Whether you are sedentary for most of the day or a highly active person it is possible to develop back pain. If your pain isn't the result of a specific injury but is the kind of pain your doctor may term "non-specific" then you need corrective exercise. A corrective exercise is one that helps to re-balance the body and reduce compensatory movements. By re-balance I mean strength imbalances, certain muscle groups may be weaker or less sensitised and therefore need to be trained more specifically to reduce compensation and improve recruitment patterning. That is where corrective exercise co...

OK, you’re not an idiot not as much as me anyway. But, I want to explain a really simple template for programming your workouts. It’s super easy to over complicate these things, so this blog is going to be a basic step by step guide on how to put together your own training plans, why you should program it that way and also how a trainer can involve their clients in the process. SMART Goals First off, you need to understand your goals. I mean, if you want to enter a bodybuilding competition and you’re running 20k per day you’re going to look shit on stage aren’t you? So, when it comes to d...

I love kettlebell training, I find them convenient, versatile and progressively challenging. There is a technical element to many of the lifts that just isn’t present with more traditional forms of resistance training. As much as I love a good barbell deadlift, there’s just something more organic about one of the more complex kettlebell movements like, say, the Turkish getup. There are so many joints and muscles being used, it requires control, balance, concentration and coordination, it’s not a million miles away from yoga in many respects but with the added benefit of having to control a ...

  It may come as some surprise to you that I have long suffered with lower back pain. It has taken me years to get to the bottom of it and although I still experience occasional flare ups I now have a good strategy for dealing with it and getting back to normality as quickly as possible. Without boring you too much with lots of technical anatomy information let me just explain this. The joints in the body alternate between mobile and stable in an ideal world. The lower back, or lumbar, has a tremendous range of motion compared with other parts of the spine. 40-60˚of flexion 20-30˚ of exte...

If, like a lot of my clients, you are an active person and you partake in sports that involve running then the chances are you have experienced a Hamstring injury of some kind at some point. It might be a spasm, a minor strain or a grade 3 tear. Hamstring injuries are pretty devastating for running sports so what can you do to reduce your risk of experiencing one? This blog will set out to look at some of the evidence available regarding stretching and foam rolling and asks whether they are effective. Then we take a look at some of the evidence on strength training and finally, give an evid...