This is a question that seems a little silly right?

You’re probably thinking of course it does.
But does it really?
Does it actually make it go away??

In some cases, if you have a very well targeted strategy, it may well do. But in most cases, all that is happening is that your are alleviating symptoms.

Tightness is a symptom of dysfunction.

Muscle tightness is reactive to something.

We don’t just tend to randomly get tight! So the key to addressing tightness, is essentially to look at what might be going on to cause muscles to get tight in the first place. Keeping in mind, that "tight" is a pretty crap word to explain this physiologically, but we will use it for now.

A key point I want to make in this is that tightness doesn’t mean short.

Lets imagine for a moment 2 poles with an elastic band at the top, one at the bottom. As the bottom of one pole moves away from the centre the bottom band will increase in tension. The system may recognise this as tightness,...

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 runners could do with improving technique, despite the fact that we would assume that it is just something that we should be able to do well naturally.

Yet the reason that we don’t, is the same reason that we also can’t teach somebody to run better.

And that is because your body, doesn’t always move the way we think it should, want it to, or tell it to.

Every-body tells a story. The ankle sprain when you were 5. The bad knee from the bike fall as a teenager, etc etc. While you may well think that whatever injures you had in the past are well rehabbed, we need to remember one thing.

The body heals for efficiency, not perfection.

Any injuries or niggles you have had, you healed up just to the point where things were good enough to do the things that you wanted. And that doesn’t mean things returned to normal (for want of a better word). It means things returned just to the point where you could get in wth life and the things that you wanted to do.

Even if...

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...

To your seasoned runner, the word pronation comes with all the connotations of a 4-eyed young overpaid Englishman, waving a crooked wand around and casting the spell of running doom on you, as you are destined to years of running injuries and poor technique.

Unless, of course, you fork out a few hard earned dollars for the latest and greatest shoes, designed to rid you of your over-pronation curse....

Let me kick off with something that might get your shoelaces in a knot.

There is no such thing as over pronation.

In fact, I don’t even like to use the term pronation at all, when describing a foot.

Because pronation is an ACTION.

It is the beautiful cosmic synchronicity of 33 joints and 28ish bones opening and closing, as muscles load and preload, to frame the amazing sequence of events that we call walking, or in this case, running. But as should rightfully crawl before you run, in this case we might look at how you walk before you run.

What is pronation?

If we can...

As a smartarse teenager, I found great amusement in shouting out the window at runners leaning against a pole or wall stretching their calves, yelling out my ideas around the fact that the wall wasn’t going to budge, or encouraging them that they were nearly there and to push a little harder. 

Push a little harder!!

As a young runner, it was also part of the warm up my running coach would give me.

Only now I know the most amusing part of seeing so many runners perform this stretch, then hightail it out of there, is that it is completely useless.

And it is not that stretching is useless. Quite the contrary.

Stretching is an area of the industry that is riddled with confusion and misinformation.

There has been a big push with some coaches and therapists recently around stretching being dead, and a misinterpretation of research around stretching decreasing performance.

I believe a lot of this misinterpretation comes down to the way stretching has been studied.

Performing...

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...