Featured Speakers for the 2026 AGM Education Day
Gregory S. Johnson and Vicky Saliba Johnson, guest speakers for the 2026 educational day, are co-founders of the Institute of Physical Art (IPA) and the Functional Manual Therapy® (FMT) approach to patient care. Both Gregg and Vicky trained under Maggie Knott, who together with Dr. Kabot founded the PNF approach to patient care. Gregg was primary faculty at Kaiser for over 6 years prior to 1978 and began teaching the first weekend PNF courses for Maggie in 1977. Through the IPA, Gregg and Vicky continued Maggie’s work and expanded on the principles of PNF to develop the FMT approach, ensuring the continued use of PNF for decades as a critical component of advanced manual therapy. Together with their highly trained faculty, the IPA has educated over 55,000 therapists throughout the US and the world. The IPA mission it to impart to clinicians a systematic, scientifically grounded approach to manual therapy, with the goal of restoring and optimizing efficient movement.
Education Day Overview
Lecture and labs will focus on the correlation of PNF to CoreFirst® Principles of posture and movement. The lecture will lay the foundation for PNF as the most efficient manual approach to treat and facilitate efficient human movement, regardless of pathology. Labs will focus on the connectivity of extremities to the core and the facilitation of the core through the extremities. Specific techniques will include Tonic Spread (Saliba 2007), Combination of Isotonics (Johnson 1978), Prolonged Holds, Functional Mobilization, and total body patterns of movement (Functional Movement Patterns™). An emphasis will be placed on the importance of PNF in conjunction with joint and soft tissue mobilization to facilitate efficient functional movement.