by Dan Williams | Apr 25, 2011 | Blogs, Chronic Conditions, Exercise, Health, Improving Athletic Performance, Musculo-skeletal Rehabilitation
The hamstrings muscle group has been plagued by injury, injury recurrence, improper rehabilitation and impaired performance. Bahr and Holme (2000) proposed that injuries result from a complex interaction of multiple risk factors and events. In terms of prevention and...
by Dan Williams | Apr 22, 2011 | Blogs, Health, Nutrition
As if you need an excuse to eat chocolate! Just in case you do, here’s 13 health benefits of chocolate. The flavonoids (plant compounds from cacao) in dark chocolate play a role in improving cardiovascular health, both through antioxidant effects (complicated,...
by Dan Williams | Apr 21, 2011 | Blogs, Chronic Conditions, Exercise, Health, Improving Athletic Performance, Psychology
There is a close relationship between stress and performance. This relationship can exist in both a negative and positive way. Stress is a stimulus that causes a physiological or psychological effect. Good stress is termed ‘eustress’, while bad stress is...
by Dan Williams | Apr 19, 2011 | Blogs, Exercise, Improving Athletic Performance
We want to increase strength. No surprises there. And yet we fail to use eccentric training as a mainstay of our programming. So what is eccentric training, and how can we use it to maximise performance. Eccentric training involves training the ‘lowering’...
by Dan Williams | Apr 18, 2011 | Blogs, Chronic Conditions, Health, Musculo-skeletal Rehabilitation
It’s beginnings are all too familiar. An ankle rolls. A knee gives way. An muscle starts to hurt when it shouldn’t. Welcome to inflammation. For the sake of this post, we discuss the inflammation caused by injury or trauma (mechanical inflammation)....
by Dan Williams | Apr 17, 2011 | Blogs, Health, Nutrition, Psychology
Exercise, nutrition and weight loss programs make use of food diaries. Science supports this contention. Research tells us that by being aware of what we eat we eat less. This works not only on a micro scale (per meal), but also on a much larger scale – with a...
by Dan Williams | Apr 14, 2011 | Blogs, Chronic Conditions, Exercise, Psychology
How much physical activity is needed to drastically reduce the risk of disease? The answer might be surprising. You should already know that exercise intensity is the single most important variable in maximising the health benefits of exercise. You can read more in my...
by Dan Williams | Apr 11, 2011 | Blogs, Health, Improving Athletic Performance, Psychology
Sleep is a highly sought, frequently underachieved necessity of life. And yet, people don’t really know what’s going on when they’re asleep. Probably because they’re… well… asleep. Sleep is an immediately reversible, perceptual wall...
by Dan Williams | Apr 10, 2011 | Blogs, Chronic Conditions, Exercise, Health, Improving Athletic Performance, Musculo-skeletal Rehabilitation
In parts one and two of this series we covered the need for more effective hamstring injury screen, prevention and rehabilitation. In this, the final part, we discuss initiatives to fill this need. To aid in effective injury prevention, mode specificity is a vital...
by Dan Williams | Apr 7, 2011 | Blogs, Chronic Conditions, Exercise, Health, Musculo-skeletal Rehabilitation
What are the ten top ailments that reduce quality of life? We can examine this by looking at DALYs, or Disability Adjusted Life Years. Basically, these combine years of life lost due to premature death and years of life lived with a disability. DALYs are a great...
