WHY PAIN REMAINS AND RETURNS AND WHAT THAT REALLY MEANS When pain lingers or keeps coming back, it’s easy to think something must be wrong with the body, with your approach, or even with you. If you’re a movement professional, you might start to wonder if you’ve missed something, if you have failed or not…
We get into shaky territory in yoga and especially yin yoga when we start suggesting it can fix pain. Pain is personal, complex and multifactorial. It doesn’t neatly dissolve after a class or a stretch and even speaking anecdotally about an individuals persons experience of their pain improving through yoga can be irresponsibly misleading. It…
Less is More: Why Simplicity Sticks in Movement Teaching As movement teachers, many of us, especially in yoga, feel the pull to create ever more elaborate sequences. To keep clients entertained, to keep things fresh. Clever transitions, intricate links and choreography that impresses our peers can become the standard we hold ourselves to. Yet there’s…
The Body Odyssey: explaining and understanding pain care providers 🙃Everyone has bias including those with the best intentions. 🤸🏽 The mobility teacher will always advocate that becoming more flexible with mobility drills will resolve pain. 🏋️♂️ The personal trainer will advocate that losing weight lifting weight will eradicate pain. 🥼The physiotherapist will advocate that…
Why Rethinking Running & Resilience Helps Non Runners Too There’s a persistent belief that there’s a “right” way to run. A perfect form that keeps us efficient, fast, and injury-free. Yet, when we look at the evidence, that idea starts to fall apart. Heel striking, for example, is often blamed for injury. However, there’s no…
Function Over Fixation- A Shift In How We Talk About Pain When someone’s been in pain for a while, it’s easy – understandably – to make being pain-free the main goal, but in truth, that binary thinking of ‘pain or no pain’, can be frustrating, disheartening, and misleading. It might even stop people from noticing…
What Makes a Great Physio—And What Yoga Teachers Might Learn From It Knowledge, expertise, and experience: the classic trio we tend to look for when we seek out a physiotherapist. But are they enough? Or perhaps more importantly—are they the right things to prioritise? A recent study by Kleiner et al. (2023) explored what people…
What causes pain may not be what maintains it. When someone experiences pain—whether it’s acute, nagging, or persistent—the natural question is, “What’s causing this?” For both patients and clinicians, this often leads to a hunt for a specific tissue or structure to blame. A muscle, a joint, a disc. But pinpointing a source of pain…
A large percentage of my private clients often find me originally with some sort of pain and injury after running the gamut of contradictory advice , money draining services and no change or improvement despite doing everything their physios say. That said, I work collaboratively with some fabulous physios and have even trained a couple…
One of the key things I ask a prospective new private yoga client about is their current activity and as soon as someone says they are a keen gardener it speaks volumes. Digging, lifting, raking, crouching, squatting, reaching overhead, leaning over, gardening has ninja warrior written all over it in my book. In fact an…