Conditioning Research is a blog that has become a mine of fascinating and useful information, covering the latest discoveries (and some quirky older ones) about strength, fitness and health.  It received the honour of being named Outside’s tenth fitness blog in its list of the Top Ten Fitness Blogs.

So without further ado, let’s get stuck in.

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It’s called Hillfit.  Why is that?

It’s all about getting fit in a way that enables you to spend more time in the hills.

Chris lives in Scotland and he is an avid walker.  Rarely a weekend goes by without him updating his other blog – Cairn-in-the-mist (a completely appropriate description for a blog about walking in Scotland, might I add) – with photos of the hills and mountains he explores while other, more sensible souls, are languishing in their beds.

He enjoys rooting around in the undergrowth of strength and conditioning science but his real passion is hillwalking.  His personal quest for greater fitness is driven by his desire to make his walking experiences easier and more fun.

The Cairngorms in May 2008 (my photo)

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So it’s about getting fit for walking?

Well, yes and no.

Chris doesn’t waste time talking about all the aspects of walking fitness that you can read anywhere else.  Ever since the 1980s jogging and aerobics phenomenon, everyone knows how to get their heart pumping and their lungs working.

Chris uses this book to make the very important point that strength is also a key aspect of fitness, even walking fitness.  He then develops this point by providing a very short, specific strength-training routine.

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So what’s in the book?

Just to give you a taste, here are the main section headings.  I have to say that Chris pitches his discussions of these subjects in a very clear and concise way.  When you are deep in your subject matter, like he is, it is very difficult to write accurately and in a way that lay-people can understand and Chris achieves it incredibly well.

• Why this booklet? – Chris explains why he wrote this booklet and why strength is important for walkers.
• Who is this programme for? – Chris discusses who his ideal audience is, which given that so few people do strength training, is probably pretty much everyone who gets out in the hills.
• Why strength for a walker? – Strength makes everything else easier, notes Chris.
• The health benefits of strength training – A welcome brief diversion in this chapter from the discussions of strength and hillwalking, Chris explains some of the advantages of strength training that few people outside of the strength and conditioning community know.
• How to get stronger – Chris explains the basic overload principle.
• Exercise vs. activity: you still need to walk! – Chris broaches the subject of movement skills and the specificity of fitness in movement.
• Performance principles – Chris runs through his recommendations for approaching strength training.
• Exercise selection – Chris explains why he has chosen the exercises he recommends in his Hillfit strength routine.  I will respect his intellectual property and won’t reveal all of the details!  However, I have to say that I think that the inclusion of the glute bridge is absolutely essential to help groove the hip hinge, to assist with the prevention of knee injury and to improve core stability.
• The hillfit strength routine – Chris details the routine for people to follow.
• Warming up or stretching the truth? – A common theme at Conditioning Research, Chris explains why he doesn’t like static stretching.  The key point, of course, is that strength allows muscles to provide joints with the stability they need and this often results in better mobility than before.
• Beyond strength – Chris suggests some other areas that a walker can improve, including gait, sleep and posture.
• References and resources – as you might imagine, I was particularly delighted with the references and resources section and I will very much enjoy diving into this chapter in more detail when I have the time.  Thanks for putting this section together, Chris, it is very much appreciated!

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Who will like it?

That’s a really interesting question that is more about the state of the public mindset when it comes to fitness and activity than anything else.  A better question might be: who would benefit from it?

The Cairngorms in May 2008 (my photo)

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Frankly, everyone who gets out regularly into the hills will benefit from including some strength training in their routines.  And Hillfit is the only product on the market that aims to persuade them to do just that.

Because of that, it has to come highly recommended.  So if you know someone who is a keen walker or hiker, please point them in the direction of Hillfit and let’s get strength training into the hillwalking community.

Having watched the DVD a few times, I decided I’d tweak my own training programme now and incorporate some of the lessons learned from the DVD.  

The two main lessons I learned from the DVD were:

1. If it’s important, do it everyday
2. Focus on Janda’s phasic and tonic muscles for long-term health

So, let’s have a look at what I’m going to do about it…

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#1: If it’s important, do it everyday

While talking about this, Dan also discusses the importance of training movements and not muscles.  So I came away with the idea that since I am concerned for long-term health reasons to have full facility of movement in my old age, I should be doing the basic movements everyday.

Now, Dan is at pains to point out that you don’t have to train the movements under heavy load everyday, you should just make sure you do the movements everyday.  I like this idea, as it doesn’t take long to pull together a few targeted warm ups that cover all the bases.

This is my current workout plan, based on a five-day split.  It started out as a full six-day split based on the DC training model of push-pull-legs-rest-push-pull-legs.  I then modified it to take out one of my pulling sessions because my body just doesn’t recover fast enough to make bi-weekly gains on pull ups.

So, as you can see, there are some big holes that need filling when it comes to covering all of the bases, especially on my pull and push days!  So, in the last week or so, I’ve been playing around with the following warm-up, using two sets of a few reps or one stretch on each side as appropriate.  It’s not a lot but I feel that it is making a different to my overall movement quality.

1. Goblet squat with kettlebell
2. Lunge stretch
3. One leg RDL
4. Press up
5. Inverted row

Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you will note that I have not included anything in respect of twist or gait.  For the twist, I still haven’t got my head around how this might be best trained.  I am still doing my own research.  I suspect I may come down on the anti-rotation side of the argument, which could be interesting.  As an aside, one of the most challenging anti-rotation drills I have done is the one-arm pull up…

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#2: Focus on Janda’s phasic and tonic muscles for long-term health

Dan made a number of interesting comments about training on the back of a discussion about Janda’s phasic and tonic muscles, as follows:

• Phasic muscles get weak and so we should train them as fast twitch muscle fibres
• Tonic muscles get tight and so we should stretch them everyday

What are the phasic and tonic muscles, you ask?  Well, there is a long list but here is the table that Dan puts up on the board:

Now, I think I probably train everything as fast twitch muscle fibres so I’m probably covered on the first point.  As regards the second point, I think I might be a little lacking.  So I’m going to include the two stretches that Dan suggests after each workout, which focus on the pectorals, biceps and hip flexors.

As I see how they impact on my general movement quality and how I feel, I will do an update. I’ll also be writing more on Janda in due course, probably once I’ve read a book or two…

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 That’s all folks.  For more on Dan, check out my selection of Dan John articles.

Gray Cook’s resource

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Who is Gray Cook?

Gray Cook deserves some introduction.  According to Fitness Meme Wiki (which I confess I only found by looking for an introduction for Gray), “Gray Cook is a practicing physical therapist, who has spent his entire career refining and developing functional evaluation exercise techniques.  He has taken the Functional Movement Screen and his advanced assessment practices and combined them with reactive-based exercises that enhance motor learning.”

That sounds very impressive, but, to make it more relevant to us, Gray is a physio who has strongly influenced the way that strength coaches and personal trainers approach screening (and therefore programming) for their clients.

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What is Athletic Body in Balance?

I was pointed towards Athletic Body in Balance as an introduction to Gray’s work.  In the introduction to the book, Gray describes the book as expounding his system, which is based on his many years of experience as a physical therapist, and which is intended to provide a model for refining athletic conditioning, injury prevention and performance enhancement.

Gray identifies the keys to his system as efficiency and effectiveness.  If the workouts that are programmed are both efficient and effective then the athlete is gaining the maximum benefit in the minimum amount of time and thereby has the most time available for recovery.

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What will I find in this book?

Athletic Body in Balance is divided into five sections:

1. Athletic Movement
2. Mobility and stability
3. Strength and endurance
4. Power, speed and agility
5. Performance programmes

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#1: Athletic Movement

In this introductory section, Gray discusses the interrelation of mind and body, the importance of identifying weak links and what he calls “energy leaks” – inefficiencies in the way that we move.

Next, Gray introduces the concept of the performance pyramid, which is the triad of functional movement, functional performance and functional skill, with each level being built upon the preceding one.  Functional movement is the bedrock and involves a normal level of mobility and stability.  Where this is lacking, it undermines the ability of the athlete to generate power (in the functional performance layer).  Similarly, a lack of functional performance (strength and power) can inhibit the expression of skill, as the athlete is dominated by the opposition.

Finally, Gray discusses some common modalities for increasing recovery and inhibiting the onset of injury.

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#2: Mobility and stability

In this section, Gray explains the self movement screen, which is an abridged version of the Functional Movement Screen (FMS).  Gray explains how five tests have come to represent a whole picture of how the body moves either efficiently or inefficiently.  The FMS uses seven tests but there is a little replication there.  You can see the full FMS here.  The tests for the self movement screen are:

1. The deep squat
2. Hurdle step
3. In-line lunge
4. Active straight leg raise
5. Seated rotation

Gray shows us how to score these tests and then goes on to discuss the corrective strategies for where we fall short of the expected norm.

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#3: Strength and endurance

In this section, Gray provides some benchmark exercises, the back squat and the bench press, and provides standards for athletes in varying different sports.  He then has a specific section on typical movement imbalances and how to correct them.  He finishes the section with a selection of additional function exercises, including favourites like the front squat.

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#4: Power, speed and agility

In this section, Gray supplies some benchmark exercises and tests for power, speed and agility.  His power tests are the power clean and the vertical jump.  His agility and speed tests involve various running exercises.  He finishes the section with a selection of plyometric exercises designed to improve speed and power.

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#5: Performance programmes

In this final section, Gray discusses the ways in which the functional movement and functional performance layers that have been built up thus far can be converted effectively into sports performance.  His main areas of focus are:

1. Rotation and swinging
2. Throwing and striking
3. Jumping and kicking
4. Cutting and turning

Gray finishes up by stressing the importance of continual progress evaluation and the need for mental focus and involvement in the task in hand.

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In summary

In summary, this is a very complete discussion of athletic performance.  It isn’t the FMS and it isn’t an in-depth look at corrective exercise.  It is more like a physiotherapist’s version of Mike Boyle’s book Functional Training for Sport, which I suppose is what it is.

Assess and Correct is a comprehensive resource in book and DVD form created, produced and distributed by Eric Cressey, Mike Robertson and Bill Hartman.

They have pooled their collective knowledge about the various parts of the body and how they are rehabilitated into one place to help individuals and personal trainers establish mobility and stability deficits and the ways in which to improve them.

Assess, then correct

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What is in the product?

The product provides two categories of assessment and a bank of corrective exercises, as follows:

1. Static assessment – there are 8 postural assessments, which can be performed purely by observation of either yourself or of a client
2. Dynamic assessment – there are 26 movement-based assessments, which are performed by watching either yourself or a client perform a given specific movement, such as a bodyweight squat or lunge pattern
3. Corrective exercises – the bank of corrective exercises is made up of 19 categories of exercises, arranged in progressions.  The categories are designed around the mobility or stability of different joints of the body.  The assessments direct you towards the appropriate category of corrective exercise

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Examples

One of the dynamic assessments is the Thomas test, which looks like this (it’s Bill Hartman explaining the test in the background):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_4_9qY1Ic8

As Wikipedia explains: “the Thomas test is a physical examination test, named after Dr. Hugh Owen Thomas, a British orthopaedic surgeon, used to rule out hip flexion contracture. The patient lies supine on the examination table and brings one knee in direction to the chest, while the other leg remains extended. The Thomas test is said to be positive if the patient cannot keep the opposing leg extended during the test.”

The assessment then leads to a corrective exercise, which is designed to lengthen the hip flexors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyx5RlUGV3g

And, as you or your client progress, the exercise can be made more difficult:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bAXiM9D6qE

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How is it presented?

The product made up of a book and a DVD, which complement each other.  The book shows pictures of all of the static assessments and the corrective exercises.  The DVD shows the dynamic assessments and the corrective exercises.

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Why buy this product?

Quite simply, there is nothing else like this product on the market.  If you want to short-circuit years of personal trial and error in helping either yourself or other people move better, feel better and achieve better results in their training then this is the product for you.

And while it may seem like an expensive product, there is more here than meets the eye.  It cannot be digested in a weekend.  This is a substantial wealth of knowledge and I can see myself working through this for many weekends between now and next year…

The course notes define flexibility as ”the range of motion at a given joint”.  I suppose that under this definition can therefore be used fairly interchangably with the word mobility, therefore.  I’m going to use mobility from now on because I can’t shake the Jane Fonda-esque connotations of flexibility.

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Six factors affecting mobility

My course notes identify several factors that influence the degree of mobility that you can find at a given joint:

1. Joint type – what type of joint you’re looking at dictates how mobile it is going to be.  For example, the shoulder and hip joints, being ball-and-socket joints, have much more latent flexibility than the elbow joint, which is a hinge joint.
2. Injury history – if a joint or the muscles or soft tissue surrounding or attached to a joint have been damaged in any way that there might be implications for its mobility.
3. Gender – it is supposed that women are more flexible than men, particularly at the hip joint.  I did some reading about this and found that the evidence is poor for showing this for all joints.  This interesting article, which is drawn from the book Science of Flexibility, by Michael Alter, discusses the reasons for the increased mobility at the hip joint and also covers the increased flexibility that occurs as a result of pregnancy.
4. Muscle length - where muscles are shortened, either because of postural problems, injury or knots, this can lead to a decrease in flexibility for a joint.
5. Age – most people seem to lose flexibility as they age.  Michael Alter notes that ”the primary factor responsible for the decline of flexibility with age is certain changes that occur in the connective tissues of the body.  Interestingly, it has been suggested that exercise can delay the loss of flexibility due to the aging process of dehydration.  This is based on the notion that stretching stimulates the production or retention of lubricants between the connective tissue fibers, thus preventing the formation of adhesions.”  Alter goes on to define these changes as: “(1) increased amounts of calcium deposits, adhesions, and cross-links in the body, (2) an increase in the level of fragmentation and dehydration, (3) changes in the chemical structure of the tissues, and (4) replacement of muscle fibers with fatty, collagenous fibers.”
6. Temperature – warming up a muscle increases its flexibility.  This premise is based on the idea that muscles are like rubber bands.  If they are cold, when you try and stretch them, they resist the movement and can snap.  If they are warm, however, they are very flexible and stretch a long way.

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Ways to improve mobility

There are a number of ways in which we can improve our mobility:

• Static stretching – my course notes seem to believe that the only option available to us to improve mobility is static stretching.  The notes provide details of a number of different static stretches, which I won’t reproduce here.
• Soft tissue work – I used to be a raving fan of soft tissue work to the exclusion of everything else.  I still believe that soft tissue work is brilliant for short-term relief and for making sure that any temporary muscle knots caused in training don’t build up into a lasting problem.  I do maintenance work every day I add extra bits in when I have a tight area that is causing irritation.  However, I have found that purely soft tissue work is short-sighted if not done in conjunction with an appreciation of muscular balance.
• Muscular balance – most of my mobility work these days is actually targeted strength training to counter the effects of sitting down all day.  I have found that the more muscular balance work that I do, the less I have trouble with my mobility.  My first exposure to muscular balance training came when I started reading T-Nation corrective exercise articles for various different pains or afflictions.  Consequently, I made some great progress with my own injury history.  However, once I started reading more, I realised that most of these corrective exercises were based on Vladimir Janda’s work on muscular imbalances and that I could have short-circuited most of my problems by listening to him.  Now, I feel that I am making the best progress by basing my muscular balance training on his perceptions.

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A brief introduction to Vladimir Janda

From my reading, I understand that Vladimir Janda was a Czech professor who excelled at the analysis of postural disorders.  There are a couple of key concepts that he introduced that are useful for understanding the effects of sitting on the body.  These tend to get referred to a lot on the internet by people who want to sound clever but they are rarely covered in much detail, except in quite technical articles.  They are:

• Tonic and phasic muscles – Janda identified two groups of muscles based on their roles.  He called them tonic and phasic.  Tonic (or postural) muscles are responsible for combined flexion, adduction, and internal rotation.   They are responsible for stability. On the other hand, phasic muscles are responsible for combined extension, abduction and external rotation and are responsible for movement.  Tonic muscles are prone to tightness, while phasic muscles are prone to weakness.
• Muscular imbalances – Janda identified two common muscular imbalance syndromes: Upper Crossed Syndrome and Lower Crossed Syndrome.  Upper Crossed Syndrome is characterized by tightness of the upper trapezius, levator scapulae and pectoralis muscles, along with weakness of the deep neck flexors, lower and middle trapezius, and serratus anterior.  Lower Crossed Syndrome is characterized by tightness of the erector spinae, rectus femoris and iliopsoas, along with weakness of the abdominals and the gluteal muscles.

For further reading about Vladimir Janda and his system, you may find it interesting to look at the following:

• DynamicChiropractic, which has an appreciation of Vladimir Janda’s life and work
• Advance Web has a technical discussion of Janda’s overall approach
• Human Kinetics, which covers the muscular imbalances of older adults
• Back Into It, which covers the basics of Upper Crossed Syndrome
• Back Into It, which covers the basics of Lower Crossed Syndrome
• Perform Better, which discuss the use of kettlebells in assisting the treatment of Lower Crossed Syndrome
• Charlie Weingroff, who makes it clear that there are four muscle groups and therefore four areas to conisder in treating Lower Crossed Syndrome: the (possibly weak) glutes and abs and the (possibly tight) quads and spinal errectors.  He also gives some useful tests and notes that you can never do enough glute activation work, which I tend to agree with from personal experience

And if anyone reading this happens to have some good books about Janda or has read about him extensively, would you mind creating a Wikipedia page in English, because there isn’t one yet and there should be.

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Learning from Vladimir Janda: Upper Crossed Syndrome

So having read about Vladimir Janda’s syndromes, which are based on the idenitification of weak muscles and tight muscles, I think that Upper Crossed Syndrome can be summarised very briefly as:

• Tight muscles - upper traps, levator scapulae, pecs
• Weak muscles - lower and middle traps and serratus anterior

So the targeted muscular balance routine that I have used to help me reduce these issues has been:

• Stretch and lengthen tight muscles - foam roll or self massage stick on upper traps, levator scapulae and pecs.  For more information about foam rolling or self-massage, see my post on what my soft tissue maintenance programme looks like.  It doesn’t always look exactly like that but it’s a fair reflection.
• Strengthen weak muscles – band pull-aparts (for lower and middle traps) and scapular push ups (for serratus anterior).  Here are a couple of videos to demonstrate these exercises, from some of my favourite online authors:

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Band pull aparts (with thanks to Charles Staley for the video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUPsw1TqOu0

This exercise was life changing for me 

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Scapular push ups (with thanks to Nick Tumminello for the video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALzFr2GT-Is

 This is like lubrication for my scapulae

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Learning from Vladimir Janda: Lower Crossed Syndrome

So having read about Vladimir Janda’s syndromes, which are based on the idenitification of weak muscles and tight muscles, I think that Lower Crossed Syndrome can be summarised as:

• Tight muscles - erector spinae, rectus femoris and iliopsoas
• Weak muscles -  abdominals and the gluteal muscles

So the targeted muscular balance routine that I have used to help reduce these issues for me has been:

• Stretch and lengthen tight muscles - foam roll or hockey ball on the spinal errectors (you have to be very careful here), quads and iliopsoas.  For more information about foam rolling or self-massage, see my post on what my soft tissue maintenance programme looks like.  It doesn’t always look exactly like that but it’s a fair reflection.
• Strengthen weak muscles - planks and ab-wheel roll-outs (for abs) and glute bridges (for glutes).  Here are a couple of videos to demonstrate these exercises, from a couple more of my favourite online authors:

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Ab wheel roll outs (with thanks to Eric Cressey for the video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MfLRDyi5jA

 Don’t try these unless your plank is absolutely solid as a rock

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Glute bridges (with thanks to Bret Contreras for the video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cylwgaK_LEQ

The world’s most under-rated exercise

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As always, please note that this is just what has worked for me.  And I mean it has really made a huge difference both to my ability to lift and my ability to do just about anything I want without getting a sore back or shoulders, which is worth quite a lot to me.

And by no means am I an expert on the work of Vladimir Janda, it is just that his way of thinking has clarified my own approach to sorting out my posture and I wish that more people were aware of his great work.

Eric’s masterwork

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What can I expect?

This is the sort of book that basically reviews itself.  I’m not even going to try and be clever about it.  Here is what you will find if you invest in this book:

• Foreward by John Berardi – I wouldn’t normally mention a foreword but John’s incisive comments are brilliant at setting the scene.  He also draws our attention to a very old Cressey article that is still worth revisiting, called Bodybuilding and Budgeting.
• Introduction by Eric Cressey – It’s always tempting to think of people of Eric’s calibre as springing, fully-formed in all their brilliance from the head of Zeus, like Athena in Greek mythology.  Eric’s introduction dispels that myth and tells a story that many will find familiar from their own circumstances.  An athlete who drifts into the gym with an “all show and no go” mentality finds powerlifting and discovers a new sense of purpose, as well as bucket-loads of new strength and muscle.
• Why stronger is better – Eric explains why stronger is better, in his own way.  This isn’t so much a Mark Rippetoe riff, as in “strong people are harder to kill and more useful in general” but a more practical approach.  Eric explains why his strain of powerlifting-derived training is faster, more efficient, more functional, more motivating, better for your health and more motivating overall.
• Building strength – before getting started on the programme, Eric spends a little time explaining what strength is, how muscles work and how we train them.  It’s not a replacement for an exercise physiology textbook but it’s better than not knowing what you’re talking about…
• Overview of the programme - I always hate it when books pile straight into an explanation of something without setting out a framework first.  I guess it’s the geek in me that likes to approach problems like a set of Russian dolls, each layer inside the next.  I guess Eric thinks in the same way, because he has a great little section near the beginning that sets out the basics of each stage of his programme and explains why each section is where it is and what it is designed to do.
• Warm ups – unless you’ve already bought Maximum Mobility or another Eric Cressey product, you’ll get more benefit out of this section than out of any other in the book.  Quite simply, this warm up section is the standard by which all other warm ups must be measured.  I remember taking this book on a skiing holiday with me and doing the warm up every day in my hotel room until it was ingrained in my head.  It covers a full range of soft tissue work, stretches and mobility drills, along with some core stability work and glute work to boot.  If I am honest, this section of the book was more influential on my own mobility work than anything else I have read.
• Pretesting – Eric introduces the concept of pretesting before launching you into his programme.  He suggests that you use (1) a standing broad jump, (2) box squat, (3) bench press, (4) deadlift, and (5) 3RM chin up.  I think this is a great range of tests and his programme will surely move anyone’s performance along on these tests across the board.
• The programme – after pretesting, you then proceed through a 16-week programme, subdivided into 4 sections, called (1) foundation, (2) build, (3) growth, and (4) peak.  Eric shows you pictures of all the exercises that he prescribes.  While many of the exercises can be done in a garage gym, not all of them can and an experienced trainee will know the variants that could be used instead.  However, this is a small weakness of the book.  What’s great about the programme is that it will sort out lots of little niggles here and there that may have been troubling you.  It sneaks some pretty effective postural corrective work in under the radar.  On the other hand, I am not confident that it would help you bust a plateau on your favourite lift if you’ve already achieved a high level.  It might help, if you have some muscular imbalances.  However, I really don’t see how it could improve an aspiring elite powerlifter’s 1RM deadlift.  I would suggest that they would need specific work to target their weaknesses.  But that’s definitely not a criticism of the programme, it’s a description of where the programme sits.  It sits perfectly between intermediate and advanced lifting.  It’s practially a road-map to move you from one to the other, and if you look at the testimonials, that’s exactly what the numbers being lifted by the trainees tell you.
• Testing - at the end of the programme, Eric suggests that you retest your pretesting exercises to see how much you have improved.  In essence, this is the basis of a good programme, that it moves you from point A to point B.
• Nutrition - Eric acknowledges John Berardi in his nutrition section and offers a number of guidelines for achieving optimal nutrition to support the prorgamme.  It’s not rocket science but it doesn’t need to be.  Eric also goes into which supplements are useful and which are not.
• Mental focus – interestingly, Eric has a whole section on the mental aspect of training, which many coaches neglect.  Eric recognises and offers tips in relation to putting your mind to work for you rather than against you.
• Eric’s top tips – not really what the final section is called but it’s what it is.  Eric tells us his life lessons in lifting: stay focused on performance, set quantifiable goals, don’t neglect the small stuff, mix up your exercises, pull more than you push, do single leg work, deload, keep learning, adjust workouts as necessary, and adapt nutrition to your goals.

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So will I like this book?

If you’re reading my blog, then you’ll like this book.  In fact, you’ve probably already got it.

I went into work on Monday, although I was starting to feel a little queasy.  By the end of the day, I was feeling rotten and I left on time and drove home quickly, just wanting to collapse on the sofa.  When I got in, it was if my body recognised that I was in a safe place and it let go.  Spectacularly.

Uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting sounds hilarious until it’s you who has to experience trying to position one end over the toilet bowl and the other over the sink.  Especially if your bathroom is not designed with that in mind.

It’s also not fun when you finally climb gasping off the bathroom floor and follow the trail of destruction back down the stairs to wherever you were when it started and proceed to try and clean it all up.

And the temperature that comes with it all is the worst thing of all.  I hate the brain fog and tunnel vision I get when my temperature goes up.  I hate the ultra-vivid dreams that keep waking me up and I hate the paranoia that I get when I’m awake.

Anyway, I managed to salvage some experiences from it.  This is what I learned:

• Lying down on your side for long periods of time is really bad for your shoulders.  I injured my left shoulder about two months ago and I had done a lot of rehab before I went on holiday.  While I was away, I did even more and I felt like I had really turned a corner.  Having spent five days lying on it all scrunched up, I think I have gone backwards.
• Eating protein is a really bad idea when you are trying to see whether your body can stomach any food again.  Much as I advocate a paleo diet, I found that dry toast was the only thing that my body would countenance eating after five days of nothing.
• Boiled or bottled water was the only thing I could consume without repercussions.  This has made me seriously question the logic of drinking tap water going forward.  There must be something in it that my body doesn’t like if it couldn’t stomach it while I was sick.  However, the financial impact of that choice is so significant that I don’t think there is anything I can do about it.  Sometimes I hate living in the UK, where everything is so expensive.
• NHS Direct is quite a useful place to look if you are concerned about what ailment you may have.  A brief look and you can reassure yourself that you aren’t going to die (immediately).  Beats wating hours in a germ-filled room packed with screaming babies and warring toddlers to be told to go home, take paracetamol and sleep with the window open.  Now if they could dispense sick notes, that would be perfect.
• Magazines have got really expensive all of a sudden.  The last time I bought a magazine, it was probably Men’s Health and it was £3.00 (I tend to use the internet for fitness and health reading these days).  This weekend, intending to spend some time recuperating on the sofa, I bought Empire (a UK film magazine) at the local supermarket in the village for £4.00.  I cannot believe that inflation has risen by 33.3% since the last time I bought a magazine and I can’t believe that everyone who was earning £30k back then is earning £40k now.  Maybe the internet has hit their circulation so much that they’ve had to escalate their prices.
• Always have an emergency box of key items in the house for in case you get sick.  You will be so much happier if you do this and you don’t have to phone around ten friends trying to find someone to go to the supermarket for you while you are chained to the toilet.  I would include ibruprofen and paracetamol, bottled water, dioralyte and maybe some flu medication, I don’t know.

Anyway.  I hope none of you are sick and if you are then you definitely have my sympathy.

We’ve done similar trips the last couple of years, where we do about 7-8 hours a day, covering anything up to 20km and 1,500m of height gain.  While it’s great to be away from a desk (I feel the difference in my hips and upper back), it’s less good for the state of my plantar fascia and the soft tissue quality of my calves and adductors.

In previous years, I just suffered while I was away and had to work hard on them when I got back.  This year, I was determined not to let the week punish me in the same way, so I thought in advance how I was going to manage it.  With a little bit of thought, I came up with a travel-sized kit so that I could do some soft tissue work on the move: a baseball and a short length of 2 inch diameter PVC pipe.

Ideally, I think the PVC pipe would be a little bit wider (maybe 3 inches) but it is OK so long as you have a hard floor and not a deep carpet to lie on.  The baseball is good as the stitching helps the ball to grip on a harder floor.  I have found that a hockey ball or a smooth ball slips too much when I really dig into my rotator cuff.

With the PVC pipe, I can help to undo the damage that I’m doing to my body by hiking by rolling my:

• calves,
• IT band, and
• (if I use a step to hang my foot over) my adductors. 

With the baseball, I can continue to work on my rotator cuff, rhomboids and front deltoids (my ongoing issues) but also help aid the recovery from hiking by rolling my:

• glutes, and
• hip flexors.

It’s definitely made a big difference to how I feel now I’ve got back from holiday and I’m hoping that it carries over into my workouts this week.

Anyway, I’m doing lots of soft tissue work to try and sort it out but I figured it would be useful to do some extra rowing movements to try and speed the rehab process along.  Lots of people talk about the benefits of face pulls so I applied myself in my Garage Gym to rigging a system up.

Garage gym set-up for face pulls

You can see from the picture below that I’m using the same basic pulley system that I use for assisted one-arm chins.  It has a climbing pulley attached to my pull up bar using a carabiner and a small piece of gear cord.  The cable is made also out of climbing gear cord, as it doesn’t stretch.  This cable is then attached to weights plates at one end using another carabiner and a sling and to my hands at the other end using another sling.

This is the start of the movement:

And this is the end of the movement.  The black sling you can see between the end of the gear cord and the sling attached to the weights plates is just to extend the gear cord such that the weights plates are just about on the ground at the bottom of the rep.  This is my weak nod in the direction of risk management…

What I’m doing

I’m doing a couple of light sets of 20 reps with c. 20kg after my soft tissue work in the evenings.  Interestingly, the groove is a little elusive.  Sometimes I find myself having to concentrate quite hard on keeping my lower back flat.  Other times I have to concentrate on stopping my upper back from rounding during the movement.  Sometimes I get this great sensation of my shoulder-blades moving together at the end of each rep.  It’s changeable.

They also seem to affect what my body does on other exercises.  I tried some presses with the bar the other night to see how my shoulder was getting on and suddenly felt much more rear delt engagement than normal. 

In short, I’m developing kinesthetic awareness of what my back and arms are doing, which is good, but I’m not there yet, which is bad.  I’ll keep you posted on how they work out.

Since I have a desk job and have had a desk job for around 10 years, I had found that my hip mobility was poor and that my body had worked around it by increasing my lower back mobility.  I did plenty of stretching, soft tissue work, activation drills and strengthening exercises to improve. 

Ultimately, the programme worked well and I was able to go back to squatting again recently.  My squat depth is now good (around 12″) and I feel a lot better when doing most of my other exercises too.

Ongoing soft tissue work

However, I have found that if I don’t do soft tissue work regularly, I start to slip back into old patterns and find myself growing uncomfortable under the bar in the squat rack.

I never want to get to the point where I can’t squat again, so I have started doing a programme of soft tissue maintenance daily.

What you need

For this programme, I use a hard ball, (I have a baseball and a hockey ball, which I use for slightly different purposes) and a foam roller.  These are my tools of torture:

The key areas

My key areas to roll are (in order):

• Plantar fascia – hockey ball
• Tensor fascia lata (TFL) – foam roller
• Quadriceps (mainly rectus femoris) – foam roller
• Adductors, sartorius and pectineus – foam roller
• Calves – foam roller
• Glutes – hockey ball
• Psoas – hockey ball
• Rhomboids – baseball
• Rotator cuff – baseball
• Front deltoid and shoulder capsule – baseball

Choose the order carefully

I like to use the above order because it works well for moving from one exercise to the next.  I walk into the spare room and tread straight onto the hockey ball to hit my plantar fascia.  Then, I grab the foam roller and lie down on it to roll my right TFL.  Switching sides, I usually roll my quadriceps before doing the left TFL and my adductors.  Sitting up, I roll my calves and then chuck the foam roller away.

All that take me about 5 minutes.  It’s not a 5 minutes out of my day that I would willingly give up.

After that, I grab the hockey ball and roll my glutes (actually, I usually just do the right one) and my psoas.  At this point, I’ve finished the lower body part of my rolling programme.  Doing the lower body first is a guarantee that it gets done.  Then I move onto my upper body.

My upper body trigger points are very swimming specific but I suspect that sitting at a desk typing all day aggravates them something awful.  I find that I get knotted up in my rhomboids, my rotator cuff and my (left) front deltoid.  Using the baseball (because it doesn’t slip like the smoother hockey ball) I get around here in as long as I need to.  Some days, that takes 10 minutes, other days I take 20 minutes.  I usually let the ball settle onto a knot and then apply pressure until I feel the knot yield slightly.  Then I move the ball around a bit.

It hurts but I wouldn’t stop doing it if you paid me.

I think, overall, the key is finding the trigger points that are where the knots have developed and attacking them mercilessly.

Plantar fascia

This is a great place to roll and I am evangelical about getting all and sundry to do it.  It’s a pretty essential technique for when you’ve been doing a lot of walking.  I take a ball with me on walking holidays and when I remember to use it, it pays dividends.  I use a hockey ball nowadays, but when I started out I just used a tennis ball.

Tensor fascia lata (TFL)

Rolling this part of my leg used to be the most horrible experience in the world for me.  However, I found that if I rolled it every day for a couple of days, it slowly got less and less painful.  Now, rolling it every day, it’s usually pain-free.  If I leave it a couple of days, it starts to make me wince again and if I leave it a week, it really makes me grunt.  It’s great motivation for rolling regularly!

Quadriceps (mainly rectus femoris)

The trick to rolling your quadriceps is to roll each leg separately.  I have found that if I roll both legs together then I get off quite easily and it doesn’t really hurt that much.  Rolling each leg separately makes the experience a lot more “effective”. 

Sartorius, pectineus and adductors

This is an area that I have always rolled but have never really managed to improve significantly.  I can feel that there is some tightness here, which improves a little with rolling but not much.  If anyone has any tips on these, I’d be interested to hear them.

Calves

Like for the quadriceps, the trick to getting value for money out of rolling the calves is to roll each leg separately.  I have found that if I roll both legs together then I get off quite easily and it doesn’t really hurt that much.  Rolling each leg separately makes the experience a lot more “effective”.  When I first started a programme of rolling, I didn’t bother with my calves.  Recent walking holidays have revealed to me that the slight pain I get behind my right knee after a week’s hard mountain walking is entirely due to knots in my calf.  A hard rolling session later and I am pain-free.

Glutes

I never used to roll my glutes at all until I felt that my squat pattern wasn’t quite level.  I monitored how my hips felt as I descended into the hole and realised that my right glute felt tight.  I rolled it using a hockey ball and the change in the way my glutes, lower back and groin area felt was quite remarkable.  Needless to say, I always include some rolling time in for my glutes now.

Psoas major

This is a great little trigger point that really makes a difference to my squat pattern.  If I find a knot here, my squat immediately improves the moment I get rid of it.  It’s a bit hit-and-miss, though, whether it gets knotted up.

Rhomboids

I suspect that my history with these is swimming related but I would be intrigued if other people also have trouble with them.  My knots are pretty substantial when they develop.  They kind of feel crab apple-sized…

Rotator cuff

These feel like steel ropes most of the time until I apply some heavy doses of baseball to them (poetic, given that baseball pitchers often have rotator cuff trouble).  They take some punishment before they start to soften up but when they do my whole shoulder girdle settles down.

Front deltoid

This may be another area that is particularly bad for me, as it’s only my left shoulder that is troubled.  Again, however, it’s a pretty substantial knot that I tend to have to deal with if it flares up.

And that’s it at the moment.  If I find somewhere else starts getting tight and uncomfortable then I’ll start rolling that…