Welcome back to this week’s edition of 2-Minute Tuesdays where we are talking about one exercise topic for two minutes and giving you three reasons why you should follow our advice. Now this week, we are talking to those of you who are high school athletes. How should you be Read more…
When the topic of “how to decrease injury” is discussed, oftentimes ideas such as stretching, joint mobility, and core training come up. While these are all fine and well, an idea this is often not thrown around is that of improving how well your muscles function. However, improving this aspect of your health could be the missing link that you have been looking for to help you prevent injuries.
Before we talk about how improving muscle function could reduce your risk for injury, we have to answer a few other questions. First, we need to identify what muscles actually do. Second, we need to discuss how they do that thing they do. Third, we need to talk about how doing that thing will actually help you reduce your risk for injury. And finally, we need to leave you with some practical application steps of things you can do to start taking action now.
Oftentimes, when we think of performance we think of athletes, musicians, actors and actresses, or anybody else that we may see on stage or on screen. But, the truth of the matter is that each of us has to perform every single day. We have to wake up and perform the various roles and responsibilities of our daily life. We need to exercise, take care of our family, attend to our tasks at work, and fulfill social obligations. From the boardroom to the ballfield, we all need to be able to perform, but we may often feel as if we are only surviving instead of thriving. Fortunately, Muscle Activation Techniques® (MAT®) can help us boost our physical performance so we can do the things we love to do as well as we would like to do them for the foreseeable future. Here’s how.
When I was 24 years old, I thought I had blown out my knee. I was playing in a basketball game in a rec league at DePaul University. During one play, I went up to dunk the ball and got hit in the chest by a defender. I reached to grab the rib to regain my balance, but the hit knocked me hard enough that I couldn’t hang on. I slipped, fell backwards, and stuck my leg out to land. The problem was that I stuck my leg out completely straight and my body was falling overtop of it at a weird angle.
Joint injuries and injuries to passive tissues such as ligaments and discs are ever-present in our society today. Whether it is rupturing a meniscus or an ACL or herniating a disc, it seems as if both competitive athletes and weekend warriors alike are commonly plagued by injuries to the passive tissues of their body. With these types of injuries only becoming more commonplace from high school athletes to middle-aged rec-leaguers, the question of, “What can be done to help prevent these types of injuries?” naturally comes up. Fortunately, there is something that can be done, and the answer lies in the active tissues of the body – the skeletal muscles.
Leo Perez, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and competitor for Alliance Jiu-Jitsu and Evolution MMA in Schaumburg, IL, talks about his experience with Muscle Activation Techniques™ (MAT™) and the changes he has noticed after a few months of sessions. Leo discusses some of the differences in his performance, recovery, and training that Read more…
“In the bottle before you is a pill, a marvel of modern medicine that will regulate gene transcription throughout your body, helping prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and 12 kinds of cancer — plus gallstones and diverticulitis. Expect the pill to improve your strength and balance as well as Read more…
When you hear the word compensation, what do you usually think of? Is it a word to describe something positive or negative? Something normal or abnormal? Something done out of abundance or inadequacy? As a personal trainer in Schaumburg, this is often a topic of discussion.
A quick Google search brings up two prominent definitions for compensation:
As it relates to exercise and movement, the second definition above is typically how compensation is used. Compensation usually labels a movement that is done in a manner outside of the parameters that we find to be “normal,” “correct,” or “appropriate.” Essentially, we use this to describe a movement that is not “perfect.”
I want to challenge you to start thinking about compensation as a description of all movement.
