Tag Archives: athletes

Be careful what you wish for….

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24

These days we are inundated with information. One problem is trying to decide how much information you really need and what do you do with it once you have it?

Take for example imaging of work or sports injuries. We can see what the cause is and should be able to provide better treatment. Right? Well it’s not that clear cut.

A couple of recent studies come to mind. The first, a study on low back pain, found that patients who had been given MRI scans took the same amount of time to heal as people who had not been scanned. Straightforward and what you would expect. What was surprising was that the MRI group suffered more and had much higher disability scores during the healing period compared to the non-scanned group. Knowing the intricate details of their injuries seemed to disturb more than re-assure the MRI scanned patients. The second study looked at what injuries/problems a doctor could see as possibly being present from evaluating an MRI scan of a shoulder. A variety of injuries were observed in 40% of the participants including significant muscle tears. This study sounded straight forward as well except for one small problem. The subjects in the second study were all high level athletes with no symptoms or reported complaints and at 5 years follow-up no problems had been reported.

The moral? The human body is extremely adaptive and we get by in spite of various injuries that may really just become quiescent rather than totally disappear. Sometimes knowing more than really necessary can create anxiety that make someone’s suffering worse than it could be. We need to trust that our bodies will tell us when something is truly amiss. So, before you go to your doctor asking for a scan or x-ray for an injury you might want to think, is there anything to indicate that this is really serious enough to need imaging? It’s not always good to know everything..

It’s sometimes said that what you don’t know can hurt you but sometimes what you do know can hurt you too!! Be careful what you wish for, what you get/find out isn’t always good for you. ;’ )

Ross

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/03635465030310051501

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22415000

stretching localization

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11

People often come to me and tell me that they have been performing routine exercises to keep themselves flexible.  Oddly enough they often report that inspite of their efforts they still feel very stiff.

One reason that is often overlooked is that they are actually trying to stretch the wrong area/tissue.  If you want to improve flexibility, whatever your particular strategy, you need to stretch the correct area.

An example: People often try to stretch their hamstrings by putting one leg on a stool and then bending their  heads down towards their knee.  When you bend forward you are actually releasing the pressure on the hamstrings as you use the flexibility in your spine to get your head closer.  If you want to stretch one area (and this is not always the case) then it is best to localise your stretch.  To get the hamstrings you can first keep your back straight and push your shest out to remove all spinal flexion.  You then put one leg on a stool and then  lean forward like you were a waiter bowing (this is only one of the many ways to stretch the hamstrings).  You should worry less about how far you go and more about where you actually feel the stretch.  You wil get mostly the hamstrings if you leave your foot relaxed. You will get the calf muscles as well if you pull your foot up towards you.   Further load can be applied by turning your pelvis/hip/leg so that everything is kept square and there is no where else that can give way to relieve the load on the hamstrings.  I could give you more variations but this would be a could starting stretch.

Add some relaxed breathing, sustained holding and a bit of patience (repeating 3-4 times for 10 + seconds ,3-4 times a day)and over a few weeks you will feel your hamstrings getting looser.

The important thing to remember is that if you don't feel a stretch in the right area when stretching then you aren't really stretching…

Good luck with your health and fitness.

Ross