Burn Your Foam Roller..play with your balls instead

A very short travel back in time as little as 10 years ago would have seen you met with surprised looks walking into many a sporting goods store and asking for a foam roller. These days even your granny has one, and it’s hard to take a step in most gyms without falling over someone flailing their body around on a cylindrical tube of high density foam.

But what is it actually doing?

Your average bro in the gym will swear by using his foam roller to warm up prior to working out, and then use it for recovery post workout, as well as improving flexibility and range of motion (ROM)..because stretching doesn’t work and impacts your performance apparently-thanks bro!

Oddly, there seems to be this idea that rolling around on the foam roller will be beneficial for every one of these 3 scenarios (warm up, cool down, improve flexibility) with the exact same techniques, with a change in the users intention being the defining factor...

Pain in the butt..piriformis syndrome myths, hamstring confusion and other reasons that might not be why you think you are in pain

It isn’t until you’ve succumbed to a deep horrible pain in the butt, that you come to realise why the phrase, “pain in the butt,” exists. At times it can be debilitating for some, with painkillers having no real impact, yet daily stresses and difficulties, can increase the pain to the point of not being able to interact with anyone, without filling your yearly swear jar quota in a day.

Runners in particular tend to jump to 2 conclusions for a pain in the butt. Hamstring tendinopathy and piriformis syndrome lead the charge here, and very often, Dr. Google, and poorly armed therapists, commonly misdiagnose these, and even worse, offer up treatments that never really see the patient set free from the patient status.

Here we look at some common reasons for butt pain and a few ideas as to what needs to happen to get past it.

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The stupidly simple reason why your stretching exercises don't work

Working out and exercising in school was simple. If the physical education teacher told you to strap on your tiny little shorts and touch your toes and swing your arms around like a monkey, you did it. Because they knew more about stuff than you.

But now it’s not so simple.

Everyone is a health and fitness expert (especially the ones that aren’t), and a quick google has us questioning the advice of ev-ery-one, and rightfully so.

But how do we know who is right?

Stretching is one of these topics that has fallen under the dark veil of interweb confusion and opinion, which ranges from research article quotes on stretching reducing performance, to the “I don’t like stretching so you shouldn’t do it," crowd.

Then on the other hand we have yogi’s and physical therapists telling us we should stretch and improve range of motion, yet the fact that it doesn’t really seem to work to...

Could the way you walk be wrecking your squat?

The headline here could have the word “squat” replaced by nearly anything, but here we’ll look at how one particular phase of your walking cycle, may be destroying your ability to perform a decent squat.

Squat Depth

During the squat, our ability to descend to depth is limited somewhat through the length of the adductors. Often times doing some work through releasing the adductors, and following up with some squat patterning work can help to see the athlete get even deeper in the squat.

But what happens when one side is shorter than the other?

Hip rotation in the squat exercise

A huge number of athletes I see suffer from some rotation in their squat, and a good number of you reading this will as well. Sometimes this will manifest as a very obvious rotation through the hips (where one hip moves backwards during the squat), other times it will result in a weight shift to one side, or any other array of...

Can Ankle Sprains Cause Shoulder Pain?

The body only heals for efficiency, not perfection (Gary Ward).

Ever had an ankle sprain? Even a little one? This could be the reason for your wrecked shoulder (or back, or knee or the other bits that continue to cause pain).

In 2016, the foot and ankle association released content encouraging medical professionals to take an ankle sprain, any ankle sprain. As part of a significant medical history, also publishing an interesting paper looking at the long term effects a of quality of life on ankle sprains (read it here if you like academic vibes).

Let's not limit this sentiment of long term problems to only ankle sprains. The info here is in this little post is relevant for any injury, but for a sec, let's think about what happened when you sprained your ankle (or did the thing that you did that hurt, if you are one of very few people to have never sustained a sprain).

Following the sprain, you surely had concerns about placing your full body...

In my line of work, there’s a lot of misconceptions around the potential danger around Crossfit.

Having worked with some of the countries best Crossfit athletes, I’ve seen the difference between what keeps a Crossfit athlete training and competing and what throws them constantly in the physical therapy room. And it has nothing to do with intensity and load, as many of the professionals would have you think.

It comes down to progression and prep, and here I want to go over the 4 things that the top athletes do to avoid injury, that you should be doing as well.

A meta-analysis showed that 74% of all Crossfitters had sustained an injury with the main areas being the shoulder and lower back, followed by the arm/elbow. 

If we consider the exercises that could be involved in injuries to these sites, the first thing to consider would be strength and range of motion in these areas. If we look to the fact that a change in joint position results in one side of the...

"You should diet or exercise based on your bodytype...."

 We've all heard the terms ectomorph, endopmorph and mesomorph floating around. Whether it is in the gym, or even during physical education class at school, or some trainers may have even heard it during their PT certification. It seems pretty legit right? The premise that we are all different body types? Well, no really, once you start to think about it.

 Somatotyping is a a system of taxonomy developed by psychologist (yes psychologist) William Sheldon to place different human physiques into the 3 categories of ectomorph (skinny), endomorph (fat) and mesomorph (muscle-obviously these are very simplified explanations).

Sheldon used these classifications as the basis for his theory of Consitutional Psychology where he developed a theory that involved each of these 3 physiques being related to a certain type of temperament. Basically the ectomorph is apparently a little anxious, mesomorph ...

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, despite everyone having heard of it, is still something we still haven't quite nutted out exactly what happens. We think that the soreness part is caused by inflammation as a response to muscle tearing that happens when we exercise, especially when performing exercise we aren't accustomed to, as anyone who has started a new gym program, or even taken part in exercise they aren't used to would know.

Usually DOMS is most prominent following exercise that involves eccentric actions, whereby the muscle is brought under load at length, and tends to peak at around 48 hours, but sometimes can make stairs a leap of faith, even after a few days. 

 Often, both trainers, and those getting trained look to DOMS as an indicator of whether or not the previous workout was any good, usually with the trainer taking way too much pride in how much they made their client hurt.

 In line with my philosophy on the fact that anyone can make a workout...