Over the past 10 years there has been a really strong push into health and fitness with many new franchise gyms opening and introducing people to strength training for the first time. It started with Curves & Contours and more recently with 24 hour gyms and Functional Fitness studios like F45 and Crossfit boxes. This is a big shift from the old days of aerobics classes and Les Mills type classes like body pump, body attack, body step etc held at the big gyms which were mainly attended by females while the blokes did body building exercises in the gym on machines or with free weights. I think the public has started to become more aware of the benefits of strength training, and the need to incorporate this into their weekly is seen as vital as eating healthy. However, ALL of the current approaches that I listed for strength training emphasize the same thing - ENDURANCE! And while this may seem like a great thing, it has hidden within this many potential problems that begin to create havoc on people's health. This article I will explain why.

Over the years I have discussed the importance of maintaining hip mobility in a number of articles, for hip stiffness is attributed to many of the common injuries seen in the lower limbs, and also the back. Just stretching the hips may assist in improving mobility but will do very little to correcting stability problems, or weakness within the hip region. Clicking or clunking sounds in the hip, osteoarthritis, and weakness are a sure sign your hip is unstable and needs a corrective strategy using exercises, not stretching. Every year we see more and more people in our rehabilitation program with all types of injuries and pain, and on our first assessment there is very little hip mobility, and a complete loss of stabilizers through the pelvis and lumbar spine. As a result every day movement patterns of squat, lunge and bend have compensatory movements within them creating all types of injuries away from the hips. Treatment from medical professionals do very little to help these people as they continue to concentrate on the area in pain, all the while neglecting the fact that the person's hips have become rigid and stiff. In this article I will show you how to firstly mobilize the hips, but more importantly teach you the correct way to stabilize the joint so the stiffness does not return.

The pain felt from a bulging disc is immense, and anyone who has experienced this will tell you exactly how scary it can be, especially if it left them temporarily paralyzed! They will also tell you that they would do anything to never have this happen again. But what tends to happen is we seek treatment, the pain subsides, and we start to go back to what we did before. We tend to blame the injury on the movement we were doing at the time, or what we did just prior to the back going. Eg Lifting a box, gardening etc. But really the cause of these injuries is very rarely from one incident. The true cause of these injuries is from repeatedly moving poorly. Common daily activities we think nothing of are often where the injury is formed. Many of us may be able to go through life getting away with some bad movement if it is countered enough with good movement. However, the person who does not build reserves and just keeps stealing from their body will pay the price. The very first thing you should do with your treatment for a bulging disc is to identify your poor movement and change it. If you ignore this, you are likely to suffer repeated episodes that get worse each time. In this article I am going to share with you some valuable information on how to do this.