BTI Continuing Education Workshops
Active Isolated Stretching and Strengthening
for the Back, Hips, Thighs and Lower Leg
with Ben Benjamin, PhD
August 27-29 | Friday-Sunday, 9:30am-5:30pm
21 continuing education contact hours | $445 | for practitioners only
Any professional concerned with enhancing musculoskeletal health — whether through massage therapy, physical therapy, fitness training, or other modalities — understands that the way people exercise has a profound impact on their overall health, mobility, resilience, and ability to recover from injuries. While many different types of exercise may be beneficial, one in particular stands out from the rest as a uniquely efficient and effective approach: Active Isolated Stretching & Strengthening (AIS), developed by kinesiologist Aaron Mattes.
Why Practice AIS?
- To enhance your ability to treat and prevent injuries. AIS speeds the healing of muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia, and joints. Combining this technique with other forms of treatment can accelerate the recovery process by up to 50%. And by increasing flexibility, strength, and resilience, it can greatly reduce an individual's vulnerability to future injuries. When minor strains or tears do occur, continued AIS work helps to prevent the buildup of scar tissue — a major contributor to stiffness, inflexibility, chronic injury, and pain conditions.
- To help clients feel younger and healthier. As we grow older, many of us accept limitations to our body's functioning (such as a reduced range of motion, decreased strength and flexibility, and impaired coordination or fine motor skills) as an inevitable result of the aging process. Through AIS, many of these declines can be successfully prevented or reversed, often dramatically improving a person's well-being and quality of life.
- To work with degenerative neuromuscular conditions. By stimulating neural growth, creating new neural pathways, and reducing muscle spasticity, AIS can successfully reduce the symptoms of various debilitating conditions — including Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases — that do not respond to other forms of manual treatment.
What You'll Learn in this Course:
You'll gain a solid foundation in the principles of AIS and the skills to apply them to the back, hips, thigh and lower leg. Following demonstrations, there will be plenty of time to practice and refine each of the stretching and strengthening protocols. You'll learn to:
- Assess the optimal range of motion for each joint in the body
- Maximize the flexibility of every major muscle
- Stretch with precision the proximal and distal aspects of the muscle separately
- Take joints to their healthy maximum range of motion
- Efficiently increase strength in perfect alignment
- Use these techniques to speed recovery from injury
Ben E. Benjamin has dedicated his life to helping people cope with and overcome the pain and stress caused by injury to the body. His therapeutic techniques help reduce and eliminate pain produced by adhesive scar tissue formed from soft tissue injury.
In sports medicine/muscular therapy private practice since 1963, Dr. Benjamin is the founder and former President of the Muscular Therapy Institute in Cambridge, MA. As an educator and author, he has conducted seminars and workshops across the country, served as an instructor and trainer in a variety of settings, and written several books and countless articles. His books include: Listen to Your Pain: The Active Person's Guide to Understanding, Identifying, and Treating Pain and Injury; Are You Tense?: The Benjamin System of Muscular Therapy; Exercise Without Injury.
His professional training and education spans more than three decades. He earned a Ph.D. in Sports Medicine and Education at Union Graduate School; a Bachelor of Professional Sciences at Empire State College; and studied assessment techniques in Orthopedic Medicine with the well-known British Physician, James Cyriax, M.D. He is a 2010 inductee into the Massage Therapy Hall of Fame.
Dr. Benjamin continues with his mission to offer his innovative therapy techniques to help enhance the quality of life for as many people as possible - to help people not simply manage their pain, but to be freed from it.