When the Method Becomes the Answer

Every mobility system I’ve spent time with comes with a map of the body, and every one of those maps leaves something off. PRI builds its map around the body’s built-in asymmetries and reads movement through the patterns they create. McGill’s work came out of measuring spinal loads, so its map is drawn around what the spine tolerates before it gets irritated. FRC goes joint by joint. And 90/90, which was never a system at all, has picked up a map of its own online, where it gets handed out as the answer to nearly every hip question.

I’ve taken something useful from each of those maps, and I still coach with pieces of all of them. What I want to look at is what happens to a good method when the people teaching it stop treating it as one way of seeing the body and start treating it as the only one; when the person who walks in the door gets fitted to the model, rather than the model getting fitted to them.

PRI and the Pattern Underneath

The Postural Restoration Institute starts from an observation that’s hard to argue with: the body isn’t symmetrical. The liver sits on the right, the diaphragm is built differently on each side, the heart pulls left, and most of us lean into one leg and breathe into one side of the ribcage more than the other. PRI took that asymmetry seriously at a time when most of the fitness world was pretending we were mirror images, and it gave coaches a vocabulary for rib position, pelvic orientation, and breathing that a lot of us still use even when we don’t call it PRI.

That’s real value. For someone stuck in extension, living with flared ribs and a pelvis tipped forward, learning to exhale fully and reposition can change how a squat or an overhead reach feels in a single session. I’ve seen it enough times that I don’t need a study to tell me something is happening.

Where it narrows is in the confidence of the explanation. PRI tends to present its patterns as near-universal and its model as complete, so the person in front of you gets read through the pattern before they get read as themselves. From what I’ve seen, the research on PRI-specific outcomes is thin; most of what supports it is clinical reasoning and case reports rather than controlled comparisons. That doesn’t make it wrong. It means the certainty in the room is running ahead of the evidence, and when a system positions itself as having the answer to every dysfunction, it usually doesn’t, because there’s more nuance involved than any one model can carry.

McGill and the Spine That Needs a Break

Stu McGill is super knowledgeable, and I’m not knocking him. His work came out of measuring what loads actually do to the spine, and what he’s trying to do is get the general public out of pain in the most reliable way he knows. The McGill curl, the bird dog, and the side bridge are easy to learn, hard to do wrong, and for someone whose back is irritated, reducing painful motion while building endurance around the trunk is a sensible first move.

The trade-off is the impression it leaves. When anti-motion becomes the default way to train the core, the trunk starts to look like something that should mostly be stiff, and it’s one of the most dynamic structures we have. Throwing, swinging, sprinting, and every racket sport ask for an enormous amount of spinal motion, organized with the hips. I went deeper on this in The Trunk Isn’t Always a Brace, so I won’t repeat it here, but the short version is that bracing is a tool for a context. Taken as the whole picture of core training, it shrinks the trunk down to one piece of what it can do.

It’s also worth being honest that the broader question McGill’s work sits inside (do specific postures and loads cause back pain?) doesn’t have the clean answer people want. An umbrella review of the systematic reviews on spinal posture and physical exposure found no consensus on causality for low back pain (1). Spine sparing is a reasonable strategy for an irritated back. It’s a much weaker foundation for how everyone should train forever.

FRC and the Joint as the Unit

This is the one I have to own, because I’m FRC certified, I teach KINSTRETCH, and a good chunk of how I think about mobility comes from Dr. Spina’s work. What FRC gets right, from my seat, is that it treats the joint as the unit of training and asks a specific question about it: how much range does this joint have, and how much of that range can you control? PAILs and RAILs give you a way to load the end of a range rather than just hang out there, and the logic holds up reasonably well against what we know about isometrics. A systematic review on isometric training parameters found that training at longer muscle lengths tended to produce more hypertrophy and better transfer to dynamic performance, and that high-intensity contractions were needed to change tendon properties (2). That lines up with the FRC approach of loading positions near end range with real effort.

So where does it narrow? In two places, I think. The first is that you can get so joint-specific that you lose the organism. A hip with beautiful isolated rotation still has to be organized with the trunk and the opposite side of the body to walk, run, or throw, and a program made entirely of isolated joint work can miss that integration completely. The second is the way certain tools get treated inside the community. CARs are a great maintenance and assessment tool; they’re also not a range-building method, and I’ve watched people sell them as both. I wrote about that in What CARs Are Actually For. The error there isn’t the drill. It’s treating any one drill, or any one system, as the thing that solves the joint.

90/90 and the Position That Became a Program

90/90 isn’t a methodology, but it’s earned a place here because it behaves like one online. It’s a genuinely useful position. It exposes internal rotation on one hip and external rotation on the other at the same time, it’s easy to set up, and there are good ways to load it so the range becomes something you can use. I laid out how I coach it in The 90/90 Hip Stretch.

The problem is the general prescription. It’s common to see people say 90/90 will increase hip mobility or hip strength, and that can be true; it’s also not necessarily true for the specific person watching, because nobody knows where that person’s hips should be or why without looking at them. Someone with a bony limit to internal rotation (the femoral neck and the socket simply meeting earlier than average) can’t sit into that position without the pelvis hiking or the low back side-bending to make up the difference. They’ll feel a stretch. They’ll be training a compensation. I covered the different reasons internal rotation goes missing in Hip Internal Rotation: The Range Most People Lose, and the point that matters here is that “do 90/90” is a different instruction for each of them.

Why Good Methods Harden Into Answers

If each of these approaches has clear value and clear limits, why do they keep getting sold as complete? I don’t think it’s because the people behind them are dishonest. A few forces push in the same direction.

Certifications need a closed loop. To teach a system, you have to give people a framework they can apply on Monday, and frameworks that admit too many exceptions are hard to teach and harder to sell. So the model gets presented as more complete than its founders might describe it over dinner. Clients want an answer too, and coaches want to give one; “here’s your pattern and here’s the fix” is a much easier conversation than “let’s try a few things and see what your body responds to.” And the internet compresses everything. A careful, context-dependent idea gets clipped into a thirty-second video, the context falls off, and what’s left is a position and a promise.

There’s also a simpler reason, which is that range of motion responds to more than one input. A meta-analysis comparing resistance training with stretching found that both improved range of motion, with no significant difference between them (3). If one method held the key, you’d expect it to win clearly. What the research keeps suggesting instead is that tissue responds to load, time, intent, and exposure, and several different systems can deliver those things. The method is the delivery vehicle.

I’ll admit there’s a tension in me saying this. As a gym owner, it’s good for me that much of the industry is behind, and that many coaches pick one system and stay inside it, because it lets an assessment-first studio stand out. I also wish the industry would catch up. Both are true, and I’d rather say so than pretend the gap is purely a tragedy.

The Assessment Comes Before the Method

The way out isn’t to throw the systems away or to blend them into some vague “I use everything” stance, which is usually a way of not committing to anything. It’s to put the question in front of the method. What is limiting this person, at this joint, in this position, right now?

Take the same complaint (a hip that feels tight in flexion) and you can get three very different people. One is stuck in extension through the ribs and pelvis, and the hip feels blocked because the pelvis has nowhere to go; breathing and repositioning work, the kind PRI is good at, might change more in ten minutes than a month of stretching. Another has passive range but no control at the end of it, and the hip guards because it doesn’t trust the position; that’s a loading problem, and PAILs and RAILs are built for it. A third has an irritated back, and the hip “tightness” is protective; calming things down and building tolerance, closer to McGill’s playbook, is the right first step. Same complaint, three methods, and the one that’s right depends entirely on what you found.

That’s why assessment-first coaching isn’t one more methodology competing with the others. It’s the step that decides which tool belongs in the room. You still need to know the tools deeply, because a shallow understanding of five systems is worse than a deep understanding of one. But the depth is in service of the question, and the question belongs to the person in front of you.

Who Actually Needs One System

There’s a fair argument on the other side, and it deserves its space. Newer coaches benefit from learning one system thoroughly before they start mixing. A framework gives you a way to see, a sequence to follow, and a language to explain what you’re doing, and coaches who skip that step tend to collect drills instead of developing judgment. Going deep on FRC, or PRI, or McGill’s work early in a career isn’t the problem. Staying there, and mistaking the boundaries of the system for the boundaries of the body, is.

The same goes for some clients. Someone in pain, or someone who struggles to stick with anything, may do better with one clear, simple framework than with a coach who keeps changing the approach. Adherence matters more than elegance; the best program on paper does nothing if it doesn’t get done. In those cases, picking one approach and committing to it is good coaching. It’s still a choice made for that person, though, rather than a belief about everyone.

The test I keep coming back to is asking a coach what their favorite method can’t do. If they have a ready answer, the method is still a tool in their hands, something they reach for when it fits and set down when it doesn’t. If they don’t have one, the method has stopped being a tool and started being an identity, and identities are a lot harder to update than programs.

References

1. Swain, C. T. V., et al. (2020). No consensus on causality of spine postures or physical exposure and low back pain: A systematic review of systematic reviews. Journal of Biomechanics. Link
2. Oranchuk, D. J., et al. (2019). Isometric training and long-term adaptations: Effects of muscle length, intensity, and intent: A systematic review. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. Link
3. Alizadeh, S., et al. (2023). Resistance Training Induces Improvements in Range of Motion: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine. Link