Preform Injury Treatments and Training

Certainly helped keep spirits up on

Oh yes I am!!

Sitting isn’t completely the problem, the amount of siting compared with the amount of movement is.

We tend to sit more and move less as we age, just watch a toddlers habits compared with an adult.

Chairs have us in hip flexion, as the hip flexors get weaker and our glutes become sandwiched by the chair and our body weight we begin to regress hip stability.

With this becomes an unstable lumbar (lower back) and the pressure continues to get passed up the body.

Leave the chair doing more work than the body and the body gets weaker, stretching weak muscles isn’t going to improve the balance, it’s gonna make it worse long term.

The key is to strengthen what’s weak and lengthen what’s strong, because strong in an imbalanced system usually shows up as tight and unable to function at end range.

Your hips position determines the relationship your what happens at every other joint in your body

When your GCM (general centre of mass) is out of balance, other joints will have to compensate to enable the body to function, whether that is efficiently or not

Addressing the problems in the hip in my opinion are the most important factor for most people, it definitely is the case if you have back, knee, ankle, neck pain…the list goes on.

Hips are the first priority then we work up or down

Orthotics

Orthotics may help symptoms for a small time but…

When we use an external hardware for a long duration repetitively and don’t solve the cause of the problem the hardware will do the work…

This means that your body does offload the job and the tissues you need to function will continue to get weaker, this goes for inserts and chairs

If you broke your leg and used crutches, would you never walk again and continue to use the crutches?

Of course not, the objective should be to fix rebuild, so you can regain freedom again.

Back pain is often attributed to a lack of balance in the front and back of the hip

Build up your hip flexor strength, sprinting athletes have hip flexors that are on average 4x the size of the general population.

Stretching them to the point where they go when sprinting will delay the response they fire when trying to prepare for the next step, this will destabilise your hips and your lower back.

This is one of the variables you need to look at to piece the puzzle together

If your hips are pinching in the front….

Doing more glute shortening work is gonna make it worse, the glutes are important, in particular context, the context that you don’t know how to use them through their full range.

Like with core work…don’t neglect the other parts of your hip.

Anterior hip shift

If your hips have shifted in front of your ankles, your glutes are either having trouble lengthening, your hip flexors are weak and unable to give the resistance to load the glute.

If you deadlift and squeeze your butt at the top, you are shortening muscles that are already short, you will inhibit their ability to lengthen, that is the stimulus you will be feeding your system, and you’re goddamn right and a little adapt to it.

You feed the problem with every rep, only work in ranges you can actively get into, they will get greater with time.

Core work

Realise that you could be creating problems or adding to one’s you already have with things you think are making you stronger or better.

Find what’s missing….consider what you need to work on.

Focus there and you’ll restore balance and true fully body strength

Soft tissue work can be painful

Everyone we have in wants different approaches to treatment, we use sports massage as our main method of treatment, with sports massage we are working in a deep tissue fashion, massage like this can create a sensation of tenderness, we use this to guide our treatments.

The general consensus is if tissue feels tender when exposed to mild to moderate compression it shouldn’t hurt, if it does there are some some issues with the relationship between the nervous and muscular/fascia system and we can make a change to these relationships with massage.

Post massage we can end up with bruising, cupping marks, increased blood flow, tenderness etc, it’s not always pretty, we recommend that people do SMR (Self myofascial release) because recognition that we need to chip away at the tensions by exposing them to compression regularly for the short term while making changes to lifestyle and our training.

Flexibility

Stretches are something many of us base our training around, some of us do none at all, we at preform only stretch when under load, tension and maintenance of tensegrity and stability.

Can we be too stiff? Yes
Can we be too mobile? Yes

Context isn’t always taken into consideration, the why is the most important question for me, when we are babies we are very mobile, but we lack the strength initially to be able to even hold our own heads….this demonstrates a lack of stability.

As we develop from the floor (tummy time) to all fours (crawling) to our feet (walking) we are building stability and tension, if all healthily babies are hyper mobile and they build tension and stability, we can too.

Babies can’t sprint like Usain Bolt or Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce or jump like Michael Jordan. This is because they haven’t built the tension and elasticity for the stretch reflex necessary to react to movement, the ground and gravity.

Stretching too much can create a loss of stability, stiffness is just as important as range of motion.

Soft tissue work

Massage is a great tool, it is used to reduce pain and symptoms of stiffness and I look at it from a very practical standpoint.

It helps with hydration, this is more about locally, not just about drinking water but about bringing fluid to the tissues being worked through friction, shear forces and compression.

We down regulate the nervous system locally which can have a global effect, this is why we often feel tired after massage

We can also help to bring awareness to the brain and help the conversation of mind to muscle communication, by making the brain aware of the tensions or sensitivity of tissues. People often say “I didn’t realise that part would be tender” this helps to guide awareness into these spaces.

When it comes to massage we recognise like all manual therapies we can’t completely solve long term effects of poor lifestyle choices or injuries that occur through lack of strength, to get full effect we need to make sure we are moving, strengthening and lengthening tissue appropriately. This is why we also offer training modalities.

Knee pain is generally because your hips aren’t working properly, our body needs to work in synergy to load particular areas and then cast pressure up or down chains to create a strong stable system.

If we feel pain in our knees going up stairs, squatting, getting in and out of seated positions, there is a good chance you have tight glutes, they are firing but can’t load under length.

This creates a trade off and will shift the lions share of loading away from the hips into other joins, those other joints can only keep going like this for so long.

There’s a reason your shoulder joint is bigger than your elbow, same as your hips are bigger than your knees.

A body that moves well during locomotion (walking and running) should have the capacity to rotate equally between hips and ribs.

The core should be relaxed but also be able to elastically react to forces travelling from shoulder to hip and vice versa. These tissues are connected through fascia on the front and back of the body, helping to pull opposing shoulders and hips toward and away from each other, this is something we see in both locomotion and other athletic movements like throwing.

Connecting these tissues to work together in particular contexts is a must if we are trying to rehabilitate back pain, shoulder pain, hip pain and even pain in the extremities.

Muscles that work together in this manner are connected through the inter web of fascia (directly connected) or through force transmission (both connected to the same bone placing opposing forces) we try to educate our clients as much as possible so they can truly start to understand themselves and have a guide on preparations for their physiological goals

The glutes

The glutes are a muscle that is both important for sport and for many of us that are self improving (aesthetics)

The glutes functions are extension (leg from in front towards the back of our body), external rotation (knee rotates away from the midline) and abduction (knee splits away from the midline).

To get an effective stretch on the glute we need to do the opposite and use tension from the opposing tissues to help keep the balance of tension and joint stability.

There are many exercises we don’t recommend because they can cause compensations (other areas having to pick up the slack) which can injure other parts of the body.

Squats are long but we do them with particular details using okf protocols to ensure we are getting both the best growth, improving length potential, increasing elasticity and function.

More on hip posture and why we don’t recommend certain exercises later

When exercise selection comes up, we want to ensure we choose exercises that don’t require us to use poor posture or movements that go against our physiological needs, stress + bad posture will create a stress adaptation which will result in poorer posture over a period of time
More posts coming about this too

This week I got asked what a boxer could do for chest to improve their bench

Boxing is a throwing sport, throwing fists, to improve in such a sport you need balance, agility, good connection between your shoulders and hips, for me bench press doesn’t do that, you lay on your back and in most cases are coached to squeeze your shoulder back and move the shoulder that you have disoriented through poor positioning, you put your spine into discombobulated curvatures and almost completely stop using your hip, very few who bench use their hips.

Push ups are way more applicable and appropriate, you use a position that you would have connected from a very early age Whalen crawling, at preform we use okf principles which worked the entire shoulder in a stable position, which improves posture and will give you the strength and elasticity needed to produce powerful well balanced move t through the shoulder, weighted vests are the best way to build this up.

More to come

We offer vouchers which would be a great idea for loved ones that are into fitness, need pain management, or want to start the new year with intentions for improved health and fitness in mind

Just click the link to see what we have available
https://app.squarespacescheduling.com/catalog.php?owner=25437167&category=Gift+Vouchers+
If you would like a custom gift voucher don't hesitate to DM me

Starting to connect with more sports

Looking forward to working with some of the carded lads to help them with som prehab fundamentals so they can keep themselves ready for the ring year round

Appreciate Norwich Broadside Warriors Boxing Club for giving us another branch

We have 2 locations

NR12FITNESS, NR128QJ (Hoveton) Monday-Friday 8am-8pm

Inspire studios, NR7 8SG (Norwich) Tuesdays each week

Link for booking in socials bio’s