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Strength, the Key to Injury Hacking? Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and I’m here with another “How to Hack Injuries” episode for every sports and fitness coach who wants to be able to help with clients pain, existing problems and avoid injuries but don’t want to specialise in injuries themselves or become a therapist. So this is a question that came in from Sophie, inside of the injury hackers Facebook group, you can come and join us at injuryhackers.com. And she asked how much strength training should she promote. So if you’re worried about clients with existing problems in your sessions, then this is the video that you need to be watching.
So when it comes to strength training, what do we mean? Well, usually when it comes to injuries, we’re talking about the strength of the muscles around the joint, or we’re talking about the stability of a joint. And when we’re talking about the muscles around the joint, some of them are deemed to be strong, and some of them are deemed to be weak. And when you look at the strength balance like that, then obviously it is becomes logical that you want to focus on the weaker muscles and try and strengthen those. But that is an issue in itself because it can add extra strain to a body if the muscles are restricted in function instead of actually being weak. So sometimes, the muscles in the body behave weak, because they can’t function because they’re being restricted.
So when it comes to stability of a joint, for example, we’re talking about usually strengthening around a joint that often gets confused with the idea of stiffness. And if we strengthen it, then we stiffen it, and when we stiffen it, it can’t behave in the ways that it was before, so it can’t dislocate. Or it can’t, you know, do all those things become unstable, like the concerns might be. The result is the traditional vision of strength training, so that means resistance bands and extra load and things like that. So barbells and dumbbells and, and stuff no matter how small they are, is always an external load that gets added to the joint. And, you know, we train in those ways.
But when it comes to injury hacking, strength training is actually a spectrum. Okay, so we have improving your ability to move on one side, okay, and then we have adding extra load on the other side. Now you don’t want either of those independently, okay, you don’t want either of those on their own. So if you have too much ability to move without restriction, then you get problems with being too mobile in the joints. But if you have too much load at the expense of being able to move joints in lots of different ways, which is what most of us have, we have stiffness. And that means that we encounter pain and things like that, as well. So the two things on their own can create problems. And what we’re looking for is a blend of those things. So that we can help our clients out of the pain that they’re having, and keep them mobile and all those things as well.
So most people that you coach will need to start from more of a focus on improving their movement abilities. So the ability of the joint to move in any given direction without restriction, most people will start there because most people sit down too much we repeat the same movements over and over again, we have developed stiffness over our lives, and our joints are restricted as a consequence of that. And that’s where you think about things like mobility or flexibility or call it whatever you like, that’s really where the focus is. And this restores the balance of the length of the muscles around the joints that restores the balance of the strength of the tissue and the ability of that tissue to be able to create strength and power and things like that, okay. But when you have excessive tightness around a joint, excessive restriction in a joint, then that natural strength capability is hidden, and your body can’t access it because those muscles can’t behave properly. So when we’re improving the movement around the joint, we’re actually accessing the natural strength reserves that our bodies normally have. And this is where most non-injury specialist coaches stop really. So they do a little bit of stretching, a little bit of mobility work and then they just carry on within regular training which may include external load strength training, as well.
But when we have the, the idea of these things, these two things as being mutually exclusive, so they’re separate entities, then we have, like this horrible Limbo land. Okay, we have a little bit of mobility, improvement of movement, we have a little bit of strength training, but we don’t really have a way of being able to progress both things because we try and do them separately, okay, and this creates like a little yo yo effect, alright, so you train and stiffen everything up, and then you do a little bit mobility work, and you try and unwind it all. And you just flip flop basically, between the two things, and nobody gets anywhere. So that’s not helpful for your clients, because they don’t have the progression that they’re looking for, they have to take time away from their training to do the extra stuff that you’ve asked them to do. Or they have to find the time in their own day, to be able to do that additional stuff doesn’t help therapists either, because the client isn’t progressing from week to week in between the time that they see them, okay.
But when we apply injury hacking ideas, which are the SMARTT® methods from mostmotion®, we have a process that I call the 3M Flow, which basically allows you as a coach, to improve a joint range of motion, okay, then we help the brain to appreciate and understand that that new range of motion is there. Okay? Most people when they do stretching, or mobility or something like that, they just try and focus on improving the range of motion. And that’s it. And the brain doesn’t really recognise how to use that in the context of everything else the body has to do. So this is why the 3M Flow changes everything, because we do improve the joint range of motion, but then we help the brain incorporate that new range of motion into the normal, okay, we ask the brain to use it. And then we ask the brain to coordinate that new range of motion with everything else that it’s supposed to be doing. And that creates a progression, it creates the opportunity for movement patterns to change more permanently. And that actually gives us the ability to add load and resistance to those movements more safely.
And that means we can blend the strength, the traditional strength training, the external load that we think of when we think of strength training, into the ability to maintain and improve this joint range of motion. So what we end up with is the ability to move in any given direction under the strain of load. And that is super powerful when it comes to resistance to injury. Okay, now we’re not talking about starting with 100k, deadlift, okay, you’re not going to do that in lots of different directions. Because your body isn’t prepared for that, when you start learning how to deadlift, you start with a broom handle, you start with no weights at all. And that’s where this spectrum comes in the idea of a spectrum. So you start with no load, and then you can increase the load as you go through, as the bodies get better, more capable of doing these movements in the first place. So this helps your clients to break out of that Yo, yo, that horrible horrible yo yo that we all get stuck into. Okay, so we do the mobility training, because we think it’s helping, and then we go and do the training, because we think that’s helping, but end up just getting stuck doing both, okay.
But this helps the therapists to accelerate the effectiveness of their treatment, because usually, the therapist is trying to improve that range of motion in the joint, okay, that’s what takes away the pain. So when we can add to that when we can contribute to that without treading on their toes, without overstepping our role as a coach, then we can help the therapist we can help the client to accelerate that treatment process. And that reduces the cost to your clients. And it means that the therapist can help more people at once, okay.
But the biggest problem comes when we try and dive in too quick with a solution. And what I mean by that, I mean, not recognising the signs of potential problems that might be there. So by that, I mean, just basically choosing in your brain as a coach, that you’re going to focus on hips today or spine today or you know, something, what that you’re focusing on regardless of what your clients are struggling with. But when you can see what they’re struggling with, you can apply these things differently to those clients. And that means that you can help more people all at once. So if we don’t recognise what’s really happening, it doesn’t really matter what your solution might be, because it’s not going to be that effective.
And that’s why I created the five step framework so that you can, as a coach, totally improve your clients movements based on their own individuality, even if you’re teaching a group. And I’ve outlined this framework in a FREE training that you can get we based on the idea of knee pain. It’s called “The Injury Hacker’s Solution to Knee Pain“, I will teach you all of my strategies, the exact strategies that are used at every step in this framework, absolutely free in this training. I’ll put the link in the comments below. So make sure you go and grab that training because it’s super, super useful if you want to be able to get involved with your clients injury problems and help them to stop feeling like they’re struggling with the same problems over and over and over again. So that that’s basically it for today. Thanks for watching. Of course, if you like this video, then make sure you click the likes, click the hearts, share it with your friends, all that kind of stuff. And of course, leave your comments below as well. I’m Sarah from mostmotion®. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you again next time.