Without a doubt the Deadlift is one of the best exercises you can ever use in the gym. Whether you are a keen sporting athlete, someone recovering from injury, or even an 80 year old looking to maintain quality of life this exercise provides amazing benefits and is something we use everyday in life. Outside of the gym it is simply known as "bending". For this reason we tend to refer to this as a foundational movement pattern first and an exercise second. As much as the benefits from learning and developing your skills with deadlift are amazing it also comes with high risk if performed poorly. Injuries such as herniated discs are so common with this movement with many of these occurring outside of a gym and from daily activities like picking up a pen off the floor. There are so many versions of this exercise it is important to know which one is best for your body right now. This article we will explain everything you need to know about deadlifts and which version works best for you.

This article is something that I found very relevant to my own health and fitness goals in recent years. I have suffered numerous setbacks and injuries that have completely derailed my plans but instead of throwing in the towel and giving up I had to adjust my training and also my nutrition to meet my body's needs. We must accept that things are never perfect, there is always going to be something that may come up in our life that could sabotage our best efforts and intentions to be the best we can. I also share with you some great info-graphics from the guys at Precision Nutrition that I find really helpful when things are tough.

Apart from lower back pain the most common injury I come across in our studio each week is knee pain. It affects people of all ages, with many young sporting athletes suffering with patella-femoral problems and more severe ACL injuries. But it also greatly affects sedentary people and can become a much bigger problem if not resolved at the source and eventually begin to create injuries at other joints of the body. According to the current study by Nguyen and colleagues, frequent knee pain affects 25% of adults, and osteoarthritis is the most common cause of knee pain in adults 50 years and older. In recent years, the rate of knee replacements has surged. Rates have tripled in women in the United Kingdom and have increased 8 times in the United States among those 65 years and older. Is this due to aging or is there someone much bigger at play behind the cause of this? I would argue it is due to two things. Lack of movement and poor movement. What you will find with most knee injuries it is nothing to do with the knee itself! To find out what is behind the problem we need to use a series of tests and assessments to find where the leaks are coming from. This article we will show you how.