As most Australians are well aware, in recent years there has been a great deal of publicity around our great game of Australian Rules Football and the possibility of creating a National Women’s League. Fortunately over the past 5 – 10 years, the prevalence of young women playing football has increased and the need for a league allowing these girls to continue playing football through their teenage years into adulthood has been recognized.  It is because of this that there is now almost 50 teams in the Victorian women’s football league alone, and similar to the men’s league, we now have a women’s youth team for the up and coming, and talented girls are now scouted to form our ‘Vic country’ and ‘Vic metro’ teams. And just like the guys, the need to improve your skills across many facets of the game is essential if you want to be one of the girls who makes it into the "big time". For this sport is growing so quickly, the need for conditioning and a professional approach to training will be as important as the skills part of the game.

You must be thinking what is this exercise? Well it has many names depending on where you learned how to do it. Being CHEK Practitioners we tend to refer to this as Horsestance, Pilates instructors refer to it as Quadruped, and many Americans including famous back pain researcher and author of great books on back Stuart McGill call this Bird-Dog! While the name may differ with different institutes, they all agree that this movement is one of the best you can do to treat injured back pain and also prevent it! This exercise not only targets the back but also the hip extensors, which in many cases is the whole problem. The lack of hip mobility and stability forces the spine to move too much with simple movements like bending and squatting. The spine is saved from high compressive loads in a four point position and allows people to work on creating stability and good extension of the back. McGill has found from his research that this exercise is a major contributor to desensitizing back pain!

Only 25% of the people we talk to about food eat three or more servings of vegetables a day! And the ones they do happen to eat are not often green leafy vegetables or cruciferous veggies. If you are in the majority who is not eating enough veggies full stop, you are missing out big time on major benefits, as these food groups are one of the pivotal cornerstones to optimal health. Just doing more workouts is a waste of time if you are not getting your nutrition right. The more unhealthy you are the more important green vegetables & cruciferous foods become. Vegetables contain an array of antioxidants and other disease-fighting compounds that are very difficult to get anywhere else. Plant chemicals called phyto-chemicals can reduce inflammation and eliminate carcinogens, while others regulate the rate at which your cells reproduce, get rid of old cells and maintain DNA.