Course BadgeHODA-A™ Certification · Level 1
Perceptual Calibration Certification
Become the calibrated instrument behind your findings.
Every clinical finding you have ever produced passed through one instrument: you. Level 1 is sixteen mentored weeks with Dr Jo Abbott in which that instrument is finally examined, understood and calibrated — using the assessment methods you already own.
From the cohorts
Clinicians who have already done this.
★★★★★
“Through this course I deepened my trust in myself and my skills — learning to quiet my own internal state, navigate and stabilise my biases and assumptions, challenge what I feel. HODA-A Level 1 has made the intangible tangible… through simple drills that you can easily include in your clinic routine. This course has contributed more to my professional development than any other in over 20 years of practice.”Christina ChalmersBSc Sports Therapist, East Sussex, UK
★★★★★
“After 30 years as a hands-on therapist, this is the most impactful course I’ve ever done… I now start from ground zero with every client. Not ‘I’ve seen this before’ — because the truth is, I haven’t. Every body is unique. Clients often say: ‘Wow… I didn’t even realise that was happening until you explained it.’”Teresa DixonSports therapist, New Zealand · 30 years in practice
★★★★★
“It puts facts, accuracy and reliability back into the hands-on value that a therapist can provide… It is a journey in the development of the therapist and how they respond to their environment, the client, and the true reality of what assessments reveal.”Heidi ThomsonHODA-A™ Level 1 graduate
The founding question
How do you know when to trust what you see, feel and perceive?
Level 1 does not answer that question for you. It gives you a structured process for answering it yourself, patient by patient — which is the only form of the answer that survives contact with real practice.
What you can do afterwards
"What will I actually be better at on Monday morning?"
The fair question, answered plainly. Seven capabilities you hold at the end of Level 1 that you did not hold at the start.
You can tell when you are the reason the finding looks like that
Instead of “my hands felt X, therefore the tissue is X,” you check your own position, force, contact duration, attention, expectation and hand temperature first.
Fewer conclusions drawn from compromised acquisition conditions.
You can separate what you sensed from what you think it means
Sensation, perception and interpretation stop collapsing into a single event. You can say where in that chain a finding formed.
Most disagreement between two clinicians happens at interpretation, not at sensation. You cannot resolve a disagreement you cannot locate.
You test findings instead of confirming them
You learn to ask what you could change — contact, direction, position, sensory channel, the information you already hold — that would give the finding an opportunity to disappear.
A finding that survives three attempts to remove it is worth considerably more than one you found and liked.
Your experience becomes explicit rather than mysterious
You keep the intuition. You gain the ability to say how you knew — so you can defend it, teach it, transfer it, and notice when it fails.
Expertise you can specify is expertise that can outlive you.
You become more systematic without becoming robotic
HODA-A™ prescribes no palpation method. It gives you a framework for interrogating the ones you already use.
Less arbitrary process and greater consistency of approach — a change in method, not yet a demonstrated change in reliability.
You build a calibration habit rather than another technique
Most CPD adds a technique. Level 1 asks how good the instrument is that is holding all of them.
One reusable process that travels across everything you already do — and everything you learn next.
You report findings with their uncertainty
“Compliance asymmetry, right greater than left. Moderate confidence — near my resolution limit at this force, patient seven of the day.” Rather than: “the right side’s tighter.”
Nobody objects to a measurement reported with its uncertainty. What the profession objects to — rightly — is certainty that has not earned itself.
Where are you in your career?
The same programme. Two opposite starting problems.
Every HODA-A™ clinician begins at Level 1, whatever their experience — that shared foundation is what protects the standard. But the reason it matters to you depends enormously on where you are standing.
Twenty, thirty years in practice
Your problem is not sensitivity. It is that decades of skill have never been characterised.
You can feel things a new graduate cannot. You also carry the strongest expectations in the room — and expectation lowers the threshold for detecting what you already anticipate. Experience improves your detection and increases your bias at the same time. Nobody has ever told you that, because nobody has ever specified the instrument.
- Language for what you have always known but never had to articulate — so you can teach it, transfer it and defend it
- The one thing experience cannot supply on its own: a way to notice when experience is the problem
- Your autonomy back, without giving up rigour
- A serious answer to “palpation is unreliable” that is neither defensive nor dismissive
“I’ve been doing this for thirty years. What could this teach me?”
Nothing about your hands. Everything about the instrument behind them. You have been running a precision instrument that has never been calibrated, characterised or given a specification — and that is not a criticism of you. Nobody in this profession has ever been offered one.
“After 30 years as a hands-on therapist, I can honestly say this is the most impactful course I’ve ever done… One of the biggest shifts has been understanding bias. This work has taught me to challenge what I feel, to question it, and ensure it’s real — not something created by my own assumptions.” Teresa Dixon · Sports therapist, New Zealand · 30 years in practice
Final year and newly qualified
Your problem is the opposite: no internal reference, and you have been taught not to trust the one you are building.
You were trained in protocols, evidence hierarchies and the finding that palpation reliability is poor — then sent into clinic to put your hands on people anyway. So either everything feels the same, or everything feels significant. You defer to imaging and to whoever is most senior, and you follow the script tightly because deviating feels like malpractice.
- A deliberate method for building a perceptual reference library, instead of waiting twenty years to accumulate one by accident
- Permission to trust your perception — bounded honestly. Confidence with a stated uncertainty is safer and more defensible than either false certainty or total deference
- Vocabulary: you can describe what you found and how you acquired it, to a supervisor or an MDT, without hand-waving
- The right sequence — calibration before technique collection, rather than unlearning later
“I’m too new for this. Shouldn’t I master the basics first?”
This is the basics. It is the layer underneath every technique you are about to learn. Everyone else on your course will spend a decade acquiring this by trial and error — and most will never make it explicit.
“I am the instrument, and my hands are data collectors, not only tools to deliver a ‘treatment.’ … I had a big imposter syndrome issue before starting. Has it been resolved? Without a doubt, yes.” Miriam Moffat · Graduate Sport Rehabilitator, BASRaT-registered · London
And if you are somewhere in the middle — competent, busy, and aware that CPD became technique collection some time ago — this is the first programme in years that works on you rather than on your toolkit.
The programme at a glance
What you are enrolling in.
The sixteen-week journey
How clinicians evolve, week by week.
Nine modules, sequenced so that each one makes the next possible. You begin by examining the perceiver, then the history and relationship that shape what the perceiver receives, then the physiology of the signal itself — and finally you put the instrument back together.
Perception changes through repetition, reflection and time. A weekend course can inform you. It cannot recalibrate you.
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Week 1
Arrival and kick-off
The live kick-off integration session. You meet your cohort, receive your calibration kit, and confront the founding question: what does my assessment actually measure?
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Weeks 2–4
Perceiving the perceiver
Human Perception and Interoception. You learn to notice your own internal state before and during contact — and discover how much of “what the tissue feels like” begins inside you.
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Weeks 5–8
Memory, relationship and touch
Sensorimotor Memory Stimulation and Care Ethicist Attunement. Your history is in your hands, and the therapeutic relationship shapes the signal. Laboratories make both visible.
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Weeks 9–12
The science of the signal
Cross-Modal Judgements & Neuroplasticity, Mechanoreceptor Activation, Intuition & Pattern Literacy. Intuition is respected — then examined, trained and calibrated.
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Weeks 13–16
Integration and consolidation
Sensorimotor Integration, Somatosensory Interpretation, and the end-of-course live integration session. Nine ideas become one habit — yours, calibrated, with the certificate to evidence it.
The calibration kit
This programme arrives at your door.
Level 1 laboratories are physical, not theoretical. Your onboarding kit contains the objects your hands will train against — each one a known reference, a fixed quantity your perception can be tested against, week after week.
Testing yourself against something that holds still is the only way to separate what varies in the patient from what varies in you.
- Braille blocks
- Wooden blocks
- LEGO bricks
- Eye masks
- Marbles
- Feathers
- Tuning forks
- Therapy putty
- Gel hand warmers
Structured laboratories
Hands-on calibration exercises against known references, repeated across the sixteen weeks so that drift becomes something you can observe rather than something you suspect.
Reflective calibration assessments
Module quizzes and reflective calibration pulses that track how your perception — and your reasoning about it — changes across the programme.
Guided integration
Dr Jo connects the science to your background: your previous career, your clinical language, your discipline, your way of perceiving.
Said plainly
What Level 1 claims — and what it does not.
A framework built on measurement science has to hold itself to the standard it asks of everyone else. So here is the honest boundary, before you spend anything.
| Level 1 does not claim | What it does claim |
|---|---|
| That you will become measurably more reliable. | That you will learn to recognise, interrogate and begin calibrating the variables that influence the information you acquire. |
| That HODA-A™ has proven that calibration improves inter- or intra-clinician reliability. | That this is an empirical question — and that designing and running the study is exactly the point of the framework. |
| That your clinical outcomes will improve. | That participants consistently report their clients notice a difference in presence, clarity and how quickly relevant areas are found. |
| That your hands will become more accurate in absolute terms. | That you become a comparator with a known operating range — reading difference against a reference, which is what a human instrument can honestly do. |
| That this replaces the assessment methods you use now. | That it interrogates them. Bring your palpation method, your movement observation, your joint assessment — HODA-A™ examines the measurement process underneath. |
Before we test reliability, we must stabilise the instrument. Level 1 is the stabilising.
The Clinical Integration Community
Sixteen weeks, and you never calibrate alone.
Every cohort has a private Clinical Integration Community — an active professional space where clinicians share calibration observations, test their language, examine uncertainty together, and learn from how differently other clinicians perceive the same thing.
Between modules, Dr Jo uses the cohort’s real questions and reflections to revisit theory and make the next step manageable. Participation is optional, professional boundaries apply, and patient-identifiable information is never shared.
The disagreements are not a problem to be managed. They are the most instructive material in the programme.
Guided, not just delivered
Mentored by Dr Jo throughout.
Personalised bridges from your previous expertise — musician, athlete, engineer, experienced clinician — into the measurement framework.
Reflective feedback that helps you separate sensation, perception, interpretation and action.
Progress support when pace, confidence or cognitive load needs adjusting: the journey is guided, not policed.
Two live integration sessions — kick-off and end-of-course — offered at times that serve a global cohort, and recorded for on-demand catch-up.
A mentored journey, not a video library with a forum attached.
Sixteen weeks · Lifetime access
The programme is sixteen weeks. The learning is for life.
The guided certification — mentoring, live integration, cohort community — runs for a defined sixteen weeks. Your lifetime learning access continues afterwards: revisit modules, repeat laboratories, and return to concepts as they become newly relevant across your career. A concept you meet in week six lands differently two years into calibrated practice.
Enrolment
Choose your cohort.
Level 1 runs as a mentored cohort, not on continuous open enrolment. Places in each cohort are deliberately limited so that every clinician can be guided properly — and so that calibration kits arrive before week one.
| Cohort | Begins | Completes | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cohort 4 | Week of 30 November 2026 | March 2027 | Open |
| Cohort 5 | Spring 2027 | Summer 2027 | Dates to be confirmed |
£795 per clinician. That covers all nine modules and the final integration phase, your physical calibration kit posted to you, both live integration sessions with Dr Jo, your cohort’s private Clinical Integration Community, approximately 45 CPD hours, your certificate and credential badge, and lifetime learning access to the materials as they develop. There is nothing further to buy.
Not ready to decide? Attend a free webinar, or book fifteen minutes with Dr Jo and work out honestly whether this is your season.
Enrolling a clinical team of eight or more? Speak to Dr Jo about a team cohort.
Frequently asked
The questions clinicians actually ask.
I have been in practice for decades. What could this teach me?
Nothing about your hands — they are almost certainly more sensitive than a new graduate’s. What Level 1 adds is a specification for the instrument behind them: a language for what you have always known but never had to articulate, and a way to notice the one thing experience cannot correct on its own. Every prior you have accumulated across those decades lowers the threshold for detecting what you already expect. That is not a flaw in you; it is how perception works, and it has never been made visible to clinicians before.
I have only just qualified. Am I too new for this?
No — and the sequence works in your favour. Level 1 is the layer underneath every technique you are about to learn, so you acquire it before you build habits that would later need unlearning. It also gives you something most new graduates lack: a way to describe what you found and how you acquired it, with your confidence stated honestly, in front of a supervisor or an MDT.
What does Level 1 cost, and what is included?
HODA-A™ Level 1 is £795 per clinician. That covers the full sixteen-week guided certification programme: all nine modules and the final integration phase, your physical calibration kit posted to you, both live integration sessions with Dr Jo, your cohort’s private Clinical Integration Community, approximately 45 CPD hours, your certificate and credential badge, and lifetime learning access to the materials as they develop. There is nothing further to buy.
Why sixteen weeks?
Because calibration is embodied learning, not information transfer. Perception changes through repetition, reflection and time — a weekend course can inform you, but it cannot recalibrate you. Sixteen weeks at around three hours a week gives the nervous system what it actually needs: deliberate pace, spaced repetition and guided integration.
Is three hours a week realistic alongside a full clinical week?
It is designed around it. Much of the work rides along with the patients you are already seeing, and the reflection is measured in minutes rather than evenings. Only the two live integration sessions are scheduled; everything else flexes around your list.
Do I have to attend live?
No. There are two live integration sessions — kick-off and end-of-course — each offered at two times to serve a global cohort, and both are recorded. Between them, learning is self-paced between live integration sessions, designed around real clinical workloads.
Is this evidence-based?
Yes — and it also examines how the evidence in this area was generated. Both of those can be true at once, and that is rather the point. The framework is COSMIN-informed, and its geometric measurement work has been validated against 3D motion capture. Where a claim has not yet been tested, this page says so.
Will it make my palpation reliable?
That is the honest question, and the honest answer is that it is an empirical question rather than a promise. Level 1 teaches you to recognise, interrogate and begin calibrating the variables that influence what you acquire. Whether calibrated clinicians demonstrate better repeatability and reproducibility against traceable references is a study that needs running — and building the framework capable of running it is what HODA-A™ exists to do.
Do I have to give up the methods I already use?
Not at all. Bring them. Bring your palpation protocol, your movement observation, your joint assessment, your discipline’s way of working. HODA-A™ is not another technique — it is the measurement architecture through which the methods you already trust can be interrogated, and often strengthened.
How much mentoring is included?
Level 1 is guided throughout. Dr Jo leads the live integration sessions, is active in the Clinical Integration Community between modules, and uses the cohort’s own questions and reflections to shape how theory is revisited. This is a mentored journey, not a video library with a forum attached.
Who is Level 1 for?
Manual therapists, physiotherapists, osteopaths, chiropractors, sports and soft-tissue therapists, movement professionals, educators and researchers — anyone whose clinical findings depend on their own perception. Every HODA-A™ clinician begins here, whatever their experience: that shared foundation is what protects the standard.
Will it count for CPD?
Level 1 represents approximately 45 CPD hours and carries a certificate and credential badge on completion. Categories vary between professional bodies, so check yours — most participants log it without difficulty.
What do I hold at the end?
The HODA-A™ Level 1 Perceptual Calibration Certificate and course badge — evidence of approximately 45 CPD hours — plus eligibility to continue to Level 2: Clinical Signal Integration. More importantly, you hold a measurement system you finally understand: your own.
Begin the work
Your hands were never the problem.
But an instrument this sensitive deserves better than being left uncalibrated. Sixteen guided weeks. A calibration kit at your door. A cohort of clinicians doing the same honest work. And an instrument — yours — that finally gets the care it deserves.
Cohort 4 begins the week of 30 November 2026 · Places deliberately limited · Nobody skips Level 1
HODA-A Level 1 Perceptual Calibration Certification
This is a must do course! It is a scientific and evidence based course. It puts both facts and accuracy, and reliability back into the hands-on value that a therapist can provide. Hands-on assessment becomes scientifically measurable, repeatable and reliable. Apart from learning the science and how to calibrate, it is a journey of learning how integral the therapist becomes in the management of calibration and assessment. It’s a journey in the development of the therapist and how they respond to their environment, the client, and the true reality of what assessments reveal. This course has the scope and freedom to allow one to explore all aspects of therapy and what it means to be a therapist. This is an exciting and dynamic course. It will grow your success and is life changing.
30 Years in Practice… and This Changed Everything”
After 30 years as a hands-on therapist, I can honestly say this is the most impactful course I’ve ever done.
HODAA has completely transformed the way I work.
It’s taught me how to truly listen to my own body first—calming my nervous system, becoming centred and present—before I even begin working with a client. From that place, everything changes.
My hands are more sensitive.
My awareness is deeper.
And I’m far more intentional in every treatment.
One of the biggest shifts has been understanding bias.
We all carry it—but bringing it into a session stops us from truly hearing and feeling the client. This work has taught me to challenge what I feel, to question it, and ensure it’s real—not something created by my own assumptions.
I now start from ground zero with every client.
Not “I’ve seen this before”—because the truth is, I haven’t. Every body is unique.
Instead, I feel what the client presents through my hands and respond to that. And the results speak for themselves.
Clients often say:
“Wow… I didn’t even realise that was happening until you explained it.”
That level of clarity, trust, and understanding has completely changed my outcomes.
This isn’t just a course—it’s a different way of thinking, feeling, and treating.
And for me, this is just the beginning of the journey
Teresa
Sports therapist and Backpain Systems ResetTM Coach
New Zealand
Very Highly Recommended!
Through this course I deepened my trust in myself and my skills, learning to quiet my own internal state, navigate and stabilise my biases and assumptions, challenge what I feel. I am no longer asking questions from a place of fear but most importantly from a place of security and grounding. HODA-A Level 1 has made the intangible tangible. Bringing science of calibration, connection and touch into real life situations, through simple drills that you can easily include in your clinic routine. This course has contributed more to my professional development than any other in over 20 years of practice! I cannot recommend this course highly enough to all hands-on practitioners. It will transform your approach to assessment, treatment and clinical decision making.
Christina
BSc Sports Therapist
East Sussex, UK.