The PREMIER Body Method is a system used to teach “the art of using one’s physical body.”
The PREMIER Body Method is a fully comprehensive training program designed to teach the fundamentals of movement mechanics, and then how to apply those mechanics to fitness, exercise, sports performance training, and the real world.
It is used as a rehabilitation training system to help people suffering from injury or chronic pain. It is used to decrease the risk of injury, and serves as a body preservation strategy for both athletes and persons looking to live a health life style.
The PREMIER Body Method is used by health and fitness enthusiasts, as well as athletes, all the way to the highest level, as a method of training the body to perform at its best.
Why do you want to understand how to use your body? Another way to ask it is; what is your motivation?
For many people the answer is easy. I, for example, have always been obsessed with exercise, human performance, and physical fitness. I love this stuff! Many of you out there feel the same way. You love being active, in shape, and achieving higher and higher levels of physical ability and performance. For all the athletes out there, your why is because you want to become better, stronger, faster, and more efficient and productive in your training and sport. Coaches and others who work with athletes have the same goals. Others find that their motivation is to look and feel good. You want to be lean, hard, and sexy. So you are motivated by aesthetics. Or, you may want to live longer and have a higher quality of life. These can all be great why factors and fantastic motivators. But for many others, you don’t exactly love exercise. If fact, many of you out there flat out hate it! So why do it? Why learn this stuff?
One Hundred Million!
According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), this is the number of persons in the United States that suffer from physical pain. That’s nearly one out of every three Americans. To put it another way, that’s more than diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and stroke – combined! (AAPM 2014) The impact on quality of life is astounding. Of the 100 million Americans suffering from pain, two-thirds say their pain greatly affects their overall enjoyment of life. More than three-quarters report depression as a result of their pain. Worse yet, an estimated 86% of pain sufferers report inability to sleep due to their pain. Physical pain affects our quality of life on an epic scale. (AAPM 2014)
The list of people affected by pain goes on and on, extending from the person suffering from pain to that person’s family, friends, and beyond. These are not just any people. These people are the people you know. These people are you.
How many people do you know that suffer from pain? Yourself? Your parents, spouse, or friends? Some coworkers? We all know someone with back pain, neck pain, knee pain, hip pain, or shoulder pain. Pain is so commonplace that we just accept it as a part of life. Back pain is the leading cause of disability in America and worldwide for people under the age of 45.
Statistics show that over twenty six million Americans suffer from back pain. The pain doesn’t stop there. The American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAMP) reports that these individuals are “three times more likely to be in fair or poor health and more than four times as likely to experience serious psychological distress as people without low back pain.” They’re also more likely to have drug addictions.
Where have we gone wrong? Have the experts failed us? Should doctors, physical therapists, Chiropractors, and other health experts take the blame? I don’t think so. We do the best we can, and we’re actually doing a remarkable job. That is in terms of treatment. That’s a key point. The true failure lies in our understanding of how we have gotten to this point in the first place. We need to consider why we end up in so much physical pain so we can prevent it and, when it does occur, treat it more effectively. What is the real cause of physical pain? Is it really just a part of life? Is it genetics? Is it aging? Is it nutrition?
I suspect that yes, all of these likely play a part. However, I have dedicated and spent the majority of my life studying the nature of physical pain and injury. Both as a doctor specializing in sports medicine, and as an athlete dealing with pain and injury myself, I have come to see one factor far above any other to be the leader in the true root cause of physical pain.
Physical pain is a physical problem. It is caused by physically using our bodies improperly.
Poor biomechanics, which is the scientific term for how we move, leads to pain. When we are speaking about physical pain in our bodies, we are speaking about the result of the physical damage we have caused to them due to improper biomechanics. Since we each only get one body, this concept seems critical. Moving your body correctly is fundamental in treating and reducing the risk of pain and injury. How you use (move) your body will determine how you feel.
Prevention is the only true cure for our pain epidemic. We can reduce the risk of pain by learning proper biomechanics, that is, how to move our bodies correctly. This knowledge needs to be ground into us, just like we learn other health habits like brushing our teeth to prevent decay and washing wounds to prevent infections. We can only do this through teaching each other. It’s no different than driving a car. You may have the keys and the car, but you can’t make use of it until you learn how to drive it. Everyone needs to learn how to drive this wonderful machine we call the human body. The exciting thing is that it is really not that hard. It just has to be learned. Just like we learn to read and write, we can learn to use and control our physical bodies.
See we need to think of life as a sport in and of itself. We live in a physical world; this world demands physical abilities from our body. If we don’t properly take care of our body physically, many of these abilities get stripped away as we age. It has been one of the true joys in my career to see so many people time and time again gain back their physical ability. What my true goal is, is for people to understand how to move and use the their body from the beginning. Before all the damage is done.
The Vision
It is my belief that understanding this knowledge of how to move our bodies correctly is an essential part of life, just like personal hygiene, or eating right. I don’t brush my teeth every day because I like the feeling of scratching bristles against my gums, I do it because I’m smart enough to realize that if I don’t, some bad stuff has a much higher probability of happening. Now, does brushing my teeth prevent 100% of cavities and tooth decay, of course not, but it certainly drastically reduces the risk of it. The same is true for the physical body. The information learned throughout the PREMIER Body Method helps us understand how to take care of the physical body, possibly reducing the risk of accelerated wear and tear damage, and excessive degenerative changes as we age.
In my mind, I believe this should just be common human knowledge. We teach each other so many other wonderful things: reading, writing, math, science, language, art, and history, but nobody ever takes the time to teach you how to actually use your physical body. It’s really quite astonishing when you think about it. I have been teaching this program for quite some time, and pretty much everyone that has gone through the program has said to me the same thing: “Why is this not taught to us from the beginning?” Well now it can be, with the PREMIER Body Method.
The big dream is to have this concept of movement education implemented into our society at a young age, before all the damage is done. It should be tough in schools, as part of a complete physical education program. It should be taught at home, as it’s passed from parent to child. Understanding how to move should be apart of our culture.
Dr. Donald James Richardson, DC, CCSP, DACBSP, CSCS
Sports Medicine Specialist
Strength and Conditioning Specialist
Dr. Richardson was born and raised in southern California. As a child and teenager his main interests included sports, science, and math. Performing as an athlete has helped to shape Dr. Richardson's life and give him the values of dedication, teamwork, as well as years of joy. He played all sports as a child, and continued in high school and collegiate sports as a football player and track athlete. Dr. Richardson’s academic strengths lead him to pursue the pre-med collegiate major of human biology and biochemistry at the University of California Santa Barbara. He then continued his graduate and post-graduate education at Southern California University, completing his doctorate in 2008, and residency by 2011. His passions for sports, science, and the human body lead him to pursue his post-graduate specialty degrees in sports medicine, biomechanics, rehabilitation, sports nutrition, strength and conditioning, and sports performance. Dr. Richardson has worked with the national governing bodies of several sports since 2008. During this time he has served as both a team doctor and sports performance coach, both nationally and traveling internationally all over the world with athletes, and completed a volunteer rotation as USOC Sports Medicine Volunteer from December 27, 2010 – January 10, 2011 in Chula Vista, California. His true passion is in the field of human movement education and bridging the gap between rehabilitation, basic strength and conditioning, health and fitness, and sports performance.
Dr. Richardson then continued his career at a large multidisciplinary orthopedic physical medicine and rehabilitation center in Newport Beach, CA. Here, Dr. Richardson served as the rehabilitation director, treating injuries of all types and teaching biomechanics from the ground up. Dr. Richardson’s unique variety of specialty training allowed him to fill this dynamic.
"Having had the privilege and honor of working in many aspects of physical medicine and the musculoskeletal system, has allowed me to integrate many aspects of care.”
Dr. Richardson’s drive, determination, and expertise then led him to venture into creating his own private practice in his hometown of Los Angeles, CA. Universal Sports Performance is the culmination of all aspects of sport, health, and fitness. Offering services ranging from sports medicine, injury diagnosis, rehabilitation, Chiropractic care, physiotherapy, injury prevention education, sports performance training, personal fitness training, nutritional and diet programing, among other health care services makes Universal Sports Performance truly a one stop shop for anyone looking to improve his or her health, fitness, and performance goals. “My unique combination of experiences has allowed me to create the ultimate training environment for people of all levels to achieve their goals, weather that be healing from an injury, just getting back in shape to enjoy the life they deserve, or taking performance to the highest level.” Taking care of the human body is what it is all about. “At Universal Sports Performance we take great pride in finding and diagnosing the root cause of the pathology which leads to the long term dysfunction many people suffer from today. It is only through re-training the root cause of our dysfunctions, that we can truly heal.”
Dr. Richardson has also served as an associate professor at Southern California University, where he has taught classes in biomechanics, rehabilitation, and strength and conditioning at the graduate level.
The culmination of Dr. Richardson’s work has lead to the creation of the PREMIER Body Method, a fully comprehensive educational training system designed for the purpose of human movement education and biomechanics in relation to musculoskeletal pathology, health and fitness, and sports performance.
Taking you more in depth, the book offers you an advanced look into all of the teachings, methods, scientific background, and philosophy of this training system.
The original idea for the PREMIER Body Method came from the vision of creating a complete system that works at all levels, from rehabilitation through exercise, strength, and conditioning. The next thought was about all the people, not necessarily elite level athletes, who simply want to live a happy, healthy, pain-free life through exercise and physical fitness.
If you ask anyone who knows about injury, pain, and exercise, you will come to find that poor technique, or the mechanics of human movement, is the single greatest factor leading to injury. Once the individual experiences pain, performance declines and progression stops.
Because injury results from poor technique, it makes sense that a complete, yet simple system that teaches proper human biomechanics from the ground up would have the potential to reduce the risk of such injuries.
This idea continued to drive the development of the PREMIER system to not only be the bridge connecting rehab to sports performance, but to make The PREMIER system a fully comprehensive program to train human movement mechanics from the most basic level, all the way through a level of functional human fitness and beyond. It is a system thorough enough to progress injury to high-level function, yet simple enough that you don’t have to be a high level athlete to perform it, or have a doctorate degree to understand it. The book, The Sport of Life, is the complete written work and manual for this training system.