Working with clients as they move provides endless possibilities for assessment and improvement in real time. No longer do you have to ‘assess, treat, and re-assess’ – you can do it all at the same time.

Clients seek bodywork because they want to reduce their symptoms and improve their performance – we want to help with both at the same time.

Functional Bodywork allows the practitioner to work with motor control, joint and soft-tissue issues with the same technique – the client is simultaneously assessed, treated and re-educated with pain-free interventions.

Previously known as ‘Born to Move’, the Functional Bodywork workshops blend functional movement principles with hands-on manipulation of the soft tissue to give you completely new and exciting assessments and treatment strategies for your clients.

You will learn how to manipulate client positioning and movement to create predictable reactions through the client’s system. The client can be worked on in whatever position is most appropriate for their pain pattern, their strength and balance, or according to the needs of the treatment plan. By the end of the 4 days of training, the therapist will know exactly how to create movements that support the client’s goals.

Not only do the workshops give you a full range of treatment principles but it also gives you an immediate sense of true functional anatomy. The body’s natural tensegrity, its ‘kinetic chain’, or it’s ‘chain reaction’, however you wish to word it, is all felt, assessed, and worked with directly during treatment. We do not make up ‘anatomy stories’, limit you to ‘anatomy models’, or follow one school of thought – in this workshop the client’s system and its movement are the only references.

What is Functional Bodywork?

Functional Bodywork (FB, formerly Active Fascial Release/AFR) has been developed by James Earls, blending his understanding of myofascial and functional movement principles with hands-on manipulation of the soft tissue to create a variety of therapeutic effects.

James trained with Tom Myers, the originator of the Anatomy Trains model, and studied functional movement principles with Gary Gray and David Tiberio of the Gray Institute. Functional Bodywork aims to bring the best of both these models together to give you an immediate and effective treatment tool.

Functional Bodywork combines elements of motor control theory with a neuro-myo-fascial approach to identify, treat and finally re-educate the client’s movement patterns. Blending guided movement with various soft tissue engagement protocols has created a method that addresses the body as a whole and acknowledges the roles of the body’s various tissues and their interrelationships.