It seems everyone has a problem with their glutes right now. At least every second person that visits my clinic, tells me that another therapist has told them that their glutes are inactive/weak/not firing or insert any other glute related term that is the flavour of the month right now. 

Funnily enough, 10 years ago, this isn't a thing that I heard so much. So have we all gotten weak butts all of a sudden? Heck even K-Mart now sells a set of bands to get the masses to crabwalk and clamshell their butts back to burliness.

But are all of your glute exercises and squats actually fixing the issue with your glutes?

Here I'll answer this, as well as leaving the question open, as to why are the 2 most popular glute exercises named after sealife?

Is sitting the problem....?

It could be argued that the rise in the need to fire up everyone's glutes is related to the increased time we spend sitting. As a result, it is said, our pelvis position anteriorly tilts, meaning the glutes are...

Every time I see a new client theres a period of improving their coach-ability. While it makes my job a lot easier, as I can cue the person into positions with less fuss, it usually corresponds with the person coming back and telling me how they have improved in sporting performance and technique, as well as being aware of various other movements and positions that they hadn’t been aware of before.

During this time there a few things that I have found that accelerate the coach-ability of my clients.

1. Work with massage balls.

Working with massage balls is a great way to discover your own anatomy. Often it also reveals sore bits you didn’t know that you had. Using a ball to find muscle insertion points helps you to discover what bits do what, and where you may personally need to spend some time releasing and recovering.

2. External cues

When learning how to do exercises it helps to think about your body doing a thing to something else, rather than trying to hard...

It would make sense that improving your range of movement would lessen your chance of injury.

But how does it improve performance?

There are a lot of ideas we could form around how improving mobility may improve performance. But here I want to look at 2 big ones, one that is fairly obvious, and one that contradicts popular beliefs.  Discussing these points will require a bit of science, so buckle up and I’ll try and keep the jargon to a minimum.

1. Inability to access ideal form.

This one should be fairly obvious.

If you have limited ability to dorsiflex at the ankle (pull your toes towards your shin) your squat depth will suffer, which could impact easy to see examples such as a squat, or be the thing that causes you to get injured repeatedly when you run.

Less obvious movements that are impacted, are those that are easily compensated for.

For example, in order to press a weight overhead, it is necessary to flex the shoulder, and...

We get injured when the capacity of our stuff, is exceeded by the load we put on it.

I remember having to play baseball at school for sport. It wasn’t a sport I particularly enjoyed. Especially considering that when playing among other kids forced to play a sport that isn’t their chosen one, skill can be lacking. This meant running between bases, could see balls often fly anywhere. And a number of times, like many of me fallen friends, they would find me. With force.

The most memorable time was when a flying ball made contact with my flying balls. My 3 offspring are evidence that this didn’t cause permanent damage, but the pain of the incident is easily recalled, and flashbacks to writhing on the ground clutching at my early teen assets still feel pretty fresh.

Compare this to the time I was struck on the head with a ball (helmets weren’t the fashion then) and I still made it to the base with a slight rub of the noggin and carried on. Those...

Just recently I penned a post reflecting on my previous state of alllllways being injured, and I spoke about how through this time, I developed the Not Really Yoga system, which has seen me injury free for some time, despite my crappy history.... 

Enter, daddy teaching daughter how to skateboard.

Now, I sit here, one-finger-typing with a cast on my wrist, recalling my previous skills to adapt and deal with injury. This is a well worn path for me, and I've picked up some wisdoms along the way. Below are many of the things I find myself repeating to injured athletes, and hopefully there are some take aways for you in there too.

1. Adapt. 

If you have just sustained an injury, then this is a period of forced, and experimental adaptation. whether you are having to change the way you brush your teeth, or getting dressed takes a little longer, you're abut to learn what it is like to feel like a beginner again. Find a way to enjoy the beginners mind and set goals and...

The buzz with most trainers and gym bros these days is that static stretching is dead, and doing so before exercise will destroy gains and turn you into a weak girly man.

This is an about face from the days that many of us donned out short shorts for school PE, while the teacher told us we have to stretch before we do anything.

So has science discovered that the trusty PE teacher was wrong?

This is an area of massive confusion.

The "don’t stretch" message comes out of studies that showed us that static stretching prior to exercise, reduces strength. But Jeebus forbid that anyone would actually read the research that made this claim. But if you did, you would discover that the research uncovered that stretches that were held in excess of 60 seconds, resulted in a reduction in power and explosiveness when the exercise was performed immediately after the bout of stretching.

Hardly a real world application.

So if you are someone...

"It's ok for you, this stuff is easy for you..."

This has been said to me few times, and just now, it has lit the fire in me to share a few things that might make anyone reading second guess this statement before firing it at me.

No, it is not easy. Through my own dealings with chronic disease and life changing surgery, I have birthed a massive amount of empathy that knows not to assume anything about anyone, despite appearances, social media feeds and outwardly projected vibes.

Here's a bit of what has got me to the point of making things look easier, and more importantly, helped others to find ease and resilience. 

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Or...Is your training making you "anti-fragile"?

I’ve been reading a great book called Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

While reading I’ve realised that some of the concepts presented more eloquently describe my approach to training and exercise.

The book is based around the concept of anti-fragility, which stems from the fact that we have no real opposing term for something that is fragile. We have terms like robust and resilient, but if fragility assumes that something is broken under stress, anti-fragility assumes that something thrives under stress.

You may consider that any exercise meets this description of anti-fragility, that is, exercise allows us to be anti-fragile, but like the author when he discusses exercise in the book, you would be mistaken.

In my Not Really Yoga program, I talk a lot about how stretching just makes you good at stretching. That is, stretching doesn’t necessarily allow you to use...