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In our CORE PT Power Tribe Facebook community, you can connect with other CORE PT clients working at many levels of rehabilitation and clients who are out living the active life they envisioned for themselves. We will list events that you can participate in with your CORE PT Tribe and family. Our community board is always open for topics and discussions. We encourage you to connect with each other.

Interested in joining the CORE PT Power Tribe? Contact us! Let’s create active lives together.

ing a trainer watch you to ensure an exercise looks good. However, you can look good in the mirror yet be using all the wrong muscles to complete the task. A closer inspection of your movement strategies may reveal hidden cheats creating road blocks to reaching your full potential and setting you up for injury.

Let’s try a very simple movement test. Stand on one leg and then slightly bend your knee (see picture). Repeat this motion 5 times slowly on each leg. Now, let’s assess how you completed this task. Were you able to keep your trunk upright as if sliding down a wall and avoid tipping forward or to either side? Were you able to keep your toes pointing forward and prevent the knee from diving in? Were you able to keep your toes relaxed and the arch of the foot off the ground? Were you able to prevent your back from rounding or arching? Did you use your arms to maintain balance? Did you rely on speed or perform the task slow with control? If you’re like many, you either couldn't perform the exercise at all or initially thought you looked good in the mirror but nowrealize that your toes are scrunched up when you're on one leg or your trunk is leaning forward when you drop into the small knee bend. These are just a few of the cheats oftens een in the simple movement assessment to indicate that your body lacks efficient muscle function and coordination of the kinetic chain.

It’s not just CAN you complete the exercise but HOW you complete the exercise that matters most. Form is more than just how you look in space; it’s also the sequencing of movement and muscle strategies you use for a particular task. How you complete a task is directly linked to your risk of overuse injuries. Conditions like IT Band Syndrome, Plantarfacitis, Shin Splints, Achilles Tendonitis and Rotator Cuff Tendonitis are all linked to poorly controlled movement.

Don’t wait until you’ve reached a performance plateau or suffer from recurring overuse injuries to act. Find a movement specialist in your area to analyze “HOW” you move. Get more out of your exercise, get specific with your training, understand your body, and preventing your cheats during exercise. For most, improving how you move only takes weeks of dedicated training. Knowing what to do and how to do it is key. Take charge of your fitness in 2015 and change how you move. Doing so will save you hundreds of hours of wasted time at the gym and likely save hundreds to thousands of dollars in future medical bills. Don’t let limitations of your current workout programs deter you from reaching your goals! You can work smarter, not harder in 2015.  

Healthcare costs are shifting to the consumer with higher deductibles, copays, and stricter therapy caps. It’s imperative that consumers get savvy and “Work Smarter Not Harder.” Here are 3 simple tips to get the most for your money and lead a healthy active life.

1) Don’t ignore symptoms. Symptoms such as shoulder pain with lifting, or tightness in a muscle when running cost more to treat the longer you ignore them. Muscle imbalances increase your risk for injury and can be present even in the absence of pain. Recognize early warning signs like aching, stiffness, a need to modify your activity, or a need for anti-inflammatories. Stop the cycle before it becomes serious.

2) Take control. Physical therapists are the provider of choice for treating and preventing injuries. We maximize your muscle control and we educate you on how to manage your long-term movement health without depending on passive strategies that only mask the problem. Our active approach puts you in the driver’s seat of your health. At CORE, we use The Performance Matrix to help our clients achieve ideal movement efficiency, decrease injury risk, and enhance performance.

3) The choice is yours. You aren’t tied to any one network when selecting a physical therapy provider. Ask friends and family for recommendations. Get savvy as everything from physical therapists with professional degrees to individuals with 6-week online certifications use exercise. Not all professions are equally qualified and even within one profession vast skill differences exist. The most convenient or cheapest services may not be the best. They could even do more harm than good. Passive interventions may not be the best long-term investment as they often fail to change how your brain and body move. It’s not simply “feeling the burn” as the intensity of your workout doesn’t determine its effectiveness at decreasing your injury risk. Choose a provider that understands your unique needs, your history, and your goals to help you make the best decisions. Expect results! If despite your efforts you’re experiencing recurring pain, activity limitations, or you’re stuck at a plateau, you may simply need to find a new provider.

We care about your long-term movement health. So whether you’re a youth pitcher with dreams of playing in the World Series or a weekend warrior looking to log a few more miles, we urge you to be a savvy consumer when it comes to your current and future health. Focus on how you can “Work Smarter Not Harder.”     

Why are recurring hamstring injuries so prevalent even at the elite sport level? Most hamstring injuries are driven by an underlying muscle imbalance. The body has multiple layers of muscles. Some layers like the hamstrings are power muscles ideal for producing explosive power, strength and speed. Other layers are stabilizer muscles that function to decelerate forces on the body, control posture and alignment.

Anytime the deeper stabilizer muscles aren’t sufficiently doing their job the power muscles attempt to do both jobs; however the job of “gluing you together” and “rapidly exploding through range” are in conflict with each other. The brain can only do both jobs by shortening the range of motion that it has to control (muscle stiffness). When the athlete challenges the system with a full range motion like sprinting, the knee rapidly accelerates into the stiffened range and a hamstring tear ensues.

Muscle imbalance can be a result of over emphasis on strength training with insufficient focus on tissue extensibility, inefficient stabilizer muscles due to a history of previous injury and/or a movement restriction. According to the National Institute of Health, athletes have a 63 percent recurrence rate of hamstring injury following the first episode. Traditionally hamstring rehabilitation includes rest and treatments to expedite tissue healing followed by progressive stretching, strengthening and gradual return to sport. Often rehabilitation fails to identify and resolve the underlying impairments driving the hamstring to stiffen up in the first place. It is crucial trainers identify the underlying muscle imbalance to stop the adaptive cycle leading to recurring hamstring injury and prevent these sometimes career ending injuries.

You can decrease your risk for hamstring injury and re-injury. Movement specialists can identify and fix muscle imbalance to restore maximum efficiency in all layers of your muscle system. Muscle retraining has to be specific to the identified impairment to decrease your risk. Movement specialists around the world, including those in Kansas City, are turning to technology like The Performance Matrix to prevent injuries and revolutionize training of elite athletes and people from all walks of life. Whether you’re an elite World Cup soccer player or a recreational athlete, preventing injury is the key to keeping you successfully in the game for life.

Let’s look at the hamstring strain as an example. The biggest risk factor for a hamstring injury is a previous injury. Other risk factors include age and fatigue (2). Most individuals with this type of injury manage their pain with rest, massage, chiropractic treatment, ice, or other passive strategies only to realize only temporary relief and improvements that are short lived (3). That’s because these passive treatments simply manage symptom irritability rather than treat the underlying problem driving symptoms. However, there is a solution to runners’ overuse injuries; you can take an active approach to find and fix the underlying problems driving your aches and pains.

New York University’s Langone Medical Center recognizes that proactively identifying underlying weakness and correcting movement can prevent injuries and eliminate the downtime required to rehabilitate injuries (3). At CORE, we couldn’t agree more! Injury prevention is our PASSION and that is why we teamed up with The Performance Matrix screening platform to identify underlying weakness and movement control problems within the musculoskeletal system. These underlying problems or “weak links” are the driving force behind the onset of overuse type injuries, are the key to stopping injury recurrence, and are also the reason so many athletes encounter performance barriers. So, stop managing your pain with passive strategies. Take the first step in actively fixing your problems by getting screened today.  

How can finding your “weak links” prevent injury? Let’s look back at the hamstring strain example. There are many factors that can contribute to hamstring strains, but a common factor is weak gluts (aka gluteals, the large muscle group that makes up your backside). If the gluts aren’t doing their job the hamstrings will try to pick up the slack by working double time to fill both power and stability roles. In this scenario it’s only a matter of time before sufficient speed or load results in a hamstring injury. Often, the underlying glut weakness is residual from a previous injury in which the pain resolved without regaining efficient glut function. The glut “weak link” kicks off a chain of events leading to hamstring injury. So you can see why the number one risk factor for a hamstring strain is a previous injury. It’s also easy to understand the importance of finding your “weak links” now before injury ensues.

Using The Performance Matrix screening platform CORE’s movement specialists will identify your “weak links” and design a specific training program to fix your underlying problems, decrease your injury risk and help you reach your full running potential. Training with our movement specialists will help you achieve superior results compared to programs you do on your own. Our team monitors your every move during training to ensure the desired physiological training effect occurs to fix your “weak link” and regain efficiency in your musculoskeletal system. By helping you avoid common exercise pitfalls, our specialists will maximize your results. In describing the most common training pitfalls Alison Peters, M.S., a clinical exercise physiologist at NYU put it best, “You can get strong doing something incorrectly” (3). Injury prevention is about more than strength, it’s about control. If during exercise you lack sufficient control, you merely reinforce the muscle imbalance or compensated movement pattern your body is already using. You may feel stronger, but failed to change how you move or decrease your risk for injury. At CORE, helping you regain movement control is our expertise. We will help you fix your underlying “weak links” and perform better. Take the first step in actively changing how you move by getting screened and leave other passive strategies behind. Your next PR is just around the corner and we can help you achieve it.

 

(1) http://www.findmymarathon.com/statistics.php

(2) Injury Prevention in Novice Runners: ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal Vol. 18/NO.2

(3) The Whole Body Fix: Runner’s World Magazine March 2014

And you’ve never spent as much time on the floor as you will with a baby. All the time spent trying to get your little one to enjoy tummy time might have left you with low back pain. The amount of bending forward you do (changing diapers, changing clothes, lifting your baby, sitting on the floor) uses a lot of lumbar flexion and without the right form or muscle balance, it can eventually cause you pain.

Another common post-partum complaint is neck and shoulder pain. Those little babies are heavy, especially when you add the weight of your newest accessories, infant carriers and diaper bags. And now you’re spending multiple hours a day looking down at your little one (maybe to admire how precious they are when they’re sleeping or maybe to plead with them to take a bottle and stop crying). If you don’t have the proper shoulder positioning, it can really take a toll on the muscles of your neck and shoulders. The best tip is to RELAX. When things get stressful, try to keep your back relaxed (you’re probably arching it) and make sure your shoulder is resting in a good position (it’s probably tipped forward).

Life as a new mom is HARD, but it doesn’t have to be painful too. At CORE, we can help you safely get control of your aches and pains and allow you to enjoy the new little person in your life. 

At CORE we specialize in movement assessment and training. For us, it's not CAN you move but HOW you move that matters! You’d be surprised at the number of competitive athletes who can’t efficiently decelerate a jump, squat correctly or do a push-up without falling apart. Kids must learn to efficiently control their body weight and hone their proprioceptive awareness while their tissues are young and less susceptible to injury. Kids used to develop these skills in P.E. class and unstructured play activities but the push towards sport specialization has changed our perception of exercise, limited diversity of motor control development and increased repetitive use injuries in today’s youth.

In recent years, strength and power training have dominated sport development programs with little or no emphasis on the quality of control with which youth athletes decelerate body movements. These training practices in conjunction with the motor development limitations of sport specialization are a recipe for injury in the youth athlete. Body control is the foundation on which all future sport skills must build upon. Larry Meadors who is a strength and conditioning coach with the National Association of Strength & Fitness put it best in his article Yes Kids are Stars on the Playing Field, but Can They do a Push-Up? “We all learned the alphabet, and as we learned the alphabet we learned how to put two letters and then three and then four to form words, and pretty soon we had a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book. And you should apply the same things for athletics.” According to Meadors’ article, more than 3.5 million kids 14 and under are treated annually for sports injuries, and the numbers are increasing. More than half of all youth sports injuries are preventable. In about half the cases, the injuries are associated with overuse, often linked with the growing trend of children specializing in one sport and playing year-round.

At CORE our passion is helping consumers navigate the misconceptions out there. When it comes to your kids we recommend 1) variety to ensure development of a diverse movement repertoire, 2) rest to avoid overuse injuries in developing tissues and 3) a comprehensive and balanced training approach. Successful athletes not only possess strength, speed, power, flexibility and a strategic understanding of the game. They also possess keen body awareness and the ability to control the compressive and shear forces placed on the body during sport participation. Ensure your kids have adequate control so that they can be successful movers as youth athletes AND throughout their lifespan.

 

http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/yes-kids-are-stars-on-the-playing-field-but-can/article_89f74457-1cf1-56ec-b308-06166d1d076c.html

Click Here for the original New York Times article

As physical therapists we are trained to look at the whole body and to analyze full body movement and control. A good physical therapist will definitely assess the area that is painful, but a great physical therapist will also check the joints above and below to assess how they move and screen for faulty movement patterns that may be a contributor or cause of your pain. This is especially important in recurrent injuries. A recurrent ankle sprain cannot be solely due to just being clumsy; there must be a reason that the ankle is susceptible to injury.

To illustrate how this is, take the ankle sprain example. As the foot hits the ground during weight bearing exercises (walking, running, or landing from a jump) our body must be able to control itself through the ankle, knee, hip, and spine. For the body to properly control this motion, muscles up and down our leg must work together and in the proper balance to keep our leg and foot in the correct alignment. When the correct alignment cannot be achieved either due to faulty ligaments or muscle control the risk for injury to structures up and down the leg occurs. One common area of fault in control of the lower extremity is poor control of femoral medial rotation. This means the ability to not let your thigh bone rotate inward as the knee bends during weight bearing. Increased femoral medial rotation, leads to increased knee valgus (“knock knee” position), which causes tibial external rotation (rotation of the lower leg bone outwards), which can cause increased pronation at the foot (the foot excessively rolling inwards).

Whoa, that’s a lot of motion to control with every step! That is why having correct muscular and motor control up and down the “kinetic chain” is vital to a patient’s rehab success. If the poor movement control at the hip pre-disposed the ankle to injury then you could do ankle strengthening exercises for weeks and still have a risk of injury. This idea of having control though the entire kinetic chain can be applied to the upper extremity and the spine as well. It’s all connected! So stop blaming those pesky ankle tweaks, aches, and sprains on weak ankles or being clumsy, it just might be your hip that’s the culprit.