Ankle mobility

Came across this video via James Dunne's blog, Kinetic Revolution.



 As someone who knows only too well the issues of limited ankle mobility, I'm going to give this a try when I go out to play tennis today!

If you've never really stretched your calf muscles or mobilised your ankle, or if you've suffered an injury either recently or in the past, then you will want to progress gently with this, as you would with any new exercise.

Event work

So the last couple of weekends have been busy with a couple of events. On Sunday 8th September I was at the London to Brighton bike ride doing post event massage for riders. I was working with World Cancer Research Fund. A friend works for the charity and I helped out last year. This year I was the principle therapist and treated most of the riders who came for a massage.

On the 15th I was at the Royal Hospital Chelsea for the "Beating Blood Cancer" bike ride. Bit of a cycling theme developing! Working with Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, a team of 9 therapist worked in rather muddy conditions to provide post event treatment to about 150 cyclist over 6 hours.

The conditions weren't great, but the team did a fantastic job and no one moaned about the mud and the  way the ground moved every time to shifted position!

Today's tasks include cleaning the couch and getting the dirt of my shoes!

Tensegrity and massage at Optimum Sports Performance

You may or may not have come across the principle of tensegrity, but I'm guessing that if you are involved in any sort of soft tissue treatment you will have discovered that sometimes the area that presents with pain or problems is not always the area that you need to treat.

Sometimes therapists are guilty of making these relationships sound way too mystical as if there's some sort of secret knowledge that reveals the true root of the problem. A more straightforward understanding simply points out that the soft tissues are are dynamic structure that works under load and tension. Tightness in ove muscle or group is bound to have an impact on other tissues and structures with which it has a connection. Tensegrity is just one way of describing these relationships.

Anyway, there are a couple of interesting articles about some recent studies that explore these principles at Optimum Sports Performance. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

Treating my plantar fascial pain

Well it's been a few weeks since I started to develop some pain under my heel, a classic sign of plantar fasciitis. Getting moving in the morning was uncomfortable rather than painful, so I took a fairly typical approach and just hoped it would go away! It didn't!

Knowing how difficult it is to get an appointment with my doctor, and knowing that the solution would probably be an injection rather than soft tissue therapy, I decided that my foot was accessible enough to treat it myself. Massaging the are under my foot with one of my spikey massage balls and also with something a little harder and stretching both the fascia and the calf muscles and calcaneal tendon seem to have worked a treat. I also applied some K tape to the area.

All in all, this simple approach has reduced my pain to zero in the morning and I can put my heel down as soon as I get out of bed.

It's just another reminder to me that stretching and working on flexibility is such an important component  to remaining healthy and retaining effective range of motion! I'm off to take part in the South of England Veterans Tennis tournament on Monday without the worry of the discomfort of landing on my right heel when I jump and run.

Eccentric Training and Flexibility

I found an interesting article looking at a range of studies that suggest that eccentric training has a significant effect on flexibility and injury prevention. Eccentric exercises are those that involve the lengthening phase of a muscle through a controlled eccentric contraction.

I always recommend a dynamic form of stretching for warm ups rather than static stretching, and I wonder how this relates to the concept of eccentric training. something to think about.

You can read the article here.

Resistance band exercises for glutes and other hip muscles

Here are some great resistance band exercises for hip mobility.

 

Are your hamstrings really tight, or is it somewhere else?

I remember the moment when it suddenly struck me that not every short muscle is a tight muscle. I can't give you an exact date and time, it wasn't quite that sort of epiphany, but it was a jump in my understanding of soft tissues and how to treat them.

I was reminded of this today when I came across a short article over at Kinetic Revolution looking at the issue of tight hamstrings when the real cause lies the position of the pelvis. An anteriorly tilted pelvis can make the hamstrings feel tight when in fact the issue possibly lies with the flexors pulling the pelvis forward and lengthening the hamstrings.

Treating the hamstrings as tight could lead you to think that they need stretching, but that only exacerbates the actual tightness in the flexors. Release the flexors and the hamstrings will sort themselves out in all probability.

The implication here is that when you test the hamstrings, then you should be looking at the pelvis not just at how far the client can bring the hip into flexion with a straight leg. And of course you should also test the hip flexors.