The rest of trip was as inspiring as the first part. I actually got some more time to read a few chapters of Steve Jobs biography. Flights can be useful sometimes, dead time means catching up on the reading you don’t normally nave time to do. This is one of many that I’ve read and it’s proving to be fascinating, I enjoy reading about how the really successful businesses were created and evolve. I’ve read all of Richard Branson’s books (he used to be a patient at one of my clinics some years ago), Alan Sugar, Sir John Harvey Jones and many others. Jobs’ book so far has impressed me in that you clearly don’t have to be a nice person to be great at business. However, his attention to detail, passion about his products and a very clear design concept for all his products is clearly critical to the success of any business. According to my kindle books app on my iPad I’m 19% though the book, so I’ve so much more to learn about him and Apple.

Anyway I did get some work done on the second part of my trip too! We had some advanced talks with some of the largest businesses in the US about both our education programmes and of course our iMoveFreely software ( www.imovefreely.com ) about how our programmes fit into their existing education and occupational health programmes. The education interest was mainly in fitness, medicine and occupational health. The imovefreely programme has had interest from pretty much every business field from fitness to furniture stores. Everyone wants to help themselves and their employees to reduce their pain.

I’ve learned a lot about the US and what makes it tick from our partners (ITSA – Intelligent Training Systems of the Americas) based in North Carolina and I’ve been very impressed by their knowledge and network. So far the impact we’ve had in the US has been nothing short of amazing in such a short period of time. I return with our tutor team in July to run no less than 6 Biomechanics Coaching courses from West to East coast.

Judging from the interest following our LA lecture, it looks like we’ll running them further afield too. More to come…..

This trip however is more focused on business and sales in particular.

First on the agenda, was a trip to LA. When I attended the IOC World Injury Prevention Conference in Monaco last year, I was invited to LA to present at the American Occupational Health Conference, so I went with Becky Langton the President of ITSA to present our work on how intrinsic biomechanics can impact upon occupational health stats and in particular reduced absenteeism.

We presented the research performed by the South Yorkshire Police which concluded that our online iMoveFreely programme can reduce all musculoskeletal absenteeism by 64% over a 3 month period. We also outlined the work done by Dorset Fire and Rescue Service, where 1 Biomechanics Coach we trained reduced the incidence of new back pain episodes by 52% over 9 months. These are quite impressive results and the assembled audience which included over 200 HR directors from the world’s largest organisations were highly impressed and very interested in our work.

We were inundated after the lecture and it got so busy, the organisers had to move us all out of the auditorium so the next lecturers could start their presentations. We must have been there 30 minutes exchanging business cards with interested groups afterwards. We have now been invited to Las Vegas to present our work there to a leading group of nurses and there was representation from the UN there who found our work very interesting and want to meet to learn more about our online programmes.

We arrived at LAX on Monday 30th April having been up since 4am to fly there from North Carolina. We then presented at 8.30am on 1st May and flew back to North Carolina the same day, arriving at RDU at midnight. Long days, but great fun and amazing opportunities.

I’ll update my blog soon with more from the US trip.

With the help of Martin and Tor we took them on a journey through assessments of muscle spasm, mobilising nerves, a debate on hollowing v’s bracing and finally some of the first of 450 core progressions! With such a diverse range of professionals, experiences and personalities the pleasure of facilitating this group was a wonderful challenge and learning experience for all including myself.

The magic moment during which I physically demonstrated how they could now change someone’s leg length & orthotic prescription by releasing pec minor was a mind blowing moment for just about every one of the attendees. Many of whom have already booked onto further courses in Biomechanics Coaching.

Here is just some of the feedback :

• Hi Rachel, really enjoyed your workshop and already putting into practice the skills you taught us. I’m still excited about implementing everything – you were great! I’ve subscribed to the newsletter and will work with what I have learnt and may eventually dive into the diploma!   Thank you again, it will compliment my yoga classes and hopefully help so many of my clients.
• Hi Rachel, Thank you for a wonderful day of learning!  You are a fantastic presenter, so easy to listen to and understand, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and have a mind of information buzzing around just waiting to be put to the test.
• Just a quick note to say thank you for today’s workshop.  It was great.  And I understood everything!

Roll on the next one on May 26th in London!!!

Rachel France

Sadly IHRSA was much smaller than usual, I’m not sure of the footfall but the show was nowhere near the size of previous years.  Hotels were hard to come by in downtown LA, and so i think the organizers are going back to previous, more accessible venues next year.

Matrix had the largest stand by far and Precor’s stand was excellent. There were the usual smaller organizations in the peripheral stands, but there wasn’t any really new or revolutionary products or services out there…..disappointing really.

I’m sure he’s got great people looking after him, I’d imagine that chubby chandler is doing what he did for another one of his stable who went through a similar poor spell; Lee Westwood.  Not too long ago Lee was 254th in the world, now he’s been world No. 1 and continues to stay in the top 3 in the world.

Those of us who understand about Intrinsic Biomechanics, understand all too well that you can be great at movement patterns one day and then awful the next.  Slight changes in your body’s mechanics even overnight can have a profound effect on your golf swing.  Overnight you can have joints in your spine lock up, muscles go into spasm, nerves become tensioned and even your leg length can change.  Imagine how this is going to affect the way you move from a day to say basis during walking, never mind a fine and sophisticated movement like the golf swing.  Players continuously have to compensate for their Intrinsic Biomechanical problems in their swing.  Why do you think the swing thought that you had yesterday and worked well, is not producing the same results the next day?  As our Intrinsic Biomechanics changes over night (and over our lifetime), we are constantly accommodating and changing the way we move to produce the outcomes we want. So the fade you hit yesterday without thinking can become a draw or push today because we are trying to do the same as yesterday, but your mechanics have changed and so it won’t work.

This is more relevant if you have been injured where your proprioception is completely altered and the body has to compensate even more.

I hope that Nick and his advisors are working on these things, because if they’re not then I fear he will continue to struggle. Good luck Nick i hope you do manage to come back.

Daley says they are supposed to be protecting the sport for all of us, and he’s quite right.

I do wonder though how badly the top brass in the authorities want to catch the drugs cheats or those who police them. What would the outcomes be if they did eradicate drugs in sport? Well, times would get slower and distances jumped and thrown would be shorter. Weights would be lighter and endurance would be less. Would sponsors pay to be associated with poorer performances? Would spectators pay to see world records of 10.5 seconds for the 100m? Maybe not. If the drugs cheats were completely eradicated what would that say about our sports when pretty much every record would probably never be beaten, or even touched again by clean athletes? If records were never broken again, does that mean many of our records were produced by cheating athletes? Does that say our authorities have been ineffective over the last few decades at stopping the drugs cheats? How embarrassing would that be? Probably too embarrassing.

So do they really want to stop the drugs cheats? What other reason could there be for their policies being so weak?

Read more…..

An example is some work published by Stuart McGill, Professor of Professor of Spine Biomechanics, University of Waterloo in Canada. In his book he refers to ratios of the trunk musculature and suggests that if the ratios are not correct that the spine is unstable and potentially vulnerable to injury. In his book he refers to the flexion/extension ratios for males and concludes that the flexors should be 86% the strength* of the extensors for safe and effective function of the spine. Then in a paper which was published some time later, another population was tested and they concluded that the best ratio is 99%. So what are we aiming for when we test our clients? I emailed Stuart, who was as always very helpful and his conclusion was that as long as the extensors are stronger* than the flexors in this example that’s fine, and incidentally there will be much more work on this published in the next 2 years. OK, so not all researchers are as quick to reply and apply their work as Stuart, but this still leaves us with a dilemma.

I was speaking with Robert Guntzberg (former Chair of the European Lumbar Spine Society) and like many, he believes that we should be moving quickly towards an evidence based fitness and medical approach, but he agreed that there was often no evidence to help us through particular problems with a client or patient, so how can we prescribe evidence based programing when none exists in that particular example. Well he came up with a very interesting idea. He maintains that a true expert combines evidence base with their experience to provide clients and patient with genuine expertise. That makes sense to me.

So when a research paper makes a particular assertion, let’s just step back a moment and look at the population, the context of the paper, how many people were used in the research, the bias and the relevance to current thinking, before we trash the work we’re doing and adopt a new approach. Just because one research paper or an authority says the world is flat, doesn’t make it so. It’s the weight of evidence that we need, not just one paper, but instead getting a group of research papers, researchers or experts to agree on a direction. But this is of course a challenge in itself and it’s usually the guy who shouts loudest who gets heard…..and in our industry there are a number of those.

Listen to those who shout loudly should at your peril!

Martin Haines

We have several meetings arranged already with US and European businesses, so lets try and make something work there.  i’ll blog and let you know how it went and a bit about the show.

We always get a great deal of intetest in our work, but this year went crazy. we had intetest in our Biomechanics Coaching diploma and also our other most popular courses which are the Biomechanics Coach; low back specialist course (which takes you up to L4 on the REPs register) and our sports massage courses which also qualify you as Biomechanics Trainers.

We had our office manager on the stand all weekend too, so she could take contact details down so the guys could concentrate on the techncial side of things, which worked really well.