What is Pre-habilitation?
Pre-habilitation is a proactive approach to avoiding injury. Professional athletes know of its importance, but it is often the missing component in the exercise programs of recreational fitness enthusiasts.
All experts agree exercise is key to health and longevity. Exercise helps with:
- reducing risk of chronic disease
- lowering blood pressure
- reducing excess weight
- giving us more energy and strength
- boosts our mood
- increases health of skin
- boosts brain activity and memory
- helps with relaxation and sleep quality
- helping lessen aches and pains
One of the biggest issues with starting an exercise routine is muscle imbalances and repetitive motion with incorrect form that often leads to injury. I see this quite often with new clients coming to me for advice.
With pre-habilitation, qualified trainers use specific exercises to strengthen vulnerable areas, while lengthening tight areas of the body to avoid injury. Each body is different, depending on its own set of habitual movement...
How to Stay Motivated
Staying motivated can definitely be much harder than initially starting an exercise plan. It’s just a fact of life. Starting a new habit and sticking to it is super hard. In this article, I am going to provide a few helpful tips to stay consistent with your habits so you can reach your health and fitness goals.
Just as we gradually train our bodies to develop strength and endurance, so need to do the same for our minds.
- Think of yourself as an athlete. If you put effort into consistently working out you are by definition an athlete. Your goal may be to feel better, to look thinner, and have more energy, but in the end, you are an athlete. And if you put yourself in that mindset, psychologists say you’re more likely to act like an athlete. And athletes stick to their workout program regardless if they feel like it doing it or not.
- If you have ever taken one of my classes you know I usually say “oohhh isn’t this so much fun?” or “wasn’t that...
A Simple Method to Avoid Injury and Live Pain Free
Now that is an important topic we all are hoping for, eh? Now let’s see if I can deliver…
I am super passionate about this. I’ve been for quite a while. It’s always been a focus, but definitely since I had my rotator cuff (the muscles under and over your shoulder blades) injury back in August 2018. You can read about it on my blog here.
At the time, I read a book about shoulder injuries called Framework for the Shoulder and the author, Nicholas DiNubile, mentioned that once we are in our 40s the rotator cuff muscles have received so much wear and tear and with changes in our tissue composition as we age we are quite likely to injure those muscles. A bit disheartening I should say, but I wasn’t satisfied with that answer. Nope. My plan is to not experience that pain again.
Being a Corrective Exercise Specialist with the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) I knew exactly what happened. I was training 6 times a week with heavy weights with...
Why do Pilates?
I have been purposely practicing movement since I was a child. From the age of five doing acrobatics and ballet to aerobics (think bright purple unitard with leg warmers) at my local community centres in my teens.
I have always loved movement so deciding to become a fitness professional in my 20s was a no brainer.
In my 20s, while personal training my Toronto clientele, I also trained as an endurance athlete, and also in my early 30s when my children were little. I moved into heavy weight lifting in my late 30s. During these years I always practiced yoga as a recovery method, balancing my other activities and trying to stay injury free.
In my mid-40s, I found Barre, and have enjoyed the amazing transformation in my body. And then recently, about one year ago, I discovered Pilates. I immediately fell in love with the practice. I found the articulation of the spine (flexion, extension, rotation, and side flexion) fascinating. In yoga, we mainly keep the spine...
Strengthen Your Rotator Cuff Muscles
Strengthening the rotator cuff muscles is integral to keeping your shoulder joint strong and injury free. For a detailed description of what causes shoulder impingement, please visit my blog post on that topic here.
The rotator cuff consists of four small muscles. The supraspinatus is the topmost muscle. It lays across the top of the scapula (shoulder blade). The muscles (laying posteriorly - the closest to the skin) are the teres minor and the infraspinatus. The muscle under the scapula (laying anteriorly) is the subscapularis.
The supraspinatus, along with the deltoid, abducts (lifts up from the side) the arm. The teres minor and infraspinatus externally rotates the arm. The subscapularis internally rotates the arm.
The rotator cuff muscle that gets most injured is the supraspinatus. The muscle I strained was my left supraspinatus.
Rounded shoulders = winged scapula
Our rounded shoulders are the main reason we injure our rotator cuff muscles. Most of us have...
Inner Core Stabilization, Diastasis Recti, and Flatter Tummy
Pillow belly. That is what my children called the soft, squishy area between my ribs and pelvis. When my children were little they would take running leaps, head first, into it.
During my pregnancies I developed noticeable diastasis recti. Diastasis recti is the separation of the connective tissue in the middle of your left and right halves of the rectus abdominis, the most superficial abdominal muscle, making it unable to contract properly.
Joint Pain & Exercise
Several years ago I went through a stressful patch in my life with over programming (driving kids everywhere), too many volunteer commitments, selling/buying house, moving to a new city. And so, amongst all of that I wasn’t taking care of myself all that well: I ate a lot of prepackaged convenience “vegan” foods, lived on caffeine, often skipped meals, wasn’t consistent with exercising, didn’t get enough sleep or even down time. I was about 8 pounds underweight (when I am stressed I don’t eat). So my health was at an all time low. On top of that I started having severe peri-menopausal symptoms: delayed cycles, hot flashes, extreme fatigue, urgency to pee, joint pain. Fun times.
Many of those symptoms were eased by slowing down, cutting out a few programs from the family schedule, making healthy meals at home, eating animal protein, taking a compounded T4 hormone for my hypothyroid. But my joint pain remained. It wasn’t awful, just an...
Author
Amy Goeldner
Certified Fitness Pro
Amy is a certified personal trainer, group fitness instructor, corrective exercise specialist, Pilates instructor, yoga instructor, and most importantly super passionate about helping people build their bodies from the inside out to become strong, move better, and develop functional movement patterns to live your best life possible.
