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7 Steps To Mastery

30/1/2019

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mastery, awareness

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Become a Rebel in the Physiotherapist, Physical Therapist, PT World

29/1/2019

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If you've wanted something more, something different, or something better from your career, then you need to become a Rebel.

OR....

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Getting into professional sports as a physiotherapist

27/1/2019

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There's a rebellion happening, about physiotherapy careers.

OR......

More on that at the end. But first.....

Let me ask you the same question I ask the pro-sport coaches I go to work for.

What is most critical to your success, that you think I can help you with?

I got into professional sport by answering this question without it even being asked. A football team wanted a trainer and I was qualified. What was critical to their success was having someone who knew how to strap their players and attend to their on-field injuries, helping them to return to training. It was a simple transaction – they advertised, I filled the position. From there, getting into higher levels of sport followed a similar path – meeting a need.

At some point, I keep one more question up my sleeve – “what are you prepared to do to get it?” I rarely have to ask that one, but it’s there in case I meet a very aware client.

The question I asked you, and my clients, has a second part – “that you think I can help you with”.

My Chinese Women’s Volleyball Head Coach, Jenny Lang Ping, had one critical factor for success – score more points than the opposition. But I could not help her with that, so when I added the second part of the question she replied simply, “power, and speed”.
At that point, I knew the destination I was tasked with getting her team to. And I turned to my colleague, Performance Coach Rett Larson, and told him we now had a mandate. He rubbed his hands with glee because he loves volleyball and can absolutely program for power and speed. My job just got easier – help keep more athletes in training so they could do more of Rett’s great speed and power program. That meant using objective systems of screening, assessing and testing to find out what their power and speed profile was, and what was stopping them from getting more. Then I had to use clinically reasoned, evidence-guided and experience-shaped methodology to change their behaviour, measurable as changes in power and speed. Simple. The result – the team won more points than the opposition and the coach saw many of the athletes become faster and more powerful.

Working in professional sport isn’t that challenging when you think of it that way but getting into professional sport can definitely be very challenging. I'll be coming back to you soon with tips and tricks about getting into professional sport. For now, I've got to fly to north east China to attend to some swimmers and water polo athletes. "Zàijiàn", which is "goodbye" in Chinese.

If you're still reading, you're wondering about the Rebellion. Click here to find out more.

PT Rebel Starter Kit

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Plank on elbows.....why?

15/1/2019

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I've already questioned the plank.

Now let me question that if you're going to plank, why on elbows? Why not on hands?

First - if you have a wrist problem that prevents weightbearing through it, but you want training of the trunk that connects upper quarter and lower quarter, think chops and lifts. Or a large number of other exercises.

But, if you still want to plank, and the wrists aren't tolerant, there's always gripping a dumb-bell and planking.

Why am I strongly suggesting getting off elbows? Because if you don't include grip or weightbearing through the hand, you're missing out on stimulating large numbers of mechanoreceptors in the hand and wrist and fingers - all of these detect and respond to pressure, sending signals to the rotator cuff of the shoulder, as well as the muscles around the elbow, scapula and thorax and neck. So, if you leave the hands out, you're excluding so much useful information to challenge stability and motor control.

Then, as per my previous article on planking, get out of it after 10 seconds and progress. Read more.

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Experiences on trying to boost fitness with training camps.

13/1/2019

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A little bit of back-story, just a little bit. In a previous role, as sports medicine coordinator at the Northern Territory Institute of Sport in Darwin, Australia, we serviced elite junior athletes. Not just serviced, but worked plans to bring them along in many areas of their potential future sporting careers. Together with a sports scientist and strength and conditioning coach, we kept an eye on training load and plugged it into an excel sheet I created that accounted for sessional RPE across months.

I used formulae for acute training load and chronic training load, creating a training stress balance in much the same way as the Australian Institute of Sport had been doing. We could monitor, using their 5 year research guidelines, when our junior athletes acute training load (moving average of last 7 days training load) jumped too high relative to their chronic training load (moving average of their last 4-6 weeks, we could choose to look at either). What we found was consistent with what was found at the Australian Institute of Sport – that when ATL:CTL jumped above 150%, the chance of the junior athlete getting sick or injured was higher. This was most common at training camps.

A few things worth mentioning:

• When the chance of getting sick gets higher, it doesn’t mean they do get sick, but in the case of junior athletes balancing school life, home life, strength training, sport training and conditioning, their recovery strategies were not good enough and they usually did get sick.
• The sickness likelihood persisted for up to 2 weeks after the spike.
• When they got sick, they didn’t train, they recovered. This often took at least a week, if not 2. During this time, their training load dropped sharply, affecting CTL and ATL. In other words, affecting fitness. Freshness/form rarely came with this rest, because they were sick.
• Upon return to training, if we didn’t have control over their local squad training, they would often return to volume sharply, causing a large spike in Acute Training Load again, relative to a dropped Chronic Training Load, and we cycled through this again – unless we got a coach on board to slow it down on their return.
• And the big consequence is that the main aim of a training camp – to boost fitness – caused a loss due to illness, and a drop in form.
• The longer term consequences were that when we measured changes in many areas of their performance that were linked to their scholarship, they didn’t change. The training camps spikes, and subsequent consequences, played a major part in not progressing.

A forward “back-story”. I moved on to working in professional sport in China where monitoring training load was more of interest than use, since we rarely could manage their load. The athletes trained in the vicinity of 35 hours/week on court/field/in-gym, so a training camp was nothing to them, in terms of load. Often the training camp was a change of scenery and of use. A rise in ATL was rare, and was protected by the massively high CTL they already had. Plus, they slept during the day and ate huge amounts of food. Now, their ability to change performance outcomes was usually poor because the athletes often held back in all performance testing since they either had a training session before the testing, or afterwards, or were injured most days anyway but still made to train. The point there was that a high training load, plus adequate recovery strategies, could stave off sharp increases in seven-ten day spikes.

So, our athletes in China didn’t bother with Heart Rate Variability (HRV), unless their program was/is almost fully controlled by their western coach, and there’s a few. And our junior athletes in Australia didn’t have the chronic training load, or the recovery strategies to handle acute spikes. On the latter, their scholarships were renewed yearly, and if performance outcomes weren’t satisfactory, they were dropped, which put pressure on sports coaches to blast them and see who was left….a strategy that works in China with a population to replace fallen comrades, and a CTL to support them, but not with junior athletes on yearly performance reviews and coaches without an appreciation for the steadier approach.

In some of our cases, building a huge overload can be managed if we already have a high chronic training load and the freedom to recovery properly.

To your training, on and upwards. And thanks for listening.

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"If you ain't living on the edge, you're taking up space"

7 Steps To Mastery

mastery, awareness

Become a Rebel in the Physiotherapist, Physical Therapist, PT World

Getting into professional sports as a physiotherapist

Plank on elbows.....why?

Experiences on trying to boost fitness with training camps.

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