1/3 of neck pain after an injury can hang around for over a year. That’s quite a large stat.

Whether that is in the form of your neck catching every time you move, an ongoing ache that comes at the end of the day, or purely your neck feeling stiff and noisy when you wake up.

Research is beginning to come out on solutions for persistent neck pain. 

The two key and MOST effective interventions are a combination of exercise and “hands on” Physio. 

Some injuries can hurt at night. In particular, tendons (the bit at the end of a muscle that attaches to bone). When you injure a tendon they become enlarged and are very sensitive to stretch, or  pressure against bone. For example, if you have a sore outside hip tendon and you lie on your pain-free side, it can wake you up because you are bringing that leg across your body, stretching the tendon against the bone below. This is really, really painful.

If you have overloaded your shoulder rotator cuff tendons, lying on your sore side will generally wake you up. This occurs due to the enlarged tendons pushing against the boy structures above them.

A lot of shoulders get better with a standard approach. Get the rotator cuff working well, sort the shoulder blade mechanics and reduce the load through the tendon for a little while and they slowly but surely get better over 8-16 weeks.

But what if that doesn’t work. What if the exercises make it worse?

The simple answer is that there is probably another area in your body that is not working well. This causes your shoulder to over work or puts your shoulder into a compressed unhappy position. Working an already compressed overworked joint with rotator cuff exercises will simply make it hurt more.

Squats aren’t bad for your knees or your low back. In fact being able to squat well is essential for life. If you can squat well you can sit well. Squatting well protects your low back from injury, creates happier healthier hips and is a compound movement requiring lots of muscles to work. It also triggers the release of testosterone and human growth hormone in your body. 

So here are a few common patterns we see with the squat 

A good motto we have at Balance In Motion is “understand the movements required for the patient to succeed and create resilience and strength in the body. Plus continually review changes in the science”

The way Physiotherapists manage injuries is constantly evolving. Personally i’ve come a long way from pushing the sore bit and putting machines on a patient 23 years ago. We now know that doesn’t work. Another example is when you just injure yourself we now recommend the POLICE protocol not the RICE protocol (more on this later). 

I swear on significant birthdays your body just starts to hurt more. One common site for 85% of the human population is back pain. It can feel pretty awful when you get out of bed in the morning. Rolling over in bed can be a problem and putting on your socks makes you feel older than you are!

The two Nicks and Mitch have given some of their best advice to help reduce your pain today. 

Not many people like clicking on these posts and admitting we are old but … doing these things really works.

Knee pain over 40 can present in a few ways 

• Pain the first few steps in the morning

• Pain at night that aches after more exercise than normal

• A giving way sensation or pain up and down stairs 

• Pain when you’ve been sitting or squatting for a while and go to stand

The most common thing people say to me when they come in is “it’s probably arthritis and i’ll have to live with it”

Kids injuries are different to adult injuries. We regularly see kids from 10-17. It’s really important to understand why our kids get sore and what can be done about it. I hope by  reading this you understand the differences. When your child points at their Achillies tendon it probably isn’t their achilles…..

Kids grow very differently compared to their friends. Did you know that in an under 13 sporting team there could be a variation of 3-5 biological years between them despite all being born within the same year! 

Tennis elbow can be one of the the most frustrating injuries you can get with a common pattern of recovery anywhere between 4 and 18 months. 85% of them get better by 1 year. Pain is located on the outside of the elbow.

Ironically it’s actually very rare to see tennis elbow in a tennis player.

It’s more common in gardeners and parents constantly picking up kids. As we come into spring and the garden triples in size people spend hours in the garden when they haven’t for a while and this leads to the injury.  

Waking up early in the morning when it is pouring outside, it’s dark, you can hear the trees smashing against the side of the house, you know it’s freezing out there ….. It just doesn’t inspire you to leap out of bed and punch out 10000 steps. 

People often complain of feeling sore and stiff during the winter months. Usually people come in and say  “I can tell when the weather is about to change because my old injury/ osteoarthritis starts to hurt more”. 

Golf has a wide variety of health benefits, such as
increasing your cardiovascular capacity, improving your strength and
endurance, and challenging your motor control and coordination.

While golf is generally considered a low-risk sport, the explosiveness of a golf
swing and the repetitions required to progress in skill can lead to a wide
variety of injuries occurring, most commonly around the back and upper
limb. Because of this, it is important to ensure you are spending time
improving your strength and mobility, so that your body is ready for the
demands of golf.

The journey of coming to a Physio, understanding why you were injured, committing to a plan and finding a goal big enough to do the rehab is a tough journey. 

You will be tested along the way and if you pass those tests you come out better and stronger than ever (ideally).

Having done some work recently with a mindset coach called Ben Elliot in South Australia I couldn’t help but think of the injury journey and the similarities. I’ve taken his teachings and applied them to the injury journey. To hopefully set you up for success. It’s also important to know you’re not alone and that you’re human. However the hard work to achieve your goal will be worth it so read on. 

The majority of people come and see us because they are in pain and want a diagnosis and a plan to get better. Pain is frustrating and it can be scary, particularly because you don’t know what is going on. It can also make you grumpy. Are you going to be ok? Do you have arthritis? Will you be able to make the start line? 
 
We now know that two people's experiences of the same pain, even if that pain is at the same level, can be perceived completely differently. How do we know this? Functional MRI studies of the brain have given us a lot of those answers.

As some of you know we do things a little different here at Balance in Motion and whilst all of us
have different stories of how we walked through the doors I thought I’d share mine, especially
considering I started on the other side of the treatment plinth!

I have a long history of playing competitive sport and what usually comes with that is an injury or
two. One of the worst of these was an injury to my right hip which was diagnosed as a mixed
lesion along with a Labral tear and was at a time when I was studying to become a Physio. In
common tongue this meant that I had an extra bit of bone growing on my pelvis and on my thigh
bone where they met to create the hip joint and a tear in the lining of the hip joint as well.

It’s the start of the year. We’ve all had the time and space to reflect on how much mental and emotional energy lockdown took out of us. It also made us reflect on how good exercise is and  how we miss connecting with our team mates or exercise buddies.

The new year is a good reset time to start thinking of some fitness goals. The new year is also a time where dreams can be  dashed because of overzealous training. Our bodies don’t forget we sat and relaxed on holiday (on a background of  a very long lockdown). So this year let’s do things differently.

Below is a Q and Q session with three of our BIM Physio team on how to achieve your exercise goals this year without getting injured because three minds are better than one!

It is summer aka “Plantar fasciitis” season. We go from spending a few months in shoes to days on end in a pair of thongs. I know some people that can hit 20,000 steps during this summer period in a day in only thongs (guilty).

But one of the issues with this is your plantar fascia doesn’t like the sudden change from shoes to no shoes. The plantar fascia is the ligament on the bottom of your foot!

Matt Barker is back from his two year working holiday in London and we are stoked to have him back. I’m sure there are plenty of people super happy to know Matty is back. We’ve asked him some questions on his fave parts of Europe. We also asked for the latest food spots from BIM’s resident foodie. Matt was working in one of the worlds most fancy Physio clinics so we wanted to know how that was also.

With summer fast approaching you see all kinds of weird and wonderful ab exercises popping up around the place, with everyone attempting to do something crazier than the next. I decided to find out which exercises are more beneficial to us, and point out those causing more harm than good.

We need to understand why doing certain exercises are so bad for us. Firstly, it usually involves over-working the upper abdominals and hip flexors whilst under working the lower abdominals and more importantly your DEEPER abdominals like your transverse abdominus and pelvic floor muscles. 

An Achilles injury is  frustrating but very common. The Achilles tendon is a really important spring that propels you forward during walking, running or jumping. It is generally injured when you over load the Achilles spring with too much spring.

Common over Achilles springing can include some of the following common examples

• Adding some sprint training or faster tempo sets when you haven’t done these for some time

• Coming out of lockdown and trying to do your fave explosive gym class at the same intensity as pre lockdown

• Going for a PB in a half marathon by sprinting the last kilometre