This vlog post is from a tutorial previously only available in our professional membership area. However, we feel this is such an important topic we wanted to raise greater awareness to the importance and relevance of individualised approaches to exercise prescription and programming. It poses two very important questions:

• What is the purpose of an exercise?
• Can exercise centric training systems truly serve the interests of all those that they profess to help achieve their aspirations?

To answer these questions, we must first understand what an exercise is and the role they play for those who practice them and those that teach them. We must also consider where the exercises we know come form and for what purpose they were originally intended. It is also probably important at this point to clarify what I mean by an exercise centric training system. These are training systems, approaches or methods that typically teach a repertoire of exercises that are...

Posture is a concept most of us will have been aware of from as far back as our earliest memories. Whether through direct or implied social instruction, the inference that it matters how we hold and conduct ourselves is imbedded in the psyche of most of us. Widely described as the position in which someone holds their body when standing or sitting, the concept of posture extends beyond static alignment considerations, to include the carriage of the body during dynamic biomechanical processes during locomotion and functional movement tasks. Optimal postural form has been codified across a wide variety of societal settings including education, health and physical performance environments of military, sport, and dance. Despite this, approaches defining the biomechanical coordinates of optimal postural alignment are fraught with inconsistencies, due in part to the multifactorial and complex nature of their rationalisation¹. In this article we consider the rationale of postural...