Posts

Biomechanics BS. Can you 'predict' injury or pain?

The perspective that the body is an interconnected unit that displays regional interdependence is a valuable one. That different parts interact in different ways during different activities and influence ROM (range of movement) in other areas of the movement chain should seem a fairly easy link to make when looking at the whole body during different context dependent movements. We often eschew the value of the integrated system in favour of the isolated joint/muscle model.
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Does clinical testing tell us much about functional performance? The Thomas test.

One of the topics that regularly comes up in our courses is how relevant are more static/clinical tests to our everyday dynamic and function related movements. We have decided to address this in this blog.

We also have a special treat. A sneaky link to Cor-Kinetic founder Ben Cormack's new article in July's Sportex Medicine *Click Here*
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Can functional movement be too much?

I thought I would have a bit of a Jerry Maguire moment with my latest blog post!

Over the last few months I have certainly gone through a period of change with regards to how I understand the human body. Anybody who regularly reads my blog may have sensed that! I have begun to appreciate the brain as the command centre for all that we do, moving away from a more functional/biomechanical approach I had previously. This has been facilitated by some pioneering characters around me who I am thankful to for opening my eyes, even if it can feel sometimes that they don't want others to come along for the ride! I have certainly suffered my own bouts of cognitive dissonance along the way.
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Muscle isolation? Is that how you learned to move?

This is just a quick blog that was inspired by taking my son to the park yesterday. It is more anecdotal than scientific but something that I wanted to get across.

My son is developing so fast at the moment and it is amazing to watch. He is now 16 months and the two biggest areas I see his development in are movement and speech. It got me thinking about how we correct peoples movement problems and teach them to move better.
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The brain, movement and pain! Part two.

In the first part of this 3 part series we looked at patterns and how the brain recognizes patterns of information to then be able to recall or auto-associate a response from stored memory.
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The brain, movement and pain! Part one.

The brain and its role in movement and pain is taking a much larger role in what we do at Cor-kinetic. Rather than just seeing the body as feeding back to the brain on a mechanical level we are starting to understand the brains active role in everything we do.
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Muscle activation – Are muscles simply reactors to bone and joint motion?

So I have seen various variations on Gary Gray’s view that muscles are reactors. I think this is spot on. Muscles ARE reactors.

I think what Gary meant by this was that generally we see muscles as concentric force producers. Actually during movement we tend to need to decelerate motion by eccentric contraction first. Think walking first we flex to attenuate gravity, ground reaction forces, mass and momentum before creating force to move. So we are reacting to forces acting on the body before we create concentric force.
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Back pain during running. Have you looked at your big toe?

Now this post equally could have been hip pain, knee pain or foot pain when running. The available motion in the big toe or hallux will affect the operation of all of these body structures during integrated movement.
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Achilles tendon pain. Are you looking at the right foot??

Things have been really busy with Cor-kinetic recently and I have not had a lot of time to blog. This post stems from a case I have been dealing with recently and I wanted to give an idea of our thought process at Cor-kinetic and how the symptom and cause of a problem are not always one and the same.

The patient in this case has been having Achilles problems on the left side and also lateral foot pain on the same foot. Interestingly the pain reduced the quicker he ran but more about that later.
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Stability and mobility. Best friends….

At Cor-Kinetic one of our foundational concepts is that of the relationship between stability and mobility.

Stability is a component part of mobility. The body needs to move in a mobile AND stable manner. Stability without mobility is RIGIDITY. Rather than a sign of functionality of the system I would see it more as a sign of dysfunction. The inability of our motor system to effectively control movement will create a rigidity in the system as the body chooses stability over mobility and closes down the system's ability to move.
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