Less pressure. That is the whole method.
In the early 1980s, Dr Marcel Caufriez was looking for a way to re-educate the abdomen and the pelvic floor without increasing the pressure on them. He did not find one, so he created it. Here you can train in his method, with him.
The classic crunch pushes down. This one draws up.
Every repetition of a conventional crunch pushes the viscera downwards and forwards, against the abdominal wall and against the pelvic floor. On healthy musculature nothing happens. On weakened musculature, that repeated push is part of the problem.
A hypopressive exercise does exactly the opposite. It is performed in expiratory apnoea, with a rib cage opening that produces a diaphragmatic aspiration: the diaphragm rises, the pressure inside the abdomen drops and the viscera move up instead of down.
Hence the name. Hypopressive: less pressure.
The visible effect of diaphragmatic aspiration.
The pressure you cannot see
Coughing, laughing, lifting weight, running, the wrong abdominal exercise. These are ordinary movements, and all of them push downwards. Repeated over years on a pelvic floor that no longer responds as it once did, they stop being harmless.
Dr Caufriez, who spent his career measuring the pressures inside the body, grouped under the name hyperpressive syndrome the disorders linked to that sustained excess of pressure: prolapse, incontinence, reflux, oxidative deficit. Hypopressive techniques were created to work precisely there.
It is not a set of exercises. It is a method with levels.
The exercises are the visible part. Underneath there is an assessment system —tests, exclusion criteria, a decision algorithm— and that is what turns a posture into an intervention.
And there is a path above it. Basic and Static Hypopressive Abdominal Gymnastics are the first two levels. Above them come the higher levels of the Hypopressive Method and the Peripartum and Neuromyostatic branches, as well as Physiosexology. All by the same author, all within Caufriez Concept®.
Starting here is not taking a course. It is coming in through the front door.
Genupectoral exercise, one of those in the basic progression.
He teaches it himself. And online, only here.
Forty-five years after creating the technique, Dr Caufriez still teaches it personally. He gives his in-person seminar around the world and, online, only this training.
This is Hypopressive Abdominal Gymnastics GAH1+2, with the same Caufriez Concept® certification as the in-person course. The course page has the full syllabus, the price, the deadlines and the frequently asked questions.
Dr Marcel Caufriez. Doctor in Motor Sciences, more than 200 scientific publications.
Learn the method where it begins
No intermediaries and no second-hand versions. You enrol and you start the same day.