Whether you're a football player, powerlifter, Olympic weightlifter, CrossFit athlete, runner or just an everyday athlete, the importance of your hip extensor muscles which include the Gluteus maximus, Biceps Femoris (Long Head), Semitendinosus and Semimembranosus functioning correctly cannot be overstated. The hip extenders are essential for your body to work at its optimum and for preventing the build-up of chronic injury to your back and hip.

What is the most common Wrist Injury from lifting you ask? Maybe you’ve been suffering through some recent workouts with wrist pain that’s come from nowhere and limited your ability to catch weight or hold weight in the front rack position, use a kettlebell, do an overhead squat or a handstand hold? Well, let us help you work out what might be happening with your wrist.

Typically with TFL pain there is general aching around the upper thigh just slightly on the lateral side, but sometimes this can come and go, it can also refer to the lower leg into the outside quadriceps, iliotibial band or around your glutes and into your lower back. Remember normally there’s been dysfunction elsewhere to cause tfl pain as we will discuss soon.

Love it or hate it, running appears in much of our regular exercise regimes.

Be it short and sharp (in a WOD), fast and explosive (in sports) or even long and arduous (training for an endurance event) we can’t deny that being more efficient at running will not only improve performance and reduce the risk of injuries but also make it a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

As the forgotten and neglected uncle of the leg family, the ankle is a joint as detailed as any in the body. Containing 26 bones, 33 joints and over 100 muscles, ligaments and tendons it's clearly not as simple as it may look.

What we need is a concoction of mobility drills, proprioceptve drills and stability drills to nail all facets, important in getting our ankle ready for training.

The kettlebell swing is a staple exercise of CrossFit training or everyday strength and conditioning work; one that places great demands on the muscles of our posterior chain.

More specifically, a study submitted through the British Journal of Sports medicine in 2013 noted that kettlebell swings use predominately hamstring muscles, however they actually target semitendinosus, the medial, inner hamstring over the lateral biceps femoris, with higher levels of Electromyographic (EMG) activity noted through the skeletal muscles.

If you’ve ever done any of the exercise, it’s likely that you’ve heard the phrase “technique is King” (or similar).

I’d like to play the devil’s advocate here, just to question whether our fetish with form has missed the point. Maybe it hasn’t - I’m happy to be wrong on this one.

I feel like culture around technique has drifted so far out of context that it’s more like the Emperor’s new clothes. It seems to have devolved into a lot of mansplaining dweebs stipulating narrower and narrower terms and conditions on any movement and trolling any differing perspective until everyone’s too tired of the criticism to step out and say “Oi! Maybe there’s a bit more to it than that.”

You train hard, you press most days and squat like a Bulgarian but you’re still not seeing the improvements you would expect? Or do you have issues with certain lifts that you just can’t iron out?

It’s likely that there is a weakness within the kinetic chain that just isn’t up to par. Remember a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.