The missing link between sports injury recovery and peak performance

‘Treatment for Sports Injury’ and ‘Training for Performance’ are often considered as two entirely separate things. I am here to tell you that they aren’t.
It is possible for you to achieve both goals (pain avoidance and performance improvement) with ONE practice. Today I am going to talk about ONE piece of this practice that I have honed with my clients over the last 5 years.

Most athletes do some combination of endurance training, cross training and fueling with the right foods. And when they get injured, they get an Xray, MRI, get checked out with a specialist, maybe do some Physical Therapy for a few weeks. There are some stray thoughts about ‘technique’ but these revolve around equipment and body alignment basics.

Bottomline is that there aren’t many in-depth resources about how to go about mastering the whole body movement required of your sport in a way that gets you more power and avoids injury.

If you’re looking for a step change in performance, you need to learn how to use your joints proportionate to their capability, large joints do the large work and small joints do less work. When you know how to recruit the large joints (the pelvis, hip joints) with your body movement, you create maximum power with little effort. When smaller joints have to do a disproportionate amount of work while others are checked out or locked up, they start to experience wear and tear.

This wear and tear accumulates over time and shows up as degeneration, sudden sprains, dislocation etc. Besides, you can only go so far by working hard in the weaker places.

Most runners and squatting sports like fencing, weight lifting etc have a propensity for injuring their back. They run, squat, lunge etc by overworking their back. Hence they are unable to recruit their hip joints for power. I hear a lot of athletes complain that their back feels like a ‘sheet of metal’. This disproportionate use of the back and hips cannot be resolved by any strength training or consistent practice. In fact, you’re likely to ‘practice’ straining yourself.

This can feel like a double whammy, you’re damned if you practice and you’re damned if you don’t. There’s a way out of it that’s actually very simple and way more effective than all the hours of endurance training or foam rolling will get you. I do this with my 1:1 clients and in my group programs.

I guide you through movement explorations that simulate the whole body movement that is required in your sport. You get to experience these in different positions and aspects of your game. In a few weeks, you start to have such an expanded, 3-dimensional image of the movement that it starts to become spontaneous for you.

It's like a science experiment. You will be able to objectively test the difference between what is strenuous because it's missing an important piece and what is strong because you tapped into a way of moving that unlocks that piece. Over time, I have seen my athletic clients replace their endurance training with the sensory movement practice I teach them. They tell me that sensory movement sessions get them much further than any strength training ever did.

They don't operate from a muscle mindset. They think whole body movement. Their awareness is sharp to tap into it when they want. Their proprioception is strong enough to adapt to changing surfaces and challenges.

If you’d like to sustainably recover from your sports injury and want to get back to it with confidence, reach out to me via this contact form and we’ll chat to see if it’s a good fit for you.