Functional Strength Rehab

DEEPEST GRATITUDE TODAY, AS ALWAYS, TO Carlos for arranging an inspirational recovery message from Los Angeles to Melbourne, from the man who Dared us to Dream, who now dares us to win!🔥. The Golden Eagle 🦅 THANK YOU SIR! I FELT THE ENERGY, I heard the music.

Sure the tumour is removed, the message goes deeper than ever. Tom refused to lose against the uncaring weights, and teaches us to Dare to Win in our own quests. The greatest teachers are those who do the work. Thanks for your work Mr. Platz🙏

Live your best life, Dare to Win🔥

ADVICE TO PROFESSIONALS. SHOW YOUR RESULTS, GET CALLUSES ON YOUR HANDS NOT ON YOUR ASS.
DONT TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE READ, SHOW EVIDENCE OF SUCCESS.

I have never prescribed a rehab exercise to a patient that I have not personally experienced and applied to myself😁.

Over 25 years ago I had a huge low back disc injury with extrusion and segment sequestration, I was unable to walk normally for over 2 years, the nerve to the calf was so compressed that I could not do a single bodyweight calf raise.

Low Back Rehabilitation has been a huge passion and I have built back bigger, stronger and better. I understand my patient population that exists in a passionate weight-training community, because I am one of these people.

Lots of skinny ass weasels tell you what “the evidence, the data, says”. Then you look at their pencil necks and realise they talk about something they personally don’t experience.

Bringing a patient back to their best and then more is true success. Pain is simply a symptom, rehabilitation is about finding causes, correcting them and helping a person achieve their goals.

Be passionate about your professions. Show your results, get calluses on your palms not on your fingertips from your keyboard😂.

TREATMENT COMES FROM ASSESSMENT!
A SCAN DOES NOT TELL YOU WHAT TO DO!

Here you see two MRI scans taken 3 months apart. In the first scan there is a significant disc injury that is compressing the spinal cord, and after 3 months it has healed with conservative care and without surgery, and is no longer compressing the cord.

A key element in tailoring individual treatment plans is knowing how to assess.

The symptom behaviours to subjective and objective static and dynamic postures, loads and directions will direct the loading approach to reduce, and centralise, the symptoms.

Knowing the specific behaviour of structures to positions requires an in depth appreciation of anatomy, well beyond the level taught in most degree programs.

As a professional your investment in further education is key to your career satisfaction and success.

Knowing how to assess can save your patient from unnecessary surgery!

YOUR BACK IS YOUR STRENGTH AND YOUR WEAKNESSES ARE THE TRUE PROBLEM.

As Rodin showed in his sculpture, how a professional must analyse and assess to a patient’s movements to find the answer to a presenting Low Back Injury.

Your back has been your solution to movement and loading, it is your strength not your weakness.

You do not have a Bad Back! It’s a great back, it is strong, you must thank it for all that it does and confront the weaknesses elsewhere that contributed to breaching the back’s capacity to tolerate the tasks of daily life.

Notably we find that the weakness is more likely to be your hips contributions to the tasks that are loading your back beyond its capacity.

Weakness cannot be tolerated. Program your rehabilitation to strengthen your weaknesses💪.

Rodin created this powerful statue to represent the human contemplation of actions and fate of those actions. This is how a professional assesses movement and the response of the patient to those actions. The statue is part of a commission Rodin received in 1880 for a doorway surround called “The Gates of Hell” based upon Dante’s 14th century great poem “The Divine Comedy”. The current state of University education on Low Back Disorders for Health Professionals certainly could be defined as a “comedy”, concentrating on symptoms rather than teaching the ability to assess and diagnose.

You need clinical experience to assess a problem, you will find your guidance in the professionals who demonstrate clinical success, not those who sit on their asses and quote “research”, but never show any successful application in clinical situations.

Understand your basic foundation sciences of Physics, Anatomy and Biomechanics to think about how to solve a problem.

BEEN A LONG MISSION, NOW UNDER 115kg

Top weight 140kg+ was necessary at the time to make a SuperHeavyweight category for a Bench comp. Definitely didn’t feel super healthy eating getting there, but the goal was achieved 🤣.

Dropping down over the years close to 130kg Bodyweight is comfortable, feels good and for me is a bit of a set point my body knows.

It was time to fit into more designer clothes😁

With international work plans and video presentations it was time to drop further and today was the first time under 115kg that I can remember for over 20 years😂.

Got super inspired to get here by MDLP and his comp journey and seeing working with with their commitment to the process🔥.

keeps our pantry and fridge stocked for our body goals!

Thanks 🙏

NOTHING IN LIFE IS NON-SPECIFIC, ESPECIALLY LOW BACK PAIN.

Peter F. Drucker was a management consultant and educator. One of the most respected and influential authors in management theory and practice.

Drucker founded the concept of “Management by Objectives”. Everything is analysed and made specific.

Injury management is performed under the same principles. If you hear anyone say the Low Back Pain is Non-Specific then you know you are listening to an idiot, or worse, someone who is a Clinical Failure and is telling you why you will be as well to validate their own ineffectiveness.

Pain is only a Symptom. It is not a dia 😞gnosis. Research should be upon causes, not symptoms. Hence why NSLBP research already commits to failure as an outcome. Quoting Non-Specific anything is failure.

Diagnosis requires finding the cause. You must examine to find the specific characteristics of a case and then with clinical reasoning create interventions specific to the identified specific characteristic.

If you can’t diagnose, and I don’t mean getting a scan, I mean actually subjectively and objectively examine a physical patient to create a hypothesis to test, then you had better learn.

In Social Media learn from people who show Clinical Reasoning and outcomes, not clinical failures who say “the research”, “the evidence” who can show no “evidence” of any successfully applied outcomes.

THIS IS A QUESTION I GET ALMOST DAILY.

There are no “DISC BULGE EXERCISES”.

Rehabilitation is not a Recipe Book, Rehab is a Toolkit!

The body is a biomechanical construct, like your car is a mechanical construct.

Rehab professionals become Biomechanical Engineers who can assess all the individual influences that not only caused the initial injury, but will be needed to solve the current problem.

Every injury requires specific, and individual, subjective and objective assessment.

There are people who respond well to Extension, there are people who respond to Flexion, there are people who respond to abdominal strength strategies, there are those who respond to erector muscle strategies.

You have to be able to progress, and regress, loads and directions.

Right tool for the right person, at the right time, for the right reason, with the right load, the right frequency and other variables.

Everything in Low Back Injury is Specific.

There are no “good exercises” there are no “bad exercises”. There are just the right exercises or wrong exercises at that time.

You never learn this in University. No University course I have ever seen graduates professionals to an adequate level of competence in Low Back assessment.

Career fulfilment comes from being dedicated to life long learning. Learn from those who show clinical results of applied science.

Injury occurs for predictable reasons, rehabilitation success is just as predictable when you find the specifics of each case.

TRUST A PROFESSIONAL WHO LIFTS FOR ADVICE ON LIFTING.

Many Social Media “experts” who tell you what “the research says” or “the data” says won’t roll up their sleeves because the real evidence is that they have no idea how to lift themselves, and no demonstration of any personal application of science.

Real expertise comes from personal experience of applying science to yourself, and your patients.

Lifting should be your passion, the community that lifts should be your peers.

I’ve noticed some of the biggest mouths on Social Media have the smallest arms😆.

Reading a “literature review”, sitting on your ass, and telling everyone what “the data” say is easy, being confronted by the reality that you have never demonstrated any success with a single athlete over your decades long “career” is definitely the true, harsh reality that exposes their true lack of leadership and expertise.

Don’t buy hair restorer from a bald man.
Don’t get lifting advice from a Rehab professional who does not lift.

AUCKLAND SHOULDER WORKSHOP TODAY🔥
Sold Out!

How much we live and love our work😁

A sneak peak into our 50 page manual of the Solutions to Weight-Training Shoulder Injuries.

A BIG day of Theory and Prac work ahead💪

Yes, there is a clear anatomical and biomechanical solution to shoulder injury and pain.

You must master these basics of science to create individual, specific, solutions to weight-training injuries.

The attendees will learn the concepts we have created to solve the problems that other professionals don’t understand.

Remember:
Weakness cannot be tolerated!
Strength is the answer.
Understand what is strong, why it is strong.
Understand what is weak, why it is weak.

Produce a stable foundation to allow the force production you are looking to apply.

LEST WE FORGET.

Grandfather Henry Hagon AIF wounded at the Battle of Lone Pine 1915, died and buried in Alexandria Egypt.

Father Geoffrey Lyle Lock RAN (1939-45).

Grateful for their service, and sacrifice, to make the world a better place.

Great great grandfather and Grandfather to .Liberty.lifts

WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE FIRST DAY STILL APPLIES TODAY.

In my first class of Clinical Applied Anatomy as a first year student (last century) a little grey haired old lady came into the room wearing a neck brace, the demeanour of a drill sergeant, and a clear distain for our level of inability.

With a withering glare she grabbed the closest student, pulled them to their feet, and told them to take their shirt off and with an arthritic middle finger began to teach.

She pointed to the student’s shoulder and said “Remember this - The area in front of the shoulder here is the biceps tendon, it is the referral spot from the Infraspinatus muscle.”

“The area on top of the shoulder here is the AC joint. Pain here is AC joint pain”

“Pain lateral to the shoulder, but superior, here, is the subacromial area. Pain here is subacromial impingement of subacromial structures.”

“Lateral and inferior here is the Deltoid insertion. Pain here is referred from the supraspinatus tendon.”

With unerring accuracy for almost 30 years since that day, and over 100,000 patients I have seen in clinical practice it has been 100% accurate as a diagnosis!

I can’t understand how it is that patients come to me, that have seen other practitioners, who point to their AC joint, I press it and it reproduces their pain, then I say “it’s an AC joint problem, has anyone told you that?”. They usually look blank and say “No”.

If you take care to understand the surface anatomy, and know the referral patterns, your professional career will begin to develop.

There is a reason that people who attend my courses make a difference the very next day in their clinics. It’s based in anatomy and science.

I’ll be presenting the Clinical Success with the Weight-Training Shoulder course in Auckland New Zealand on Saturday May 4 with 🔥.
To attend go to
https://www.unitedhealthed.com/workshops

On Sunday May 5, we are also teaching the Clinical Success for the Weight-Training Hip and Knee course.

See you in Auckland this weekend as I present with .med our 2 Day Low Back Diagnosis, Rehabilitation and Strength Training course. Email [email protected]

YOU DON’T HAVE A “BAD” BACK!
YOU PROBABLY HAVE A STRONG BACK!

It’s more likely your back is your best worker and it could do with some help.

When a patient says to me “I have a bad back”, it’s time to reframe their understanding of their back.

It is empowering to find your back isn’t “weak”, but you have other muscles that are, and your back is making up for them.

That’s why we take the approach “weakness cannot be tolerated” and we find the weak groups that need to pick up their contribution to a patient’s life.

Strength is a skill, teaching more effective movement patterns that can make a huge difference to a persons life is a skill to acquire.

A muscle/groups must be “taught” how to be integrated into patterns of strength that contribute to the movements that have been involved in trigger the pain experience.

All low back pain is specific.
You must identify the specific problem that produces the pain.
You must create specific interventions to each case.
Strength is defined by task.

Thank your back for being such a great worker, now let’s strengthen the real weakness you didn’t know existed (because they are not complaining).

Strength is the solution, and a professional need to be able to assess and find the weaknesses that are unacceptable🔥.

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU COMBINE A WORLD RENOWNED REHAB SPECIALIST AND A WORLD RENOWNED PHYSIQUE PHOTOGRAPHER?

A shot that could work as a WWE poster!🙌

is the photographer who the physique superstars ask to capture the at their best🙌.

I was fortunate that Charles was back in Australia to be able to catch up with him. A consummate artist who finds what you didn’t even know was there😁.

I’ll look forward to being in Las Vegas for the Mr. Olympia in October and seeing him in action again🔥

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THERE IS NO PLACE IN CLINICAL PRACTICE FOR THE TERM “NON SPECIFIC LOW BACK PAIN”.

There are two important Greek words in Low Back Treatment.
“Gnosis” meaning Knowledge.
“Malaka” meaning person who says Low Back Pain is Non Specific.

GNOSIS- You can only be a successful clinician if you can examine and assess to determine the precise characteristics of a presenting patient.

Make all Low Back Injury specific by competent assessment.

When you choose an exercise selection for a patient it involves determining, by both subjective and objective testing, the biological and biomechanical triggers that produces the symptoms.
It involves determining the biological and biomechanical directions and loads that reduce the symptoms.

This requires having a solid understanding of the anatomy of the structures, both active and passive, that are involved, and how they behave under certain circumstances.

Your education never stops. You must learn progressions and regressions of exercises. For example, you may have chosen the appropriate direction but the inappropriate load.

You will only learn this by clinical practice, applying theory to real patients. Learn from the professionals who show the way they succeed, and often the patients they have successfully worked with, and how they do it.

Being a career MALAKA helps no one.
Don’t tell a patient “the data says”.
Reading “research”, and commenting on it without clinical application, has no use unless your business is built upon Social Media, not seeing patients, and not showing any history of actual patient success.

Career satisfaction comes from GNOSIS.

Get calluses on your hands from work, not on your fingertips from your keyboard.

See you in Auckland April 26/27 when I will present a 2 day workshop with .med on how to assess, treat and apply exercise to solve Low Back Problems 🔥Suitable for all people who have clients with Low Back Issues.

Contact [email protected] to apply

UNDERSTAND THE INDIVIDUAL
UNDERSTAND THE TASK
UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION
ASSESSMENT IS EVERYTHING!

As a professional consultant I am aware of how I present in different situations.

It’s not only biomechanics, but you need that in your suit pocket!

As a rehabilitation professional I am aware of precise assessment of my patients to their tasks, the understanding of the science behind the problems and solutions.

There are principles to understand in all situations. Physical sciences and Social Sciences influence our decision making.

Many variables, you need to be educated to them all in your area of influence.

I will dress appropriately to the situation, whether consulting to Royalty, celebrity, pro athletes, amateur athletes, general population, student teaching, or teaching workshops etc.

It’s the same care we put into our patient assessment, rehabilitation and technique optimisation. Each person is an individual who exists under the laws of physics, biology, and physiology.

You need to be able to assess each individual like my tailor does when he’s fitting a suit. Thanks 🙌

Everything matters!

Thanks and for the work they do and the dedication to their goals.

WHERE YOU START DOES NOT MEAN WHERE YOU WILL STAY.

When I left High School I intended to play Pro Baseball in the USA, so I left home and took a semi-pro job to play Baseball and Cricket in Darwin, Northern Territory while I planned a USA mission.

I had played for Australia in the Inaugural World Youth Baseball Series in Columbus OHIO, where we came 3rd out of 14 teams (USA won, but only just beat us), and figured to turn Pro the following year. I was also selected to the Australian All-High School Cricket Team.

Semi-Pro didn’t pay that well while I was there, so I had to get a labouring job and digging ditches in the outback was the it.

I also got a job loading and unloading Road Trains in the Outback. I worked with all different people such as sheep shearer’s, prawn trawler hands, grave diggers, drifters, lots of different cultures and peoples.

A fateful change occurred when I traded passion for baseball to a passion for weight-training.

Took up a University offer for Physiotherapy and the next story began.

Did you career path change and have you ended up not where you had planned?

AUCKLAND April 27/28
Learn to be a successful professional and understand the rehab basics and the strength progressions all the way to Squat and Deadlift over 2 days.

The above plan shows you a general coverage of a sample rehab program. Everyone is an individual and each plan is specific to each person.

In the above plan we start with Hip Extension restoration - Lock Clams before Prone Hip Extension. Loss of gluteal strength due to inhibition has been noted since Professor Janda first published on it decades ago, but were you taught the science of why? We will show you!

We consider and apply strength to the 3 planes of motion.
Sagittal (forward/back) abdominal bracing
Frontal (side to side) side plank variations
Transverse (rotation) bird dog variations

Movement Pattern Disorders: where a flexion pattern is a symptom generator we teach Hip Hinge to begin correction and abolish the pain provocateur. This can translate to gym lifting patterns such as Deadlifting with hip torque.

Proprioception may begin with Single Leg Stance variations and progress to eyes closed. People with Low Back Disorders often show Proprioceptive loss at a spinal level.

Cyclical loading for disc health and nutrition transport. That’s your walking commitment here.

The science behind low back rehabilitation only exists due to the giants whose shoulders we stand on. The clinical work of McKenzie, McGill, Janda. The physiology and anatomy from Sherrington, Adams, Dolan, Bogduk just to name a few.

If someone says “we don’t know much about low back problems” they are speaking for themselves, not us! There are mountains of science behind the successful clinical rehab professionals, and we will begin your journey at this workshop. You will know a lot about low back disorders- and how to treat them after this workshop!

Suitable for anyone from Personal Trainers to Neurosurgeons, they have all attended these workshops 🔥

Contact: [email protected] for your place in the course.

GET CALLUSES ON YOUR HANDS NOT ON YOUR FINGERTIPS.

I never met a Swimming Coach who could not swim, but there are lots of Health Professionals who have no success in applied weight-training to themselves who will tell you “what the research says”.

Advice to anyone who wants to be a successful Health Professional dealing with patients injuries.

Get off your keyboard, stop telling people “what the research says, what the data shows” and actually lift something in the way you tell people matters or doesn’t matter.

As a Health Professional who deals in weight-training injury and rehabilitation, you must test theories upon yourself. Its what I do everyday (having a body image disorder is a gift that I embrace😊).

You will quickly realise much “research” is poorly constructed, and invalid on so many levels.

Can you imagine how delusional a professional must be by telling elite Powerlifters, and other Health Professionals that “there is no evidence best way to lift” and quoting a paper that the max weight lifted was 12kg🤣. It’s absurd, yes it happens.

I have had the privilege of teaching so many Health Professionals who not only lift, but actually compete👏👏👏.
None of those professionals ever would say first to a patient “research says” as the basis of their interventions. They will discuss how the hard sciences of Physics and Biology are the mechanisms of injury, and show their own applied understanding to the injury process.

True professionals do the work on themselves as much as they do on their patients. Whatever area of specialty they treat in Sports Medicine.

You don’t get a reputation of great results with patients unless you can understand, by testing on yourself, what you apply to others.

Enjoy your career! Indulge in your passions🔥

Saying “my experience is” and showing personal physical evidence of your own work means more to a patient than saying “the data says” while having arms limply hanging out of your sleeves like wet noodles.

Be strong not only for yourself, but for your patients.

REHABILITATION RELIES ON ASSESSMENT.

The failure of “researchers” to understand that everything is task and position specific results in uneducated Social Media “experts” quoting the ineffectiveness of “core training” to “non specific low back pain”.

Non specific means undefined.
Undefined low back pain and non task specific exercise research gets quotes by people who know no better to support their own failures as professionals.

Core Training means nothing unless you show how it transfers to the task the person has a problem with.

All successful professionals know that rehabilitation must have defined, specific, patient centric, clinically reasoned, interventions.

Weakness is position and task dependent.
Strengthen your weakness specific to the task.

You will learn this in Auckland New Zealand on April 27/28 when .med and myself will present our 2 day Low Back Rehabilitation and Strength Workshop.

Send your enquiry to [email protected]

See you in NZ soon🔥

PHYSICS >FEELINGS.
TECHNIQUE MATTERS.

Every world class coach and athlete appears to know what the “evidence based/ movement optimist Physio” does not.

All experienced lifters and coaches of athletes know that we create a best suited individual technique prescribed to an individual lifter. Each technique, like a tailored suit, is as individual as the person.

Seriously, there are “professionals”, who clearly won way too many Participation Awards as children, that like to quote “research” on Social Media in place of actual demonstration of clinical rehab success with top platform athletes.

For anyone who quotes the “research evidence” who does not show their own “evidence of success with patients” it’s time to shut down your Social Media and go get calluses on your hands not your fingertips.

>feelings

CLINICAL COMPETENCE REQUIRES SPECIFIC DIAGNOSIS.

If you tell a patient they have “Non Specific Low Back Pain” you are telling them they need to go find someone else because you have not got a clue.

To be a competent clinician you need to be able to discern the Subjective and Objective specific aspects of a presentation.

Only by finding individual Specific components of a patient can you apply Clinical Reasoning to implement a Specific Clinical Intervention.

Then using the scientific methodology of Test/Re-Test upon that intervention you begin to find the progression/regression of the intervention.

The specifics may involve Passive, Active or Neurological based dominance to the interventions.

You need to understand the variables and how they interact with each other.

To become a great professional requires a greater depth of knowledge of applied anatomy and physiology than you were ever taught at University.

Your clinical experience with patients teaches you more than someone else’s opinion of a Meta-Analysis of externally invalid papers.

Become a true detective by building your own case studies using the solid sciences💪.

Pain is a symptom, find its cause.

Learn from clinicians who demonstrate clinical success, they are called MENTORS!

A WORK WEEK IN NEW YORK.

Love NYC. Great city when you are at the top of your game.

Staying at The Carlyle Hotel on 76th is an unmatched lifestyle.

Tonight off to Paris though.
Will be back for Strong New York in October.

See you then.

IF YOU CAN’T PERFORM A BIOMECHANICAL ASSESSMENT AND YOU “TREAT” LOW BACK PAIN THEN YOU ARE INCOMPETENT.

How many people learned to assess movement in University?

Can you assess axial load intolerance? Anterior and posterior shear contribution to the pain mechanism?

Do you know how a hip relates to a spine in a person who has pain in squatting.

Can you assess weakness of the hip extensors in a Deadlift, and its relationship to an injury mechanism?

Do you know how to test hip joint capacity for tasks? Can you assess anteversion and retroversion and relate it to an individual’s hip, sacroiliac and low back disorders?

You need clinical experience not “research papers”. It’s solid science.

If you can’t assess these and so many other movement issues then you are doing your patients a disservice. The consequences are not only to the patient, but to you as a professional.

Physics>Feelings.

EXERCISE PRESCRIPTION IS A BRANCH OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.

If you can’t diagnose the cause of a problem don’t prescribe an exercise to “fix” what you don’t understand.

Reverse Hypers don’t fix everything, neither do Jefferson Curls.

In Low Back disorders exercise is a medically applied specific intervention to a professionally diagnosed specific problem.

Every Low Back problem is SPECIFIC! You better be able to diagnose specifically what characteristics that individual has before applying load.

You need to understand how to subjectively and objectively assess.

The patient does not “fear” movement. The damn movement hurts the patient. Believe what your patient is telling you! I listen to my patients intensely to find the answers.

Some structures don’t “adapt” positively to load when symptomatic. Spondylolysis, as above, is a perfect example. Extension will aggravate, extension can worsen the problem. You must know when, and how, to load directions, and why.

Every great success in rehab comes from the professional asking WHY!!

Pain is a symptom, not a diagnosis.

There seriously are idiots in our industry who call themselves “Movement Optimists” who can’t assess the cause of a problem, but I have seen prescribing the wrong exercise to an acute direction specific injury saying “you adapt” “a spine is no different to any other joint”.

Spines are very different to knees (the blatantly obvious being now stated for the blatantly stupid).

The science of biomechanical assessment takes a long time to understand and relate to structure.

Expertise takes time and education. It takes clinical application of your learning. You need to have a record of proven success with extreme cases to show your understanding as an educator.

Exercise is medical science. Respect that it takes a long time to understand.

Movement Optimism is not substitute for a lack of education. It’s dangerous to your patient to apply exercises to them without specific diagnosis.