concepts presented, and NSCA ,mind you, is all about science.
Anywa, in the next part, I will review Eric Creesey and a few others.
