Crawling like a Baby: How to Break Records and Restore Your Body.

Here at Backs Etc we focus on building our clients’ true and dynamic core strength, initially by getting them to breathe abdominally. We then use primal movements such as rolling and crawling to enable them to integrate the breathing and improve their basic movement patterns, which will translate into improvements in more advanced movements such as running or weight lifting. Get in touch with us if you need some help finding your true dynamic core stability.

Read the article, Crawling like a Baby: How to Break Records and Restore Your Body.

Why You Should Not Be Running

Okay, maybe this title is a little extreme. However, this article makes a strong case as to why we should be strength training rather than running or performing other long slow distance – or LSD – activities. The author breaks down a number of reasons why ‘chronic cardio’ is less effective at improving your health, and can actually be detrimental to it in some ways  According to the article, Strength training, in contrast, is much more beneficial as the basis of a fitness program, with less of the negatives.

At Backs Etc., we are not anti-running, however, we do see many patients and clients obsessed with running marathons and participating in other extreme endurance events, despite struggling with basic movement patterns, mobility and strength. This type of training can put extreme stress on the body, resulting in pain, injury and a host of other issues.

If you are a runner with niggling pain or want to improve your performance, come to Backs Etc. for an assessment, and we can design a programme to suit your needs.

For more information, read the article ‘Why You Should Not Be Running.’

Why you should consider going barefoot

I recently attended the Barefoot Training Specialist course with Dr Emily Splichal.  You may ask why such a course is necessary – if you want to go barefoot surely all you need to do is take your shoes off, or buy a pair of those strange Vibram five finger shoes and then just get on with it.  However, if you have spent most of your life wearing stiff, vibration-damping casts on your feet, AKA ‘normal shoes’, then you need to do some work to get your body ready for going barefoot. Remember that each foot contains 26 bones (a quarter of all the bones in the body) along with 33 joints and over 100 muscles and tendons, so it’s not an inanimate slab, but a highly adaptable, active base that allows us to move across all types of terrain. Feet actually need the sensory input and movement provided by the varying surfaces and slopes of the ground in order to be healthy. Wearing conventional shoes can be analogised to wearing a plaster cast on a limb for several months. At the end of that period, the limb is both muscularly weak, and neurologically deficient from the lack of stimulation.  As this Guardian article shows, learning to strike forefoot and using minimalist shoes reduces injuries. So even if you have no intention of going barefoot, but you want to avoid or get rid a plethora of lower extremity issues such as shin splints or Achilles tendon problems, then read on.

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