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Hosted by Andy Reay, former professional rugby player and strength and conditioning coach, this show gets straight into what really matters for long-term performance: staying injury-free, building serious strength, and competing at any age. You’ll hear the methods, principles, and beliefs behind Razor Performance, shaped by years of coaching driven, time-poor and often injury prone men, back to their best. If you want to know how to rebuild confidence in your body, stay injury free and strong, and know what actually works, this is your new weekly listen.
Welcome to part 4 of the Razor Performance Podcast.After a wicked podcast last week with Rob Thirlby, it's back to me on my own, and I'm gonna be discussing the one thing that you are ignoring that is keeping you injured.And I'm gonna tell you why those injuries that just come on, or you feel like it just went, or something just came out of nowhere, that that isn't the case, and what you need to do is look back through your injury history and work out why these things are happening.So, let's start off with, there are 3 types of injuries.Number one, there is a direct trauma, okay?So you fall off a, a curb and you roll your ankle, okay?You hurt the joint, you know exactly what's hurt, you know exactly which tissues, muscles, ligaments you've hurt, and you know how to fix that.Number 2 is like a spasm, okay?So let's use a deadlift as, as an example.You do a deadlift and your back spasms, okay?So that is a protective measure that your body just wants to keep you out of that position for an amount of time because it doesn't like being there.And then you've got the overload injuries, okay?So things like you've been running for an amount of time, you're building your miles up, and then all of a sudden something starts to hurt, okay?You don't really know why, you don't really know what's caused it, but it just starts to hurt, and that would be an overload injury, okay?Now for this podcast, because with direct trauma you sort of know what's happening, I'm gonna talk about the second 2: the spasm and the creeping overload.So now I wanna start off with a bit of an analogy, and just bear with me on this.I want you to imagine that your body is like a mains electricity power station, okay?Now you have got your brain, which is the main power, okay?The mains electricity.Then you've got your muscles, which their wires go to them and they have the electricity wired to them, and then, bear with me on this, I want you to imagine they've got a dimmer switch on every muscle, okay?So you can either turn the light up or turn the light down, and imagine that the light is the amount of power or the amount of force that your body allows to go to those muscles.So, what happens when we get injured?Well, let's use an ankle injury for an example, okay?If you were to hurt your ankle, your body would tone down the dimmer switches on all of the muscles around the ankle because it just won't want it to send power to that, to those muscles, okay?So if you rolled your ankle, for example, your body's just not gonna allow you to hop up and down on it because it's gonna do more damage.So that dimmer switch has been turned down, okay?Now I want you to consider the whole of the leg and all of the dimmer switches on that leg.Now for normal movement you need an amount of power from yourLet's say running.You need an amount of power from your calves, you need it from your quads, you need it from your hamstrings, you need it from your glutes, and you need a bit from your lower back.You probably need some from your upper body as well, but let's not, let's not confuse things.Now if you've hurt your ankle and that dimmer switch is turned down on your ankle, well in order to do the thing that you want to do, the power has to come from somewhere, so the other dimmer switches on the other muscles have to do a little bit more.I hope that makes sense.So, you injure something, the dimmer switch is turned down, but in order to do the task that you want to do, dimmer switches elsewhere need to be turned up in order to perform that task.So, then we go on to thinking about why that might cause injury elsewhere, and for this I'm gonna use a really classic example of people's back going when they do a deadlift, okay?So, what normally happens when someone back, someone's back goes from doing a deadlift is they think that it's the lower back's fault or they've got a weak core or they've got weak glutes or they've got something like that.However, if we were to look back through their injury history and they have a sore ankle or they've had a sore ankle, they've had a sore knee, and then their back goes, their back isn't the problem, it's the solution, okay?So if you had an ankle injury, the muscles around your ankle aren't working very well.If you have a knee injury as well, the muscles around your knee aren't working very well.So you've got 2 dimmer switches that have been turned down.So in order to perform the deadlift, other dimmer switches have to be turned up, okay?And if you think of your back, your hamstring, your glute, if they've all been turned up and it gets to a point where they're up too much, the body just doesn't like it, and it will send that lower back into a spasm to stop it doing it.So what I'm trying to say is, if the back goes but there's been injuries elsewhere, you need to solve the injuries elsewhere first because the back is doing too much work and that's why it's causing you pain.Let's talk about another example.Let's think about running, okay?So you're running for a marathon, you're building up your miles every week and your achilles starts to b- become sore.Now normally you would go to a physio and they would look straight at your achilles and try and solve that problem, but again, going back to our other example, imagine if there was another injury somewhere else.So for example, you'd pulled your hamstring.Again, we look at the hamstring.If that's been toned down or the dimmer switch has been turned down and the calf dimmer switch has been turned up, maybe that's why the achilles is sore.Now, let's think of an upper body ex- example, just to drive this point home.A lot of people come and they've got shoulder pain, okay?And again, what will tend to happen is you will get prescribed exercises which try and strengthen the shoulder.You might have seen people with bands, uh, doing internal and external rotations, or strength-building exercises for your shoulder.But if we think of the arm exactly the same as we thought of the leg, just imagine someone had broken their wrist previously.Again, the muscles around the wrist would have been turned down, and the muscles around the shoulder would have been turned up.And again, it will get to a point where those muscles around the shoulder are just doing too much work and things start to get injured.So the shoulder, once again, is not the problem;it's the solution.But why people keep getting re-injured is because rehab always focuses on the symptoms, okay?So if you've got a sore shoulder, we look at the shoulder.If you look, if you've got a sore knee, we look at the knee.If you look atIf you've got a sore ankle, we look at the ankle.Now, that's fine if there's been a direct trauma to that body part.But if it's a spasm or it's come on over time, it's more likely that it is something else that is doing it, and the dimmer switch is somewhere else has been turned down.And where the injury is, the dimmer switch has been turned up and it is doing a lot more work.Now, I train 35 to 55-year-old men mostly, and some women.They will come to me a lot of the time and say, "Well, why is this happening to me now?"Well, it's because your injury history is longer.So again, if you imagine when you're 20 you've got no injuries, your body is fine, all your dimmer switches are turned perfectly on to exactly the right amount of, uh, power and you can do all of the exercises.As you get a little bit older, you might have rolled your ankle more times, you might have hurt your knee more times, you might have, you know, fallen over more times.You might have been concussed, you might have doneyou know, this wholeL- like various things might have happened.And every time you get injured, your body finds a new pattern, a new way of doing things, turns a dimmer switch up somewhere.Then you get injured again.It turns a dimmer switch up somewhere.Then you get injured again.Turns a dimmer switch up somewhere.And then eventually, your body just can't cope with it, and you have toAnd, and, and itand the injury sort of flares up.But again, that's where we need to think, right, the, the injured site's probably not the problem.We need to take a step back and we need to fix all those old injuries in order, and then make sure we get someone back to where they need to be with everything being strong.Now,It, it's beyond the scope of this podcast to go into exactly how I would do those things.But essentially what you need to do is think of the old injuries, think of what muscles need to work in and around those injuries, and force them to work.And the way I tend to do it is I use an isometric, okay?So an isometric is where you put your body in a position.A plank, for example, is an isometric.Let's say you had a bad hamstring.You would maybe put you in, yourself in a glute variation, a glute bridge variation, and see if you can get that hamstring, force that hamstring to work.And if we go back through everyone's history completely, we'll go th- we'll see all of their injury history, every single one, and we will fix each one, one by one.So what real recovery actually requires is someone to take a step back, have a look at your deeph- have a really deep look into your history, okay?And work out what's been going on and why those things might have caused this pain that you've got now.So if you go and see a fitness professional or a physio, and they don't do a deep dive into your injury history, you're on the wrong track, and you really need to find someone who does that.Now, within my program, one of my main points is during the assessment, I will go through a very, very, very deep injury history, and I will go through a movement assessment to make sure that they can do specific movements in specific, uh, planes of movement.Okay?So we will look at your injury history.I'll decipher what I think is not functioning well, and then I will test it.Okay?So I'll put you in positions where I'll test my theory.From there, we will build things out, and we will build out a full rehab program, progressive rehab program, to solve those old injuries before we actually look at the site that's injured.If that sounds like something you might need help with, you can find me on Instagram.There will be a link to my website at the bottom of this podcast page.You canAnd you can book a call with me, okay?No pressure at all.We can just sit down.We can run through exactly what's going on with you and we can try and solve it.I'm Andy.I run Razor Performance.R- Really hope you enjoyed the podcast.I'll be back next week.