Kinesio Taping Awareness Course (With Anatomy)

The participants all ears

Powerpoint slide showing the Hamstrings

Another slide- Trapezius

It was full house for last week's Kinesio Taping class for the Physiotherapy students. However, today's Kinesio Taping awareness course was a slightly more quiet affair. Many signed up, but many did not turn up.

Well, too bad for them and good news for the participants who came as Gino went through some basic anatomy with them using Anatomy charts, models and a Powerpoint presentation of course (picture above).

The participants also had a sneak preview of some KT 2 & even KT 3 material as well.

The next Kinesio Taping awareness course is on the last Saturday of October, which is on 27/10/12 from 2 to 3.30 pm. The course is free for those who sign up, you just need to buy a roll of the original Kinesio Tex tapes from us. Call or email us to sign up.

Those of you who want more Anatomical knowledge can come to our Human Anatomy course.

Kinesio Taping Course For Physiotherapy Students

There was a Kinesio Taping awareness course at Sports Solutions today, specially organized for 2nd & 3rd year Physiotherapy students.

A extra tool in their bag of skills to treat their patients.

Will Increasing Weekly Mileage > 10% Cause Injury

How much further can you increase your mileage before getting injured? Can your weekly increase in mileage be more than 10%? Please read on if you would like to find out.

All runners out there would have heard of the "don't increase your weekly mileage by more than 10%" rule/ guideline to prevent injury. Let's see if there is any evidence behind this "sacred" rule.

In a just published research paper (Nielsen et al, 2012) that I chanced upon, 60 new runners used GPS (or Global Positioning System, something which I never used) to record their running weekly mileage. The new runners who got injured had an average weekly mileage increase of 31% (13 runners were hurt)

The remaining runners who logged an average increase of 22% in their weekly mileage did not get injured. Now, this 22% increase is definitely higher increase than the recommended 10% increase.

Of course weekly mileage alone is not the only reason for causing injury. Overall fatigue levels which takes training volume, intensity, outside life stressors (such as your job, wife, kids etc), plus other factors into account are much better at giving you a better guide as to how much to run, rest etc.

So the evidence shows that motivated runners can increase their weekly mileage by more than 10% if they are careful and listen to their body.

Personally I feel that the 10% increase guideline is good to hold too eager runners in check. We live in an instantaneous society now where you snap your fingers and you want to be a great runner. Many runners expect to just improve their times with short periods of training and doing too much too soon.

With running becoming so popular in Singapore, we've seen many cases of runners in our clinics who have never run in their lives, decide one day they wanna run a marathon, start running regularly only to get injured quickly.

So, you can ramp up your weekly mileage, but be aware (22% increase seems to be safe) and listen to your body.

For those of you who are keen, I have a Self Monitoring Sheet which we gave to athletes back when I used to work at the Singapore Sports Council to monitor their weight, resting heart rate, sleep etc to track their training, outside life stressors etc to monitor overtraining & injury. Email me if you want a copy of it.

Reference

Nielsen RO, Cederholm P et al (2012). Can GPS Be Used To detect Deleterious Progression In Training Volume Among Runners? J Strength & Conditioning Research. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0b013e3182711e3c.

*Picture by richseow from Flickr.com

Sports Solutions Sports Massage Course

Dates: 8,9,15,16 December 2012 (2 weekends)
Times: 9am to 6pm on Saturdays & 10am to 5pm on Sundays
Venue: Sports Solutions, 108 Amoy Street, Singapore 069928
Cost: Early Bird (before 1 Nov 2012): $1200, After 1 Nov: $1500

Lecturers:
Aized Noor (Master Sports & Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy (Australia),
Senior Physiotherapist, Physio Solutions)
             
Marlene Torrent Parker (National Cert. in Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork NCTMB (US),
Massage & Bodywork Therapist)

Please see Aized's and Marlene's professional background details here.

Course Content:
This course aims to teach the basics of anatomy of the human body and practical sports massage techniques.
There will be a theory and practical exam on the last day which you need to pass to receive your certificate.
Morning and afternoon tea breaks provided.

How to register:
Email: admin@sportssolutions.com.sg
Call: 62236078 or 63331211

Best Shoes For Your Kids

My little one running in his Havaianas

I have many patients who are parents and they always ask what shoes should their little ones be wearing. Well, being a parent myself, let me try to provide an evidenced-based view for this.

Prominent gait and running researchers Daniel Liberman & Irene Davis have provided lots of evidence on how we run barefoot, with shoes and how footwear can affect it. Their research is even more relevant for young kids and youths since this is the time when their movement patterns and neuromuscular pathways are being formed.

In a study published way back in 1991, the author concluded that shoe selection for children should be based on the barefoot model as optimum foot development occurs in the barefoot environment. If their shoes are too stiff & compressive, deformity, weakness and loss of mobility could result (Staheli, 1991).

A systematic review published last year concluded that with shoes, children tend to walk faster by taking longer steps increasing tibialis anterior muscle activity resulting in greater knee & ankle motion. Shoes reduce their swing phase leg speed, reduce the child's foot motion and increase the support phase during gait cycle, encouraging a rear-foor strike pattern (Wagener et al, 2011).

For those of you who are trying to run in minimalist shoes/ barefoot running style shoes, this is exactly why you have a hard time switching, your neural pathways have been programmed to run such that you land on your heels. As I have written before, the shoes are not important, your running technique is.

Based on the above mentioned studies, the best shoes for our children are no shoes or those that are closest to no shoes, so they don't change the shape of the foot nor alters how the child's feet works.

So all you parents reading this don't fret if your child runs around sans shoes.

References

Staheli LT (1991). Shoes For Children: A Review. Pediatrics 88:2 371-375.

Wagener C,  Hunt AE et al (2011). Effect Of Children's Shoes on Gait: A Systematic Review & Meta-Analysis. J Foot & Ankle Research 4:3 doi: 10.1186/1757-1146-4-3.

*Picture of my little one running by iPhone 3GS.

Oscar Pistorius Beaten At Paralympics

Pistorius running in his carbon-fibre prosthetic Cheetahs 

What irony, as soon as he was beaten by Brazil's Alan Oliveira in the T44 men's 200m, Oscar Pistorius claimed he was "unfairly" beaten. 

He claims that his rivals are artificially extending the length of their legs. In fact he said this the previous day, before even losing in the final.

Well, there is a lot more to running faster than having long strides. If having long strides was all it takes to run fast, all the tall people will be the fastest men in the world. Not true as you can probably conclude.

Scientist Prof Peter Weyand has previously written that Pistorius has an enormous advantage over able bodied runners as the latter cannot move their limbs at the same rate. Pistorius is capable of achieving leg repositioning times no human ever could. So I guess now Alan Oliveira is also benefitting from it and probably exploiting it btter than Pistorius. 

* Picture from Gallo Images