The Integra Blog

New Testimonials Coming in...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 21:17:00 +0000

We have had some nice testimonials coming into us recently, here’s the latest for George:

George’s client list reads like the honours list at the Oscars. It is very rare for someone relatively so young to have gained so much experience in the heart of the world’s top racing establishments. His exposure to the world’s top trainers, racehorses, race tracks, studs and training methods is unrivalled and lucky are the clients who entrust their bodies to him.

THE STALLION

Thank you Karl…But seriously here are some recent comments:

What I love about training with George is that he is so passionate about what he does. (read more here)

And…

What marks George out is his professionalism, commitment and attention to detail. In the 2 years I’ve been training with him he’s never stopped thinking about how to optimise my regime and tailor things to ensure that I get exactly what I need from my training. (read more here)

Read more of our testimonials here and to find out more about George, click here.

Can You Transform Your Body in Just 6 Weeks?

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 12:05:00 +0100

Written by: Martina Avellino

Clients who have spoken to us about commercial diet and exercise plans will know we’re a bit sceptical about them. This is because they tend to be generic, formulaic, and don’t often address the changes that need to happen on a deep personal level to both achieve and maintain a certain result.

The image from the right is from one of the most popular health & fitness websites.

The big selling point of these plans, however, is fast results: you are guaranteed that in 6 weeks your body will look and feel radically different. Is this really possible? Yes, absolutely. But there are caveats. Specifically:

You will have to change a lot of things at once, perhaps completely overhaul your diet and exercise habits. And this may be stressful, because change is hard at the best of times. You will have to be 100% compliant. No deviation from the plan is consented. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like eating what’s on the menu, or that a particular exercise feels a bit harsh on your joints. You’ll have to do it anyway.

You will be given a prescription, not a thought process. This will mean you’ll know exactly what to do for 6 weeks, down to the last squat or gram of chicken, but after that you’re on your own.

You’ll have to change your identity very quickly. Lasting physical change is almost always associated with personal growth on some level. If you want to maintain the results of the 6 week plan, you should be prepared to do that emotional work pretty darn quickly.

My point is that fast transformations are possible, but you need to go into them with your eyes wide open. If you’re completely on board with all the above, great. But if not, you might benefit from setting yourself a slightly longer time frame in which to achieve your goal.

Posture - Are You Being Judgemental?

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:18:00 +0100

Written by: Paul Argent

If you’ve had cause to visit a physiotherapist, osteopath, personal trainer, or Pilates instructor in the last 10 years, then you will no doubt have been told that you have bad posture. It’s also likely that your bad posture was singled out as the most important contributing factor to whatever ailment you may or may not have been suffering from at the time.

I know this because if you’d come to me 5 years ago for an assessment, I would have been the personal trainer telling you the exact same thing. My colleague at the time was a Pilates instructor and she would have told you a similar story. I also had reason to visit physiotherapists and osteopaths who all told me my aches and pains were due to, you guessed it, bad posture.

When we see a particular posture, we start to judge it and assume we know why it is like it is.

After several years of trying to adjust mine and everyone else’s posture to fit an ideal I had been taught about but had rarely seen, I discovered that very little seemed to change, on my body or anyone else’s. It also became apparent that in some cases stretching and exercising people to fit this magical ideal actually made some people’s symptoms worse. I began to investigate and discovered the following:

Posture has very little correlation to injury or pain states
Assessing the cause of someone’s pain from how they look is inaccurate and in most cases misleading
An intervention based on an inaccurate assessment can indeed make matters worse

Posture, bad or otherwise comes from the latin ponere which means ‘to put or place.’ It is how your central nervous system decides to arrange your body for any given circumstance.

For example, If you sit in a slouched posture for example, then your brain may have made the calculation that, under the current circumstances, this is the most energy efficient position for you to be in.

We can of course consciously override this calculation and decide to sit tall, but as you probably will have experienced, this only lasts as long as you can consciously control it. Start to read an e-mail and within 5 minutes you are back where you started. The more tenacious among you may have persevered but this usually leads to people feeling worse rather than better at the end of the day. Your central nervous system knows best.

In fact, your posture could be a reflection of conserving energy, your emotional state, a habit, it could be due to underlying structures, or it could be that some muscles are tight and some are weak. But we mustn’t just assume, we need to test these theories.

Orchestration

Your body is orchestrating solutions to the task you have set it, whether that is sitting in a chair for 8 hours or running a marathon. Its solutions are difficult and sometimes unwise to override. Perhaps as this process is unconscious. As your central nervous system senses more strength and stability, it will allow you to adopt different postures that will ultimately lead to fewer aches and pains.

So should you ignore your posture?

Of course not, but the first thing to do is to stop worrying about it. Overriding the position of one or more joints is a decision. Firstly, move regularly and explore the ranges you can safely move into within your training sessions.

Secondly, when you start to place more forces on your body you do need to be more aware of the position of your joints. This is to ensure that the joints and muscles of your body can safely absorb these forces (we’ll get to this in another article).

At Integra, we find that the more muscles that we can get working optimally, first with Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT) and then with resistance training, the more people tend to hold themselves differently.

If you are a trainer and assessing someone’s posture and you think a muscle is weak, strong or tight - don’t assume, test out your theory using a tool such as MAT.

Top 5 Ways to Avoid Injuries

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 21:17:00 +0100

Written by: Michael Goulden

No-one enjoys being injured, it’s often painful, it slows down your potential to reach your results and frankly, it can get very boring! What can you change in your training right now to reduce your risk of injury? Here are our top 5 recommendations.

Micro-progression

No matter how fast you want to change, your body can only adapt in microscopic steps at the cellular and chemical level
- (RTS)

A little bit of stress can be a good thing, too much is not. You wouldn’t (we hope) go run a marathon if you had never run before, similarly don’t start doing 5 x 5 reps of Barbell Squats at your 5 rep max. Start small, progress small, continue to progress.

Make the exercises fit you

We all understand that we are unique, yet we continue to try to fit our bodies into the exercises rather than the other way round.

Just because there is a bend in the Lat Pulldown bar, does not mean we all should grab the bar outside of this bend. Check your wrists. You want to maintain as much of a neutral position (as possible) throughout the movement.

Similarly, we shouldn’t all do squats with our feet hip width apart. It may work for me, due to my short legs! But if you have a long femur, your joints and spine may appreciate a wider stance. Don’t just do the traditional method. Build the squat for you.

Exercise-specific range of motion

Whether we are using a machine, dumbbells or some ropes/TRX, we need to respect the active range of motion that our Central Nervous System (CNS) is giving us. If you can’t take your body into a position on your own, allowing a barbell to drive you into that position may put you into an unstable position, creating consequences for your joints and muscles.

For example, sit up and grab a stick (in the same way you would perform a bench press, but sit upright), slowly pull the stick to your chest. How far to your chest is it? That is your ‘setting’ for today. Don’t get into the bench press position and allow the bar to touch your chest if you could not get there without the extra load.

Be aware of your body

How do you know when you have done too much and need to rest? There are so many variables within your body, this one is challenging. You can monitor your Heart Rate every morning and if there is an increase over the average, that may be a sign that you need to pull back slightly and allow your body to fully recover.

You can also start to use range of motion as a tool. If you have exceeded the threshold of your muscular system, you may find one or more muscles have become inhibited. This is normal in the short term and can potentially show up in restrictions or tightness (your body is trying to protect your joint by compensating with other muscles).

This topic is a little too big for this article so we will look at it soon, but right now start to look at your hips. Every morning, lay on your back and keep your legs together. Twist your left one in, now your right and compare. Then repeat by twisting out. Start to track over time and if you suddenly notice a reduction at one time, step back from your training a little.

Of course, if you notice it lasts a little longer then get in touch!

Alter your speed

This is a big one. Most of us understand the need to alter our training variables, such as sets, reps and rest. We don’t often see ‘speed of movement’ being part of the variable list. The majority of people in the gyms around the world train at a speed of 1.0.1.0, meaning they move the weight up for 1s. (concentric) and down for 1s. (eccentric). In reality, it’s often quicker.

Start to introduce different speeds into your training program, slow it down to 4.1.2.0 or even 10.2.10.2. The effects on your physique and performance from slowing down your speeds can be huge, along with reducing the possibility of exceeding the threshold of a muscle by too much. What do I mean?

Every muscle has a threshold, as we saw above in micro-progression, exceeding that threshold by a small amount (a little bit of stress) is advantageous to training, this is what we want. But push it too far and you could exceed the tolerance for that tissue, causing potential problems.

Let’s look at a DB Bicep Curl, we may think we are lifting a 15Kg dumbbell because it says 15 on the side, but what we are resisting is force. If we go back to physics class, we can see that the equation for force is mass x acceleration. In other words, how fast we increase or decrease the db’s speed (or, how fast you accelerate and decelerate the db) has an effect on the weight.

There are many other factors that affect the force we are resisting against, which we will cover another time but in this situation: The faster you are moving into the lengthened position, the more force is needed from the muscle to slow this down, stop and then shorten.

There is a spectrum of speed that you can explore, moving quickly has its advantages, but as we see above, speed, acceleration (and deceleration) is one part of the overall force that we are resisting and working with.

Bonus tip: plan your training!

It is a little out of vogue in certain camps to plan your training, but the aspect where this does help is with tracking both volume and rest periods. Too much volume without adequate rest and recovery is a recipe for overuse scenarios. You may be hitting the same few positions and motions with the same amount of intensity and time that not only do you overuse these variables, but you limit your performance by missing out on all the goodness elsewhere on that exercise spectrum.

A key factor in your long-term programming, you need to plan for weeks of de-training and/or rest. When was the last time you took a week off from training? Try it, then go back training and tell us about the change in your performance.

Conclusion

This is just a selection of our recommendations to our clients. For those who come to see us due to injury, it means a much quicker recovery and for those that come to see us because they want to improve their results from training, it means they keep on improving without the interruption of injury.

"Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible’!"

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:55:00 +0100

“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible’!”

- Audrey Hepburn

Egg Yolk is as bad as smoking?

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:14:00 +0100

A study came out earlier this week that several of my clients sent through to us, via the Daily Mail (although in fairness, it was picked up on a lot of other news sites too)

Here’s a quote from this article above:

Egg yolk contains cholesterol and having too much of it increases the risk of atherosclerosis, also known as coronary artery disease. Research shows regular consumption of egg yolks may have almost the same effect on your heart as smoking
Cholesterol boosts formation of plaques in arteries and when these plaques rupture it can cause heart attacks and strokes.

Quite alarming, especially as we ask all clients to have some form of protein at every meal and quite often, eggs are the primary choice for breakfast.

Dr Chris Mohr over on Mohr Results has already picked his way through the study and found the following:

Basically the researchers did what’s called a correlation study, based on self report from the subjects, and showed that those who had a high intake of eggs had similar levels of atherosclerotic plaque to that of smokers. What they didn’t do, however, is consider pretty much any other factor that also can play a role in plaque development.

Here are the factors missing from the study:

Exercise wasn’t even a factor in this study.

Saturated fat wasn’t examined.

Sugar wasn’t.

Fruit and vegetable intake weren’t.

Overall calorie intake wasn’t.

Fiber wasn’t either.

In fact, no other dietary factor was examined as part of this equation (at least that they mentioned).

And while we’re at it, no other lifestyle habits were either. How often people sit vs. stand & overall general activity and movement, even outside of just basic physical activity weren’t either.

So basically this study is what’s called a correlation study – and correlation doesn’t mean causation — in other words, doing one thing (eating eggs in this case) doesn’t ’cause’ heart disease.

We’d recommend checking out our article on breakfasts choices, including eggs!

To read the rest of Dr Chris Mohr’s article, go here: Eggs Worse Than Smoking

This is the full study if you would like to read it: J. David Spence, David J.A. Jenkins, Jean Davignon. Egg yolk consumption and carotid plaque. Atherosclerosis, 2012

Review: Being Lean Is Not a 6-week Program - Living Lean

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:20:16 +0100

This was a popular article before the summer from Martina. Our focus at Integra is always on the long-term. How can you achieve goals quickly, safely AND maintain them?

What do you need to work on to improve your body composition; to increase lean mass, whilst losing body fat?

Written by: Martina Avellino

One of the most common motivations for undertaking a diet or exercise programme is to transform one’s body shape. Typically, the goal is to improve muscle definition by increasing or preserving muscle mass while shedding body fat…

Muscle Activation Techniques for Running

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 21:55:00 +0100

Written by: Michael Goulden

A couple of weeks ago, in my article Muscle Activation Techniques for Sport, we looked at how we use MAT at Integra to enhance our clients’ ability to participate in their sports, whilst improving their performance and reducing injury risk.

I’d now like to give you some tangible examples of how MAT can affect sports performance. In this article I’ll be looking at running, and one element in particular: structural alignment, in terms of efficiency and compensation mechanisms.

Efficiency of Motion

The most effective way of improving performance is to plug the holes in your technique, and one of these holes is the efficiency of motion. Our bodies have very smart mechanisms to absorb the external forces we deal with, storing them up for a short time and then using those forces to move.

Function is about timing…when all the joints in the body work properly, gait is a highly efficient mechanism.
- (MAT Advanced Foot Function Manual, 2006)

Joint Motions During Gait

During the running cycle, for example, from heel strike to toe off, all of our joints in the feet move through a cycle from shock absorber to a propulsive lever. As your foot lands on the ground the rear foot is in an inverted position and moves into an everted position. This is a component of pronation, which also includes:

Sub-talar eversion
Talo-crural dorsiflexion
Mid-tarsal Oblique Axis extension
Mid-Tarsal Longitudinal Axis Inversion
1st Ray extension and inversion
Along with joint motions through your body in relation to pronation.

As each joint moves through these motions, certain muscles lengthen, certain ligaments increase in tautness and the bones & joints of feet move to create arches in the foot which allows the distribution of forces through the feet. The image below from The Physiology of the Joints, Kapandji shows one of these arches.

It is this ‘winding up’ mechanism of the joints, ligaments and muscles, which absorbs the external forces as we land. We have our own in-built shock absorbers.

If you reduce the motion at one of the joints, the body’s ability to absorb forces changes. This has two implications:

First, you now have a group of muscles that are compensating for other muscles, the potential for early fatigue increases, whilst the potential for further breakdown increases.
Second, you now have to rely on the other joints to compensate for the joint which is limited creating potential abnormal wear and tear scenarios.

The Body’s Ability to Compensate

During any motion your Central Nervous System is delivering solutions to the tasks you set it.

Let’s take picking up a glass of water and taking a sip of it. That action is made from many different motions at every joint between your spine and your hand (truthfully, depending on your external support, possibly every joint in your body).

If you are lacking in elbow flexion, that’s ok! Your CNS will find a solution for you to allow you to drink.

Back to running and let’s look at just one joint: there is a requirement of your 1st MTP joint (big toe) to extend up to 45º, but if you don’t have this, that’s ok! Your CNS will find a solution for you to allow the overall motion of the foot.

This is the beauty of the Human Body, if you were like a machine the error light would come on and you would not be able to function.

What Does This Mean to You?

In the short term, these compensation mechanisms are a great solution to allow you to function in daily life. But functioning at this level does not mean high performance.

In the long term, these compensation mechanisms can create further knock-on effects:

A potential for joint, ligament and muscle breakdown, as you cannot spread the external forces effectively
As muscles compensate for other muscles, they could fatigue earlier
Your power output and endurance capabilities will decrease
Although the CNS can find a solution for the limitations in certain joints, this opens up the potential for abnormal joint forces and excessive wear and tear.

These issues don’t happen overnight and can build up gradually over time.

How Does MAT Help

By bring every muscle back ‘online’ your CNS can give you better solutions, you improve your body’s ability to absorb the external forces, efficiently utilise the stored energy and you improve your muscles’ resistance to fatigue.

As we discussed in Muscle Activation Techniques for Sport, by optimising the muscular system, we are able to see tangible improvements in joint ranges of motion, muscle strength and joint control. Our clients tell us that they are able to see higher levels of endurance, increased speed, reduced recovery times and higher force production.

A Little Opinion About Barefoot Running…

As a side note, this is one of the more interesting points about barefoot running, in that shoes (for the most part) absorb some of these external forces, so we have less of the stored elastic force to utilise. Having something to absorb the forces might potentially be a good thing, but the downside is that not only do we lose the stored potential energy, but we’re now trying to push through a cushioned and unstable surface, which also reduces force-production capabilities. Of course, with faulty movement patterns, barefoot running can be more of an issue than a panacea to performance - but I will leave that debate for another time.

Kinesio Tape: What is it and why do athletes use it?

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 13:00:00 +0100

Written by: Paul Argent

I guess by now you have noticed that everyone from footballers to tennis players have taken to covering themselves in brightly coloured tape while playing their sport. In fact, we have seen a lot of the athletes at the Olympics using the tape (check out the image below, to the right). What is the tape and why do they use it?

Kinesio tape, as it is known, was devised by Japanese chiropractor Dr Kenzo Kase more than 30 years ago. He found that application of the tape following treatment reduced his patient’s pain. Since then the tape has been used by both physiotherapists and osteopaths alike as an adjunct to treatment, allowing sportspeople and ordinary members of the public to return to their activities with fewer symptoms.

So how does it work?

I have heard various justifications for its use but the most common is to either increase or decrease the activity of muscles underneath the tape depending on how you apply it. There is some evidence to support an increase in muscle activity following the tape’s application. The precise mechanism of this is unknown but it’s believed to be due to the stimulating effect of the tape on the proprioceptors in skin, which increases feedback to the central nervous system. This in turn produces higher levels of muscle activity which have been shown to last up to 4 days with continual taping.

How does the physiotherapist / osteopath know which muscles need stimulating?

Good question. The surprising truth is they don’t. The decision is based on studies of people with similar symptoms and their muscle weaknesses. This leads to familiar patterns of taping which can be seen on the image above; with both Gareth Bale and Brazilian defender Maicon playing with their medial quadriceps muscle taped as this muscle has been shown to be underactive in studies of people with knee pain.

From this image alone you will probably start to question this approach. Can it really be that two international footballers from very different backgrounds end up having the exact same muscle weak and that exact same muscle is the cause of their knee pain? And even in the unlikely event this is so, is running around with strips of tape covering your leg the only option? We don’t think so.

What is the solution?

It is indeed strange that of the 600 plus muscles in the body only one gets blamed for knee pain. We know that weakness in any area of the body has the potential to cause knee pain and the cause may be different for everybody. We feel that to truly understand the causes of pain and tightness, you can not rely on tradition or protocols. This is too hit and miss. Using the detailed assessment procedure of Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT) enables us to precisely locate the weak muscles that are causing your pain.

Although you might like the look of walking around wearing brightly coloured tape, we won’t require you to. We use a simple manual therapy technique to activate the muscle and then retest the muscle to see if it has worked. Your body then has the option of using the muscle as it sees fit rather than having a temporary protocol based solution imposed on it. This produces superior results both in the short and long term.

Why use MAT and Resistance Training for Dancers?

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 19:43:00 +0100

Written by: Rui Reis

I’m currently working with my girlfriend on her exercise regime. What comes with this, (apart from the occasional vow never to work with her again!), is the opportunity to experience using MAT and resistance training with someone who has been dancing for most of her life.

Her professional days are now over, but our conversations often come to the demands placed upon dancers from a physical and emotional stand-point.

Louisa says it like this:

The goal for every dancer is to be able to perform at the highest level with no pain and no injuries. The reality is quite often that due to both the increasing demands and the lack of a recovery and support strategy for the body, most dancers carry injury on top of injury. You have to be The Best, being good is not good enough, so asking a dancer to rest while their body recuperates is futile.

All dancers are required to execute movements with a large range of motion, with stability and control. The majority of the time, these two properties do not go hand in hand.

With the emphasis on increasing your ranges of motion, stretching becomes of paramount importance, with many hours spent in ritual stretching. Although successful in reaching the goal of increased ROM, if you take your joints beyond their active range of motion and shorten muscle tissue past it’s threshold, you can actually decrease joint stability by creating inhibition with the muscle.

If you experience muscle tightness, it could be that you are experiencing joint and muscle imbalances! According to Hobby and Hoffmaster (1986) some injuries [cause and] are caused by muscle imbalances resulting from dance training that “places specific demands on bodies.”

Your body can compensate for these inhibited muscles by increasing the tension on the remaining muscles. Do you ever have that tight muscle that you need to stretch daily because it’s always tight? Blame your Central Nervous System - it’s trying to protect your joint.

How do we increase your range of motion and how do we make your joints and muscles better able to tolerate the forces you put through your body?

Muscle Activation Techniques is designed to locate and then treat the underlying causes of muscle tightness, which as we have said above is muscle inhibition.

That’s pretty cool but then the next bit gets even better, If you take a joint into the end range and you are not strong in that range, your body wants to protect you: cue more tightness and restrictions. By using MAT and a combination of specific resistance training exercises we are able to strengthen those new joint ranges.

Remember, strength means being able tolerate and produce forces to complete the actions you need to perform, which, if you are looking to improve your performance and increase your career longevity, is something you do not want to neglect.

Muscle Activation Techniques for Sport

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 09:51:00 +0100

Written by: Michael Goulden

With the Olympics just about upon us and our focus for the next month or so turning to sport, I wanted to write about how we use Muscle Activation Techniques to enhance and complement the many different sports that our clients are involved with.

It is not automatic that once you start running, playing tennis, or cycling, you will be free from pain, aches, injuries and muscular inhibitions. We have said before that sport does not equal optimum health, in fact, many sports increase the chances of injuries occurring.

By ensuring your muscular system is working optimally, we can not only reduce the risk of injury and improve recovery times, but also improve the markers of performance: speed, power, strength and ability.

How do we do it?

We utilise a manual therapy called Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT). This is a system designed to evaluate and treat joint and muscle imbalances and inhibitions. It is a systematic approach to the evaluation and treatment of the biomechanical relationships relating to pain, injury and decreased performance.

When your muscular system is operating at anything less than its absolute optimal level, we start to see compensation patterns emerge. Joint and muscle imbalances arise when a muscle (or a series of muscles) has to work more in order to compensate for muscles that have become inhibited, and are therefore not as active as they should be - or not active at all.

How does this affect performance?

Joint and muscle imbalances can affect your performance in several ways:

When you experience muscle tightness, your ranges of motion are altered. The body will always find a movement solution, so even though you may be limited in one joint, your body can pick up the range in other joints. These biomechanical compensation patterns, whilst useful in the short term to enable movement, can start to create their own ‘overuse’ issues in the long term.
With one or more muscles not able to contract efficiently (due to inhibition), the amount of force you are able to produce decreases. You simply don’t have enough muscles fired up to produce the work you need. And the remaining muscles? Again, you ask them to do much more work and eventually they will also start to suffer.
Contrary to popular belief, we don’t have fixed patterns in the way we perform a movement. If you were to film someone performing a bench press from the side, for example, we would see the bar change path ever so slightly each time. There is a level of variability that exists within the muscular system to prevent overuse and reduce the potential of fatigue. Take out some of the muscles and you start to lose variability, and when you lose options the potential for injury starts to increase.

Are You In Control?

Your body has the ability to control joints via three main tissues: bone, ligament and muscle:

The shape of the bone dictates the type of motion that is available at a joint and structural stability (think of the hip vs shoulder joint).
The ligaments provide passive stability around a joint: throughout a range one or more can become taut which can guide the motion and increase the stability of a joint.
The muscles provide active control around a joint: the CNS orchestrates the required amount of tension needed from every muscle to control the joint (the primary focus) and then to move the joint.

If one or more of the muscles around a joint are unable to produce tension, due to inhibition, you start to reduce the CNS’s ability to provide sufficient active control. The CNS then has to increase the tension in other muscles to compensate. The ligaments and bones, which should only act as guard rails (the last line of defence), are placed upon increased demand to produce stability, potentially creating more structural issues in the long term.

How does MAT work?

Rather than stretch the tight muscles, the prime focus of Muscle Activation Techniques is to systematically identify the root cause of muscle inhibition and create improved balance across the joint. As the name suggests, where inhibition is present we utilise several methods to improve the brain’s ability to activate the muscle. In other words we improve their ability to work.

Your results from MAT?

As an athlete you are looking to maximise your potential, so any level of dysfunction will decrease your performance. When you are looking to be the best, you want to ensure your muscular system is backing you up.

By optimising the muscular system, we are able to see tangible improvements in joint ranges of motion, muscle strength and joint control. By bringing every muscle back ‘online’ we are able to see higher levels of endurance, increased speed, reduced recovery times and higher force production.

This is the first in a series of articles on Muscle Activation Techniques for Sport. Coming up, I will detail specific ways we have used MAT and RTS based resistance training to improve the performance and reduce injury risk of our clients.

New on the blog: check out the next article in this series: Muscle Activation Techniques for Running

Shoulder Surgery vs Exercise

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:26:00 +0100

Written by: Paul Argent

Is shoulder surgery always necessary? A recent study suggests not.

Have you ever gone to get something from that difficult to reach top cupboard in the kitchen and had a pain in your shoulder that can sometimes radiate down your arm? If so, there is a chance you have experienced Subacromial Impingement.

It’s a relatively common cause of shoulder pain and is thought to be caused by the tendon of the Supraspinatus muscle being pinched between your Humerus and Acromium Process as you lift your arm.

Most rehabilitation professionals will prescribe exercises for the weak muscles that they believe are the cause. Success is achieved when you have no pain. If that approach fails you have the option of surgery.

Interestingly, a recent study has found that surgery for the condition is no more effective than exercise alone. This study is great news because, as we know, surgery should be a last case scenario, given that once surgery has been performed there will be inherent weaknesses in that area.

But still, many people seem to be opting for the surgical route, so it seems the exercise solution isn’t working, why?

The exercise programme usually fails because it is not based on what is causing your shoulder pain but what causes ‘most people’s’ shoulder pain. That’s right, it is protocol based. Now given the huge amount of variability in the human body, it’s obvious that an exercise program based on norms will not work for all people even some of the time.

Using Muscle Activation Techniques, we are able to precisely locate the muscle weakness that is causing your shoulder pain. So rather than offering an exercise programme based on norms, we are able to tailor the programme specifically to you. This produces results that are superior to both surgery and conventional rehabilitation programmes.

Change Your Daily Coffee Routine For a Lean Stomach

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 09:52:00 +0100

Written by: Martina Avellino

Changing your daily coffee routine could have a big impact on achieving a lean midsection.

Caffeine has been shown to stimulate the production of the hormone cortisol. This is commonly referred to as a “stress” hormone, because it is produced when the body is under physical or emotional stress. Prolonged high concentrations of cortisol in the blood are usually undesirable: not only do they have a detrimental effect on general health, they also promote fat accumulation around the stomach.

In the mornings, cortisol rises naturally to wake us from sleep. However, once the cortisol has done its job we want our levels to drop as soon as possible to minimise unnecessary stress on the body. By the same token, during the day our bodies are constantly negotiating the stresses of our normal routine, and we want to avoid adding to this. Remember, more cortisol means more fat accumulation around the stomach, and I think it’s safe to say no one needs that!

So to avoid stimulating excess cortisol production aim to limit your consumption of caffeine to the hour before your workout. Caffeine consumed at this time serves as an “ergogenic aid” - a (legal!) substance that gives you a bit of a kick before training.

At other times of the day try switching to a good quality decaffeinated coffee (water-processed is best) or a lightly-brewed green tea, which contains much less caffeine. And if you rely on coffee to jump-start your morning, why not try our favourite greens supplement? Not only is it one of the few greens powders that actually tastes good (and I’ve tried lots of pretty nasty ones!), it also contains maca and green tea extracts, both of which are natural stimulants. Plus it will serve as one of your daily portions of vegetables.

Why not give it a go for a week?

Client Blog: All Things Breakfast

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 10:54:00 +0100

Client Blog: All Things Breakfast:

This article was one of our most popular posts over the past couple of months. We all know breakfast is good for us (unless you are following an IF protocol!), but rather than lecture you on the why, George laid out the how to implement, depending on your specific situation.

How is your breakfast now?
What did you change?
How are your energy levels throughout the day?
Did you come up with any useful breakfast recipes?

Let us know!

integra-muscle-activation:

When attempting to introduce new habits to clients, undoubtedly the change they struggle with the most is eating a good breakfast. This is no great surprise when you consider that most UK born clients were raised on cereal, toast and the occasional fry-up.

Added to this struggle are the…

Click here to read more…

Are you on Foursquare?

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 09:44:59 +0100

Are you on Foursquare?:

If you have an iPhone or Android get onto Foursquare and start checking into Integra when you are in the studio for three very good reasons:

1) For every Foursquare check-in, we will donate £1 to WaterAid
2) For every 20 check-ins you do, we’ll give you a free session
3) You help us get the word out about our services!

You can find us here: Integra - Muscle Activation | Training

Michael

Achieving Your Goals: Find The Feeling

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 09:52:00 +0100

Written by: Martina Avellino

“Behaviour change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people’s feelings […] In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.”

(John Kotter and Dan Cohen, The Heart of Change)

It’s much easier to find loopholes in a rational argument than it is to talk yourself out of a feeling. This is why we are most likely to succeed when our goals are personally meaningful.

One of the key components of a truly meaningful goal is authenticity. It needs to be your dream, which reflects your values and your identity. Others can support you, guide you, encourage you, even praise you, but the real reward is not something that comes from someone else.

The real reward is knowing in your heart that the ‘self’ you are standing in is stronger, truer, brighter. It’s knowing that you don’t need anyone to confirm you’ve changed: you can feel it in your very core.

The landscape might be unfamiliar, but you know you’re looking forward to exploring this place.

50 Things I’ve Learned About...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:52:50 +0100

50 Things I’ve Learned About...:

This article by Shawn Blanc is about publishing and writing, but it could be about your health and fitness goals, building a business, building relationships, life.

Be consistent, be passionate, build relationships, learn something new every day.

"We are all loop-hole exploiting lawyers when it comes to self-control"

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 19:55:53 +0100

“We are all loop-hole exploiting lawyers when it comes to self-control”

- Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

Are Kettlebells Safe?

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 12:56:00 +0100

Question over on the RTS page:

Are Kettlebells safe? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

RTS:

Kettlebells by themselves have never hurt anybody. They don’t explode and spew shrapnel. They don’t roll down the street and squash babies in their strollers. They are inanimate objects that sit on the floor/rack and have never intentionally with premeditation attacked a single soul. It’s what people DO with kettlebells that may be the benefit… or the detriment, as is often the case!

Most so-called experts that devise the exercises have no clue about the body (joint tolerances) nor the device (moment arm and inertial properties) and therefore, in an attempt to make a “rocking workout” often sacrifice their followers along the way.

Get a simple fishing scale and hang a 5lb wt from it. If you lift and lower it at the speed most people train, and certainly with the acceleration and decelaration that is typically associated with kettlebell usage, the scale fluctuates between 0lb and 20lb. Now this is not a problem if it is strategic (i.e., for the right joint position, right neuromuscular responses/goals, and most importantly for someone who has been evaluated for Neuromuscular Integrity at each joint via a process such as MAT and was properly MicroProgressed as a beginner up to this advanced level). But that is RARELY the case.

Only with an understanding of both the “inside view” of bodily structures and the objective properties and mechanics of the tools we use can a “certified trainer” eventually become the true Exercise Professional that both the trainer and the client mistakenly thinks he/she is. All evidence indicates that currently this only occurs at a RTS course!

(via RTS123.com)

Client Questions: What weight should I use for...

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:22:00 +0100

George says: “Pick a conservative weight to begin with, perform the set number of reps at the set speed. If you finish the set & found it far too light, treat it as a warm up set, increase the weight and start your ‘working’ sets.

You should always be in control of the weight and not the other way around! If you can stop the weight at any point in the range, you have control!

Be aware, your body will perform at different levels on different days: If you are stressed, tired (emotionally or physically), unwell, or lack sleep, train at a lower intensity than usual. Listen to your body. You’ll soon get to know which weight to use, just ensure you record it, then you’ll know what to use next time, be it the same weight or a slight increase or decrease”.