Bench press is a great exercise, but for anyone with a shoulder issue, it may not be ideal. How do you know if you should bench? Well for starters, if it hurts to bench, you probably shouldn’t bench. What if it doesn’t hurt during the bench, but it hurts later, you ask? Same answer. I suspect you knew that but were hoping for a different answer. Sorry.

If the bench press is painful for you, you should probably be seeing a manual therapist (athletic therapist, chiro, massage therapist, osteopath, physio…) to help get you to pain free state. But once you reach that point, then what?

Ideally you would switch to other exercises, at least for a while. I want my clients to be able to do at least 10 proper bodyweight pushups (Click here for an article all about pushups) before I will have them bench press, and then I get them to do the Bottom Up Kettle bell (KB) bench press before moving to “normal” bench pressing.

I love it because it requires a lot of stabilizing to be able to do it, which means my clients literally will not be able to do it if they lack strength or stability in their shoulders. If they can’t do the bottom up KB bench press, they are not ready to bench press. Period.
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Low back pain is a very common problem, and is a topic that comes up often when I talk with, well people. I have written a couple of articles about this in previous years, but I want to address it again, this time with a more practical approach. I realized recently that I have developed a bit of a template for clients who have low back pain, or who have a history of low back pain. The program for each person is different, but there are six exercises that I include for almost everyone who talks about their back when I first meet them. I am going to share these 6 exercises for low back health with you.

Before I begin though, I must point out the following: If daily living causes you low back pain, I strongly suggest that you look to a health care practitioner as your primary source of guidance for your back health. I won’t suggest what type of professional you see, just that someone who is a doctor, osteopath, physical therapist, chiropractor, athletic therapist, or massage therapist sees and hopefully provides some treatment for your back.

With that said, I’m going to share the 6 exercises that I have found to be most important and effective for helping people improve their low back health. Strangely I feel a need to qualify that again. I think that is because it makes me uncomfortable suggesting that I can help “cure back pain” when I am not a health care professional. I’m a trainer. And before I was a trainer, I was an engineer; not a doctor or a physical therapist. But here’s the thing: I help people’s low back pain by avoiding their back pain, not by working on it. Read more…

The title of this post is a quote from the blog article linked below. If you have a minute, please give it a read. It is a great reminder about the true value and meaning of yoga.

Yoga is such an interesting topic. There are many devout followers, but there are also detractors – many of whom are leaders in the strength and conditioning and biomechanics fields. The primary reason these professionals do not often recommend yoga is exactly because of what James MacAdam describes in his blog article titled “Confessions of a Type-A Yogi”. But if more yogis would have the same philosophical transformation about their practice that James has, I suspect most of them would become yoga-supporters.

It’s very well-written and insightful, so if you have a moment, give it a read: http://jamesmacadam.com/2011/02/28/confessions-of-a-type-a-yogi/

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The New York Times Health section often carries interesting and somewhat controversial articles, like this week’s article about orthotics. Orthotics are very common, but are they helping? The tone of the article is that they do not, although the specifics are that they do but they’re not sure why.

Take a read, but remember that often articles of this nature do gloss over some important facts while over-emphasizing less important ones to prove a point:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/health/nutrition/18best.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=health

If you only want to skim, skip ahead to page 2 where they discuss the orthotic study they did with 240 Canadian soldiers (yes, we have more than 240 soldiers).

It would have been great if they had included a third group in the study that did single-leg barefoot strength training to try to improve their foot and ankle strength.

This is the first entry in my new blog-series: My Favourite Training Tools (For my American readers, please excuse the ‘u’ in favourite. It’s a Canadian thing). There are probably thousands of tools out there for fitness. Some are ridiculous fly-by-night items (I can’t help but think of the Saturday Night Live commercial spoof of the Shaker Weight) while some have stood the test of time for hundreds of years (kettlebells). In each entry in this blog series, I’ll talk about one of my 10 favourite tools, in somewhat random order.

Today’s entry features the Functional Movement Screen (FMS). This makes my list even though it does nothing to get you strong. That’s because it is an assessment tool. I love this tool because it helps me to see where people have problems with the fundamental way that they move, and then that helps me to create a great training program for them that will not only get them “faster, higher, stronger”, but will also help fix movement dysfunction that they have developed in life. Read more…

“Why are there no bicep curls?”. This is a question I often hear, probably because I don’t have any of my clients doing bicep curls. Shouldn’t we be working on arms? My answer is that they are doing functional training, and for most people, bicep curls are not functional. If you are a Bavarian waitress, then yes. And if I had one as a client, I would include bicep curls in their program, particularly in the month leading up to Oktoberfest.
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Finished your Christmas shopping? Congrats! I’m not. (doh!). But heck, there’s 5 more shopping days left. LOTS of time. Anyone else in the same boat as me?

Well, if any of the people left on your list are active types – runners, skiers, frisbee players (ya – I know, it’s a disc), hockey players, soccer players, golfers, cyclists… consider picking up a gift certificate for them for a Functional Movement Screen (FMS).
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I had an article published in Ski Pro Magazine this fall, Reducing the Risk of Low Back Pain. For those of you who are skiers but not instructors in Canada, here is the link to the online version of the magazine:

Reducing the Risk of Low Back Pain.

The article is on pages 30 and 31, or you can get to it by typing “low back’ into the search field.

This article was written after I had the pleasure of attending a two-day seminar with Dr. Shirley Sahrmann, author of Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes. Throughout the course, and then on the eight hour drive home, I had a lot of opportunity to really think about what I learned and its relevance. This article presents a combination of what I learned from Dr. Sahrmann, as well as some of the thoughts it provoked.

I don’t care how much you don’t move
This was a statement she made repeatedly throughout the course, and reflects the premise that it is usually the place that moves too much that is the problem. This is in keeping with her belief of exercise instead of manual therapy as the best approach for addressing movement disorders, because manual therapy typically addresses shortness.
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A good trainer will work to not only make you stronger, more fit, and less squishy, but also to help improve your overall movement and to contribute to healthy joints and tissues. We do this by working on symmetry, and focusing on stability and mobility in the right places. But typically, the time you spend working out is just not enough to counteract the habits we all have throughout the “other 23 hours of the day”.

What habits am I talking about? The way we stand, sit, walk, sleep, watch tv, and drive all impact our bodies. We all have habits that we do every day. Many of them seem to be so minute, and yet we do them so much that in fact we do them in huge volumes. That adds up and can have a big impact on our ability to move well. Do you know what yours are?
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