Apart from Stress, the biggest obstacle getting in the way of someone wanting to achieve their health & fitness goals is, injury or pain. When you are injured or suffering from chronic pain, you now have a new goal - to get out of pain. Meaning that losing weight or getting fit is put on hold until you resolve your problem. Injury is so common with people these days due to too much stress, poor posture from sitting too much, poor nutrition and lack of exercise. Statistics show that 85% of people will experience severe back pain in their life! Many will have repeated episodes unless they have a well designed plan to identify the cause, and eradicate it for good.
Many of today's treatments merely treat symptoms and completely miss what is causing your problem. Our program is based entirely around finding the cause and correcting it as soon as possible. And the results from this approach have been amazing. Read our success stories at the bottom of the page to see real life case studies proving you can come back from chronic pain.
This is why we have chosen to specialize ourselves in the area of Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation and take pride in our reputation as being leaders in the Melbourne area with Movement skills and Functional Strength training. Most people think that personal training is off limits for you until your back in top condition. However, at No Regrets, we can work with some of the most complex injuries and health concerns to help design safe and effective plans and programs to get you back into peak physical condition.
We have extensive experience working in the Rehabilitation field for almost 17 years and our team comprises of a qualified Remedial Massage therapist and 2 CHEK Practitioners (What is a CHEK Practitioner) to ensure we deliver comprehensive health and exercise programs that get results. Click here to see our full team credentials and experience.
Health Professionals We Work Closely With
We work closely with BodyMotion Physiotherapy in Mitcham and Black Chiropractic Centre in Templestowe who are both highly respected health professionals that provide a range of therapies to help us provide complete assessments and programs that ensure you achieve your goal. This can include but is not limited to Chiropractic adjustments, Physiotherapy, Hypnotherapy, Podiatry, sports and deep tissue massage. Read the review from Michael Black from Black Chiropractic Centre to see his thoughts on our training programs.
“As a practicing chiropractor of 30 years experience I thought I knew a fair bit about spinal health, posture, balance, flexibility and training. In the last year I met Nick Jack at No Regrets Personal Training and I became more and more concerned the more I hung around him. Why? Sure, Nick's a great bloke but I realised how little I really understood about my own niche area of training, rehabilitation, joint stability and postural correction. Nick's pretty passionate about his area of expertise and he certainly has the knowledge to claim that expertise!
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Nick blew my existing understanding of how we improve and maintain stable posture right out of the water and that's a pretty bad place to be as a chiropractor! You see, Nick is no newcomer to the game; he's extensively researched and tried out everything there is and seen the shortcomings and failures of many traditional forms of exercise and training. He's read the materials and books I should have been reading and compiled the best of the best to formulate his method.
He has taken some complex concepts and broken them down in a way that you'll start to get what I should have many years ago. Simply, the way we've always done things is plain wrong and Nick's exposing the rubbish that you hear around gyms, read in magazines and that actually hurts us! If you have a perplexing knee issue, the simple explanation that 'your knee is probably not the problem' sounds like crazy talk. The reality is your body has been moving wrong for years with entrenched movement patterns that need to be undone and retaught. Nick Jack shows you step by step, in plain English and with more common sense than I care to admit, how his methods and philosophy will work for you. “
Michael Black of Black Chiropractic Centre
Our Programs Are Designed Specific To Your Needs
Whatever you current level of mobility, injury or personal physical situation – we work together to design a solution that is Specific to YOU to get you back into action as soon as possible.
Our injury and rehabilitation training is specifically designed for people who are in the stage of recovery, who know they need to do something but not sure where to start.
- These people want pain relief or to get out of pain.
- And to be able to trust someone who knows what they are talking about and can prove it.
- They want to exercise without the fear of injury.
- They would like to be able to get back to playing sports or doing activities that they enjoy and feel happy doing.
- They are looking for ways to deal with stress and lifestyle management but don’t really understand what it means to have a complete approach to health.
Our approach to finally providing our clients with the answers to these problems, is to focus on treating the cause, and not the symptoms, and by looking at the body as a system of systems.
We teach people the secrets to achieving a “Whole Body Approach to Health” and how to use/move their bodies correctly, a successful outcome is the end result. We have a golden rule of using a test to determine what to do, “if you are not assessing you are guessing” is what we teach our trainers. We address an area that is not often understood very well or taught at all by most of the rehabilitation community and this is how to move!
We know and can prove that teaching people how to move is far more effective than just improving strength or adding muscle.
Many healthcare professionals and even other personal trainers often question the methods I use with people claiming they are too dangerous. Most of these professions ignore fundamental movement as part of their treatment process as they focus solely on treating the area in pain with specific stretching, massage, or isolated strengthening remedies. Some of these treatments may in fact be great, but they will provide little value to the patient/client long term if they do not address the movement patterns associated with, or causing the pain.
The more specialized we have evolved to with treating pain and dysfunction, the more ignorant to movement we have become.
The end goal of every program must be to improve how efficiently you can move.
That is it! It is really that simple, and this is where I begin with people on the first day by assessing how they move with fundamental patterns they will require to live their life. If they are unable to move well in these patterns I need to determine if it is due to a mechanical joint problem/s or if it is due to poor coordination and a more neurological deficit. While it is tempting to find ways to simply remove the pain, it is much more useful to look for the area with the greatest dysfunction. This may have no pain associated immediately from doing it but make no mistake it will be the driver of the problems. Change this, and you change everything.
Watch the video below to see a detailed example of this in action.
Read this article - Functional movement is everything and this is why
Our programs have become popular not just in Melbourne, but all over the world! The success of our instruction and education videos on You Tube has put us in touch with many people we would never have met.
Over the past 10 years we have spent a lot of time putting pen to paper and recording videos of how we develop specialized programs for various injuries to create an ONLINE SHOP for those people we cannot help face to face. We have tried to explain as simply as possible the entire process of our program from assessments right up to playing sport again. To make it easy to follow we provide these in a step by step format, with both downloadable videos and detailed PDF reports complete with pictures and instructions, so there is no confusion as to what to do, and how to do it.
How Does Our Assessment Process Work?
If you have already downloaded one of our reports you will get a very detailed explanation but here is a very quick overview of what we do.
Our assessment process is built on what is known as the Success Formula. See the picture below.
1. Flexibility – We use a series of tests to determine your body’s current level of flexibility, identify tight muscles or mobility restrictions and design a mobility program specific to you to correct any faults. This is important to do first, as tight muscles will inhibit weak muscles and create further muscle imbalance. If you miss this stage or do not complete it correctly you will be set up for problems later on.
2. Stability – Once optimal flexibility has been established we develop a series of exercises and programs to encourage stability throughout the body. Before you can strengthen something with loads, you must be certain it is stable enough to handle it. This is a very complex stage and one that is often missed by many only to find more trouble in the strength stage. Make sure you read our article - What Is Stability Training? to really grasp what this is.
3. Strength – Now you are ready for the strengthening stage. This is broken into two parts. First we try to isolate weaker sets of muscles that we have identified in our postural and movement assessment. Secondly we begin progressing to more integrated standing up exercises that mimic the movements you need for your occupation, hobbies, sports and prepare you for daily movement. This is one area not taught well or at all in many rehabilitation and Pilates training as people do not understand movement. They focus too much on muscle.
4. Power – The last step is developing power for movements that require faster speeds such as throwing a ball or kicking a ball etc. A very important stage and again one that is often missed. This is a critical element to our ACL injury prevention program in ensuring a safe return to sport following a knee reconstruction. Read this article to see more - 5 Critical Things You Must Do Before Returning To Sport
It is very important to follow this order for an effective result with regards to the injury. Each stage is made up of several assessments, exercises and programs to ensure you are constantly progressing safely and effectively to the end stage of moving without pain or restriction. It is extremely important that you do exercise when recovering from injury but it is even more important to engage in the right type of injury training to ensure you do not cause further damage. If you are going to train, it is crucial you do so with the expert advice of an experienced and skilled Exercise physiologist, CHEK Practitioner or experienced personal trainer. Someone who knows how to move correctly and can show you how!
Success Stories Using This Method
There are far too many examples I would love to show you here but I am going to give you 2 very powerful examples of where an approach of looking for the cause and applying the principles can completely transform someone's life!
Case Study 1 - Lower Back Disc Bulge Chronic Pain For Over 6 Years!
When I first met this girl, Georgie McIntosh she was scared to even pick her handbag up off the floor in case her back went! She had been in and out of all different treatments for over 6 years for little result and even worse symptoms! During this time no one had shown her the correct methods of how to squat, lunge and bend! She was very aware of what muscles were she should be using but had no idea of how to integrate them into a movement like picking a bag up off the ground. Within only a few months she was moving considerably better and becoming stronger every day. Make sure you read her full story here but below is a quick snapshot of what she wrote to me.
"I’ve now been seeing Nick twice a week for three months. Right from the start he has identified poor movements patterns that I’ve always felt weren’t right but no-one ever listened or taught me HOW to correct it. He is great at explaining why we do movements or exercises a certain way and identifying the specific trouble spots that I have, allowing me to be much more aware of how I move both in and out of the gym. Particularly the way he structures workouts around the relationship between stretching and strengthening makes so much sense.
Much of what he says is bits and pieces of what I’ve heard before but finally packaged into a training session that works for ME and doesn’t aggravate my various complaints". I have genuinely seen more improvement in the past 3 months than I have in the past 6 years! Obviously it’s still early days, but for the first time in a long time I feel like I’m making consistent improvements and am on absolutely the right track." - Georgie McIntosh
Case Study 2 - Disc Bulge Spinal Injury
Laura came to see us early in 2015 and only 6 weeks after being partially paralyzed by a disc bulge in her back! She had experience doing weight training before and reasonably fit and strong. However like Georgie her understanding of how to move correctly was dysfunctional and faulty. Her fear of re-injury had put her in a state of being scared to do anything that was affecting her work and her life. Again within months of adopting our program she began to show amazing results and by the end of July she was lifting 70kg of weight off the floor with no pain or fear of pain. She now runs and can do almost every exercise in the gym and activity at home!
Here is a quick snapshot of her story
"The doctor said I couldn’t exercise and that I may need surgery to ‘cut out’ the bulge! I was told it would never go away, and I may always be in pain. At 23 that’s the last thing I wanted to hear. The next two months were agonising, I couldn’t do any of the things I had always taken for granted, I needed help to get dressed, to get in and out of bed, I couldn’t sleep properly because every time I moved it felt like a knife was being stabbed in my back. I couldn’t sit and have a meal with my family, and standing was limited to just a few minutes. The fist few sessions were slow, Nathan taught me how to breath properly using my diaphragm, and slowly began some easy exercises- I didn’t like the baby weights, but that’s all I could use!
Two months in, I felt less pain, I could now bend over without any problems, and I wasn’t scared of stairs anymore. Nathan was very cautious, and still today, asks if I feel any pain; but at the same time he knew how much I longed to get back to my big girl weights! Six months later, my sessions at No Regrets are the highlight of my day. I went from not being able to pick up a pen on the floor, to being able to dead- lift 75Kgs, without a problem. Six months ago It took me 15minutes to get down my stairs, today I climbed the No Regrets stairs- two at a time with a 10kg vest on, holding two 8kg kettle bells- that’s 26kgs of extra weight I had to haul up the stairs- but I did it! Six months ago I couldn’t walk, now Nathan makes me run over 800 meters- I don’t like running so I pray for rain, but at least now I CAN DO IT!" - Laura Cannistra
What About Training For Kids?
With the massive increase in sports participation with kids over the past 10 years, there has unfortunately also been a massive increase in injuries, in particular with ACL injuries.
When we talk about strength training for kids we are talking about MOVEMENT DEVELOPMENT. We are teaching kids as young as 8 and 9 how to move correctly using mainly their own body weight, but at times resistance bands, medicine balls and even dumbbells and barbells. But the focus here is not on muscle size, but efficient movement skills. This is where skills like cutting can be taught and if taught and practiced well the kids will be able to retain this as an automatic movement for life! As cutting is an advanced skill we have to teach fundamental movements first like squat, lunge, single leg stance. Without the fundamentals the advanced skills used in sports can never be correctly learned.
The kids will learn early on how to compensate and this unfortunately is where future careers can be over before they even begin!
There has been countless studies put together to track the rate of injuries with kids in sports, with one study in 2003 showing that 3.5 million children under the age of 15 accounted for sports related injuries. (Reference: "The ACL Solution" by Robert G Marx. And when it comes to ACL injuries many surgeons often report they perform most surgeries on females aged between 12 and 18 years of age.
We encourage kids to take up sports knowing they are not yet fully developed and this is a good thing. Children are still learning what risks are good to take and what are not, how to effectively train and compete, plus they will experience many rapid growth changes when they hit puberty. If we are going to get them to take part in sports we must also spend the time to teach them effective and safe methods of movement. This is hardly understood, yet alone taught at club level and it this is where our injury prevention program can ensure your kids remain off the injured list.
Read our article - Why Learning Change Of Direction Skills Is Essential For Kids Playing Sport
Get In Touch With Us Now!
Your safety remains of primary concern to us, and we will only allow you to train at a level that is suitable and comfortable. Perhaps you will not know your limits at this time, but we will – and it is important we make sure you do not push yourself too hard, while still achieving results. Best of all, this specific type of specific to you personal training will mean you are in the best shape possible to engage in a more complete and challenging personal training regime once you are fully recovered.
ALL of the clients who complete our rehabilitation programs go back to their previous activities stronger, fitter and more importantly better educated than ever before so as to not get injured again! Just like Laura and Georgie!
Our reputation in Melbourne for working with some of the most difficult cases and finding solutions via movement skills and functional assessment techniques is second to none. We 100% guarantee our results, we are so confident that our program works.
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