Just Move
So as it’s my first blog for the legends at Evolutio, I thought I’d start by introducing myself. I’m Sarah, 31, former chef in both career and lifestyle. I now coach at Wards Gym and I also work for the YMCA. I promote both CrossFit and Les Mills respectively which, I’ll admit, is a confusing and contradictory combination. I generally try my hardest to not put the training style that I personally love more than anything in the world (CrossFit) on a pedestal and mindlessly criticize all others. If I wasn’t trying though, I would say something like this:
Cast Away with Tom Hanks & the Evolutio Team
Following a gruelling six-month selection camp that included events such as the left arm 1 rep max bicep curl and racing a great white shark I was given the honour to spend 4 weeks with the Average Joe’s down at Evolutio. It wasn’t all sunshine and smiles though. Two weeks before flying over from Glasgow I began to have the nervous shakes about coming to Melbourne and what happened next I will never forget. Team Captain Alex called me and said "Well, I guess if a person never quit when the going got tough, they wouldn't have anything to regret for the rest of their life. But good luck to you. I'm sure this decision won't haunt you forever." Now that may or may not be a quote from Dodgeball the movie and that may or may not have actually happened.
Loading..... Please wait and your Success will be Right with You
Load management is a hot topic right now in the sporting world. What’s too much? What’s too little? From a physiotherapy perspective, one of the trickier things when working with athletes is to decide when is the right time to return to competition after injury and have they earned the right to return to their desired activity?
Fascia, Tensegrity & The Continuous Ambush of Tension
Now I’m not casting aspersions on any childhood songs in particular, but we have a tendency to imagine the body in movement as a rigid frame being pulled on by distinct muscles to produce specific joint actions. eg: the hamstrings pull on the shin bones to produce knee flexion. While this is not technically incorrect, are we sure this is the best way to view and address human movement?
If we were talking about robots, then I think it would be a fine. In that case, treating any pain or dysfunction would be more a case of finding the part that wasn’t working and fixing the hydraulics at that joint.
21,000 Reps vs 30
We breathe on average about 21,000 times a day. Now, what if we are not breathing correctly? That’s a lot of times in one day to do something wrong. There’s various ways to breathe: mouth V nasal, chest V abdominal. Some good, some not so good. If our breathing pattern is not “normal”, then we will struggle to normalise any of our other movement patterns.
Optimal oxygenation occurs through nasal breathing. We should be doing this 99% of the time. Mouth breathing is associated with “fight or flight”, whereas nasal breathing is associated with “rest and digest”. Basically we want to convince our brain that it is in a “rest and digest” state a majority of the time to reap the benefits. Nasal breathing reassures our subconscious we are safe. We need to turn nasal breathing into a habit. This can be tricky at first, but we will explain how and why you should be doing this below.
Bad Squats are the Reason your Knee Hurts
Have you heard the old adage of ‘Practice makes Perfect’? Most people have. When learning a new skill or movement at the gym you need to spend time ‘under the bar’, or breaking a movement down into parts and then piecing them back together. This adage is true - you get better at what you practice, and if you practice perfectly, you get better at performing perfectly.
2018
Remember when the year 2000 was upon us and all the talk was about the Y2K bug, we’d posse up at the beach at Rottnest island in W.A with our four lemon ruskis, listening to silverchair bang out another hit and talk about how the world was about to fall apart.
Now we’re in the year 2017 and silverchair are long gone. Although check your back garden because Daniel Johns might be sleeping there.
As they say, sometimes the days are long but the years go quick.
This time of the year is an interesting one from a business perspective. At the end of 2016, I sat down one on one with each of my staff, talked through their year and tried to plant the seed in their mind, for them to think about their own vision and how we fit into that picture. I wanted my staff to spend at least 15 hours on their own over the break to reflect and realign themselves if necessary.
Winner of the Evolutio 2016 Annual Coaches Competition
On a typical vulnerable spring day in November 2013, we first came up with the idea of searching for Melbourne's best CrossFit coach. So we fluttered the concept past you, our readers and supporters to see if you would want to nominate someone for going above and beyond their call of duty.
Since then, we've had over 200 nominations and 70 coaches from Melbourne nominated.