PRI: Home Study vs. Live Course

A couple days ago I announced that we will be hosting the first Postural Restoration Institute Course between Baltimore and Boston on November 10-11 at Endeavor Sports Performance.

For more information regarding the course, check out at that post here: Postural Restoration Institute Comes to Endeavor

The course that we’re hosting, Myokinematic Restoration, is also available as a home study. Over the last year, I’ve had several colleagues reach out to me and ask whether they should take the course in person or as a home study, which is a great question. At this point, I’ve taken Myokinematic Restoration and Postural Respiration as home studies, and Impingements & Instabilities and Advanced Integration in person.

I took the first two as home study courses for three basic reasons:

  1. At any given time I always have more continuing education courses that I want to take, than I can afford. As a result, I’m fairly frugal, and taking it as a home study saved me travel, lodging, and food-related expenses.
  2. I wasn’t sure if I could really dedicate a complete weekend to the course, so I figured having the DVDs for 14 days would give me a little more time to sift through the material.
  3. I wasn’t sure how beneficial the material would be, so it wasn’t worth risking 1&2 above.

Maybe I’m being overly simplistic, but I imagine this is basically the argument or concern that everyone has. As the saying goes, hindsight is always 20/20, and I can say now that I regret taking not just shelling out the extra loot to take in person. Here are a few of the main reasons why:

  1. While the home study allows you to pace yourself and rewind, there are no opportunities to interact with the instructor. Often times, it is infinitely more instructive and clear to ask a simple question and get a response, then to infer (read: guess) what you think the instructor is referring to. This is especially important for anyone’s first course (or, as I would find out later, any course taught by Ron), as the principles are drastically different for most.
  2. On a related note, taking a home study doesn’t provide opportunities to network and talk shop with other professionals. This is important for both bouncing ideas off other professionals and for building a referral network. I’ve made a lot of good friends through seminars, and given how unique PRI is, I regret not taking every opportunity to share ideas with other medical and training professionals.
  3. More than anything, home studies are too easy to skip hands-on practice. If you sit down to watch 8 hours of a seminar, it’s likely you’ll cut short on the practice reps, and/or grab food or make a quick bathroom trip while the video is playing. Furthermore, you won’t be critiqued and corrected on your ability to correctly perform the manual techniques.

Ultimately, PRI is teaching a way of thinking AND a skill set, and it’s fairly difficult to fully develop either while you’re taking it at home. This isn’t to say that the home study doesn’t have any value; in fact, the home studies are incredibly valuable if that’s all you can do, but once you understand how powerful their methods can be, it’s better to get as much as you possibly can out of each course, which you’re best suited by taking the course live. If you can make it, look into our seminar in November (PRI’s Myokinematic Restoration). If you can’t, look into any of the other courses they’re hosting over the last several months. You’ll be happy you did! Stay tuned for information on integrating PRI into performance settings soon.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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