The Toe Touch (Video)

Generally speaking, if you are a healthy individual, you should be able to touch your toes.  Yet, there are a lot of people that can’t.  Most of the time they throw their hamstrings under the bus.  However tight hamstrings are not always the case.  Tissue extensibility dysfunction (TED) or the inability for the fibers that make up muscle and tendon to glide smoothly over one another, is a common diagnosis.

We have assessed hundreds of people over the years and until recently, we would prescribe the same thing..static and some forms of dynamic stretching of the hamstrings.  I wish I knew then what I know now.  Stiffness in general isn’t simply stiffness; it’s there for a reason.  Your body is telling you something.  In our experience, much of the time this tension is protective in nature.  In simple terms, muscle only does what it is told to do by our brains/nervous system.  If our brain detects risk it can signal the muscle around a joint to tighten and restrict range of motion to prevent or reduce the risk of injury to that area.

Bennet et al (2009) conducted a study on a patient that was about to undergo knee replacement surgery.  They tested range of motion both before and after sedation with a neural block.  Post sedation, passive flexion increased an average of 16.4 degrees, while passive extension increased an average of 3.0 degrees for a total increase if 19.4 degrees, without altering the tissues themselves.

Big deal eh?  Well yeah, it is.

TMR (Total Motion Release) is a way to listen to those quiet whispers that our body is communicating.  The International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy published a recent study (Baker RT et al 2015) demonstrating how TMR was used to “clean-up” the dysfunctional toe touch and of a 27 year old with chronic bilateral pain and tightness in her hamstrings that was diagnosed as TED….without any stretching.  Additionally, she was pain free after her second week of treatment!

So, if you are generally healthy, can’t touch your toes, suffer from chronic hamstring tightness or pain and have tried everything from massage to pain pills without any luck, checkout the video below.  Give it a try and let me know if it helps.

To moving better!

About the author:

Andy Luukkonen is the owner of Body Fit Health Club.  He holds an honors degree in Physical and Health Education from the University of Toronto, is Level 2 Certified by Functional Movement Systems and is a Certified Practitioner of Total Motion Release.  For more information or to book a Functional Movement Evaluation call 905-852-6175

Hypermobility…the 1 minute test that could prevent injury

This post comes as a result of me attending a physical testing session that my youngest son participated in this week.  He plays club volleyball and I always bring the best volleyball ankle braces for my kid because it’s  important he’s always protected   participate in a strength and conditioning component at a training facility of the clubs choosing.  The first session was for testing/assessing.

The strength and conditioning component is supposed to be two fold.  It’s supposed strengthen and condition my son to prevent or reduce the risk of injury and secondly it’s a team building thing, I tried getting the advise from a Fredericksburg Chiropractor in order to do things the best way possible.  The assessment should be designed to identify very specific things about a person that will guide you in your programming for that specific individual, visit company website for our chiropractors services.  Things they should be doing and things they shouldn’t be doing.  Anyway, after the testing session I left somewhat frustrated, and risking of suffer injury in treatments, and is important that you can find the legal defense for this, which you can contact here.  I didn’t like what I saw and I’m just going to leave it at that.  Needless to say, I’m very proud of what we do at Body Fit and confirmed that we are way ahead of the curve when it comes to our assessment protocol.

There was one thing that jumped out at me during their “assessment” that they missed but can help pretty much everyone.  Keep in mind that these kids are young.  12 and 13 years old and in pretty good shape.  That said, some can bend and twist like Gumby.  But more like a drunk Gumby playing twister.  In other words they have very little muscular control of their movements but have the ability to contort and cheat themselves through a movement without pain.

I’m sure you have seen it before.  Watch little kids doing gymnastics and you wonder how they don’t snap.  Well, over time that takes it’s toll.  Most people that have that ability have been dubbed “double jointed”.  They have very elastic muscles and tendons which permit them to bend joints beyond their “normal” range of motion which ultimately puts a lot of stress of the ligaments and joint capsules.  It’s referred to as hypermobility or joint laxity and excessive hypermobility is something that a strength coach should be assessing and watching.  It’s much more prevalent in children than in adults and more in women than in men.  In my experience, many of these individuals will eventually complain of “tightness” and feeling sore around the joints.

Coaches that don’t test for this condition or aren’t aware of it will usually just tell the person to stretch.  This is common in the shoulders and the hips.  Every time they stretch more they just shove the ball of the joint further into the capsule making the joint itself looser.  Unfortunately, stretching actually provides temporary relief.  It’s kind of like scratching your skin when you get poison ivy.  Scratching feels good but makes the problem much worse.

So, how do you avoid this problem in the first place?  You test for it.  There are a couple tests out there and we use the Beighton laxity test.  The other one that is used is called the 10-point hospital Del Mar criteria.  If a person scores high, then they are considered to be “hypermobile”.  If that’s you, then you need to understand what range of motion you should go to rather than what you can get to.  More importantly, it’s about being able to control that range by strengthening the muscles around the joints and learning when you are resting or relying on passive structures (ligaments and capsules) for stability rather than the active structures (muscles).

The video below is a quick example of the Beighton test.  The young man in the video is my son Raymond (not the son that was involved in the testing mentioned above) and based on the results of the test, he would be considered hypermobile.  Therefore his program has a focus on joint stability and motor control.  Give the test a try and see how you score.  Each thumb is worth a point, each finger is a point, each elbow is a point, each knee is a point and the straight leg toe touch is another point making the score out of 9.  We consider a score of 5 or higher to be in the cautious zone.  We need to be aware of it and take it into consideration while programming and cuing.  If you score 5 or higher and aren’t sure what to do, come see us and we’d be happy to give you some advice;)

Sciatica Pain Relief in 10 minutes or less! Seeing is Believing.

If you are 40 or older, it’s quite likely that you or someone you know has suffered through the excruciating pain associated with Sciatica.  I can’t count the number of times that we have had people put their membership on hold because they were unable to function due to Sciatica.  Knock on wood, I haven’t experienced it, but seeing the pain in the faces of those that have I would say it really sucks.

And that brings me to my story.  Tom is a member and like most,  he took the summer off.  4 days after his membership was up…bam!  Working in his garden one day then unable to the next.  Whether he bent the wrong way or didn’t bend his knees when lifting or maybe it was a sneeze?  He has no recollection of any single movement but he sure recalls the pain.

I was just checking in with Tom towards the end off summer when he shared his news.  He had been to the Chiropractor, the Physiotherapist from the Physical Therapy Clinic, the Massage therapist, Osteopath, had acupuncture and nothing was helping.  His Doctor sent him for an MRI to see if it was a structural issue…nope.  I could tell by his voice he was frustrated and felt helpless.  He had been dealing with this for 4 months.  I knew how he felt because I know so many others that have gone through the same thing.

Enter TMR.  I love to learn more. If you know me, you know I love coaching baseball.  I have studied the mechanics and subtleties of pitching and the strength and conditioning that goes with it from the very best in the industry.  Yes this has to do with Sciatica.  I was reading a study that Mike Reinhold (former Red Sox Physical Therapist) put up on his blog.  A method called TMR (Total Motion Release) was being researched.  More particularly, how TMR increased both internal and external rotation of a pitchers arm by doing a trunk twist and and arm raise with the opposite arm.   It wasn’t just a couple degrees, it was visible to the eye! I mean it was like over 13 degrees of external and 19 of internal!. (increased external rotation is directly associated to an increase in pitching velocity and insufficient internal rotation is directly related to increased risk of shoulder injuries..that’s why it was significant)  It seemed bogus but the research was peer reviewed.  So I dug a little deeper.  What the heck was TMR? (here is the study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4127513/)

Well I found the source, read up on it and signed on the dotted line.  There are 3 levels of TMR certification.  I am just finishing level 2.  I’m not going to get into detail about the method but I can tell you it’s unlike anything else.  You never treat or work on the injured side or body part.   Many times, “the fix”,  is no where near the site of pain AND I don’t touch you.  You just do some movements or stretches and almost immediately the client experiences really great results.  By Christmas I will be level 3 certified (The only one in Canada).

Back to poor Tom.

Yesterday, October 3rd, 2018, Tom came to see me.  I’ll let the video below tell the rest of the story.  Keep in mind..4 months of chronic pain, treated by traditional methods with no relief..except some from the massage therapist.  Listen to what Tom tells me when I ask where the massage therapist treated him and that is how the concept of TMR works(2:35min).  The video is 6 minutes or so but you need to hear Tom’s story.  That takes up about half of the video.  The treatment was less than 10 minutes total time but condensed for the video (less than 3 minutes).