You know when you're having an argument with someone and you get angry, and you know you can't say “you are such a dickhead” but you can get away with “you're acting like a dickhead”?

Bear with me here, but I reckon this applies to glutes, disc bulges, shin splints, heel spurs and a heap of other painful things. We have so many clients that come in and say “I was told it's shin splints and to stop running” or “I had a scan that showed a slipped disc so I haven't deadlifted since then”, and I'd like to convince them these things don't always mean that particular body part IS a dickhead, maybe it was just acting like one at one point.

So recently I’ve been all over mindset, it’s like my latest hobby. If you know me, you’ll know that I don’t just like something, I FUCKING LIKE IT, in bold, caps lock on. Whether it’s an object (must wear my Train Manchester tank from Sam Briggs’s gym every Saturday), a food (I have eaten broccoli every day for the last 12 months) or a person (my bff and I have 3 matching tattoos), I must absolutely immerse myself in whatever that thing is, until it either becomes as much a part of me as my frequent use of the C word, or I basically fuck it to death and move on to the next thing.

The deadlift is considered the grand-daddy of the gym and strength and conditioning world. If you want a bigger snatch or bench… get deadlifting. If you want to run faster, jump higher.. Get deadlifting.  The hype about the deadlift is warranted. It is one of the most bang for your buck exercises and if executed well can give you big rewards in performance.  But if this lift is so good why are deadlifts kryptonite for some lifters?

"Would you say you are addicted to exercise?"

Asks my training partner / BFF / fitspo as we glue rhinestones to t-shirts in a rare non-exercise related activity.

I think carefully about my answer as I look around my apartment, which is decorated with a whiteboard detailing my next weeks training plan, along with a collage of photos taken of me at various comps over the last 18 months of being single as fuck and CrossFitting my life away. I have a kettlebell as a doorstop, and as we speak I’m entering my macros from the meal we just ate into My Fitness Pal.

In my view, what do people want more than ever. Honesty, humanisation, and the truth.

For me, it’s obvious. In a world that can be brutal, we’re saturated with an ideology that it’s not, when our surroundings, life events and personal circumstances can be completely the opposite.

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:

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.

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?