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...

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...

If you are using yoga to improve the way you move, whether it be for sport or just doing stuff better, you probably aren’t covering all of the bases that need covering. My whole vibe for developing the Not Really Yoga system has been to address this, but here, I outline some things you can do to tweak your yoga practice, if you’re not quite ready to come over to the dark side just yet.

What is the point?

An area that used to constantly bother me around the use of yoga poses for physical gain, was the lack of understanding of what is happening biomechanically in a pose. Obviously this isn’t across the board, and there are some great yoga teachers put there, but as the yoga teaching mills churn out a gazillion fresh eyed faces every 6 weeks, the herd is thinning.

Just like I say to the personal trainers I mentor, every exercise you prescribe is saying yes to the other 100 you could have done. You need a good reason for its inclusion. Yoga is no different. Sure...

I recall my introduction to yoga as a bright eyed 17 year old. A friend hooked me up with the practice to help with my surfing, which I was getting fairly serious about at the time. My desire then, was to be more limber and agile, and incorporate it as part of my fitness training.

Like many, I became drawn into the spiritual practice, and particularly the breathing (pranayama). It wasn’t long before I transformed from a weirded out dude at the back of the class, moving my mouth pretending to chant when the group kicked in, to busting out omms with the best of them.

As life took various turns, I soon became disillusioned with the more meaningful sides of the practice. Mainly through the abundance of try-hard hippies and fake gurus, who became more transparent to me as I became more immersed in both practicing and teaching.

It seemed yoga for the west had become laced with bullshit that it just couldn’t shake.

Whether it was detoxing organs with certain poses, or life...

New study on self massage shows what happens and why it works.

Despite being a multi-whatever-dollars industry, the myofascial release tool shop hasn’t got a great deal of conclusive evidence floating about.

Studies have shown that foam rolling increases blood flow to the muscle, and be useful in helping to warm up pre-workout, but there is limited evidence for what actually happens in terms of range of motion.

This recent study looked at using massage balls to see how range of motion was impacted, using ankle range of motion (dorsiflexion) for study effect.

The study looked at two groups. One used the massage balls prior to stretching and activity, and another did not use massage balls. The study showed increased in range of motion in the group that used the balls, with interestingly, the less flexible middle aged participants having greater benefit from using the massage balls pre-stretch than the younger participants. 

Massage your wet bits

This study...

Upper body rotation is obviously important in sports such as baseball, discus etc. While it’s importance in sports such as running are less obvious, all of these sports suffer from the inability to find equal rotation in both sides.

Understanding rotation during running is best understood through realising the way joints rotate when we walk. 

When we walk, the process of walking sees joints opening and closing in the feet, which (should) see the lower leg also rotating internally and externally. Following this up sees the upper leg doing similar movements a little faster, and the hip then moves in various planes as the leg moves back and forth.

As the joints through the body move, they pull on the muscles to load them like an elastic band, then pulling them back towards neutral, and to rotate in the opposite direction.

The main problems I see with runners being able to do this normal process is:

• Rotating more on one side than the other
• Lack of rotation in one...

Most people don’t like body maintenance. They say they do, but the majority of athletes and weekend warriors wait until they have a “thing” until they do the right things for the “thing.”

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of people out there are foam rolling until the cows come home, and even stretching and doing yoga. But really addressing what your body needs, takes a little bit more thought, and preparation, because let's face it, foam rolling is pretty accessible and great to chat to your mates pre or post workout as you lay about, but is it really actually helping you? (Hint:..no it isn’t)

Like anything that is good for your body, a program designed to keep your body in tip-top shape should be specific.
In the Not Really Yoga system we ensure we are doing the right thing by basing what we do on a few super logical and simple principles;

* stretch whats short, strengthen whats long
* stretching only makes you good at...

3 mistakes runners make when warming up that could reduce over 79% of injuries

79% is a weird number right. But research has shown that this is potentially the amount of runners that are injured every year as a result of..running. I always take these figures with a grain of salt, but if you run, and know others that run, you can be sure that one of you has been injured in the last year.

And it sucks.

There a lot of things that runners do wrong, and having trained some of the worlds best, I can tell you, that if I went down the road of listing all of the mistakes, you would still be reading this 2 weeks later.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

Here we’ll look some simple ways you can integrate some fixes into your warm up, and get rid of the common mistakes being made prior to a run.

Firstly, why do we warm up at all?

When it comes to running there are 3 factors that we need to address in our warm up;

-Increase aerobic demand
-Prime the nervous system for work...