If tying your shoelaces hurts, how do you expect to be able to live life fully?

By Tom Summers

Your lower back is not a lever to replace weak hips and incompetent bracing. Respect your spine and strengthen your movement competency.

Athletes join us for many reasons. Some want to podium in a full Ironman, some aim to PB in Hyrox, some want to be able to Deadlift 2x their body weight, and others just want to be able to put their socks on without being in pain. Regardless of your athletic goal, pain is all encompassing. If you are in discomfort while sitting, standing, lying, or moving around; then we need to do something about it. FYI, ignoring the pain and hoping it will go away is not a strategy, it is a prayer. Let’s use some science for a bit..

Your spine is the structural foundation of your skeletal system. If you are blessed with the ability to walk, run, hinge, turn, and jump then let’s talk about respecting one of the most complex and essential building blocks of your body. Yes your spine can bend (sideways, backwards, forwards, and rotationally), but that does not mean you can use it instead of your hips and knees. Your back is not designed to do the heavy lifting or compensate for tight hips. Yes your back is strong, after all, it keeps your head up, but it is not designed to carry the load of heavy bars or inefficient sitting and standing. Sixty percent of adults report lower back pain (LBP), let’s look at what might be the cause and some take away strategies to identify why your back might be in pain and how to respect yourself a bit more to be able to pick up the fork you dropped. 

We will address each of the potential areas of fault below in the coming weeks. For now just place yourself in the Green (Yes I can), Amber (nearly but room for improvement), or Red (wow that hurts) box for each. 

Mobility?

The foundation of a healthy system is a full unrestricted range of movement. Three main joints contribute to being able to tick the lower body mobility checkbox.

Ankles - With a flat foot, bend your knee to the wall and if your knee travels 10cm + past your toes then your ankles are mobile. Less than that and you will struggle to squat (sit down) properly.

Knees - your thighs must be able to touch your calves, either passively or, ideally, actively. If your knees hurt when you bend them to this range then you will struggle to absorb force through your thigh muscles when you walk around. This will force the work up into your lower back which is not designed to be a backup generator. 

Hips - keeping a neutral (long) spine, you must be able to hinge to 90’ at the hips. Hold a pole behind your back to see how well you can push your hips towards the wall behind you. Less than 90’ will inevitably result in using your lower back to reach down. 

▶ Click here to watch Tom demonstrate each of the Mobility markers.

Strength?

We can cut this up in many directions but let’s stay with the basics again. Three essential movements that if you can’t produce because of weakness then we have found the culprit and can get started on the solution…

Trunk - returning to a previous video you need to be able to hold a neutral braced position in your mid section. The Deadbug is our go to assessment for this. Utilise a band under your lower back to mark your neutral position and progress your limb movement to see where the trunk brace fails (▶Watch our previous Bracing Tips Video). 60s of alternating limbs is bare minimum or you have homework to do.

Hips - assuming you smashed the hip hinge and can achieve 90’ now is the time to see if we can do that under load. Yes you could do a Deadlift but for now lets try the Single Leg Hip Bridge. Put your foot on a step / stair and raise your hips to the ceiling. Keep your tummy down to ensure the work is coming from your hips. Do you observe any differences left to right or after a 60s of reps? Then we have work to do. 

Knees and Ankles - your life is lived on one leg through walking, stepping, climbing, and hopefully running. Best to make sure that you have the leg strength to do a static lunge or we have no hope of applying single leg power on the tennis court. So stand in a split stance and keep your chest upright when you lower your back knee to the ground. Do 20 per side. Impossible, then winner winner, we have found the problem.

By now, you should have a Green, Amber, or Red for all six exercises. Stay tuned for the subsequent blogs addressing each one in turn and guiding you through improving them. If like us however you are impatient and want to be pain free now (why wouldn’t you?!) then get in touch and we will start your tailored programming tomorrow. 

Interested to learn more about how we can tailor fit a training programme for you?

The White Powder None of Us Should be Ingesting.

By Tom Summers

An 8 year old smoking a cigarette turns heads but one chomping through a plate of biscuits and muffins is enjoying a treat? Well diabetes is fun…

Science has proven the damage that cigarettes cause to our health and we have legislation to protect us. Now science proves sugar is killing us, why are we still seeing it everywhere?

If you pick up one nutrition book this year make it the Glucose Goddess by Jessie Inchauspĕ. Jessie cuts through science jargon and explains how sugar in its many forms impacts our bloody glucose levels by deregulating the locking and unlocking of our fat storage and in turn our energy availability and body composition. In a world still plagued by outdated emphasis on calories and stigmatisation of obesity, we are doing a woeful job of upgrading the education our households and workplaces experience. For those inclined to dive deeper to the tactics on hormone imbalance, insulin sensitivity, and chronic health decline, The Obesity Code by Jason Fung is an informed choice. 

On a personal level we must agree that the institutes we rely on for policies and care (schools, businesses, doctors, government) are blind, slow, or misaligned to an effective solution and are years away from a health focused plan around sugar in our diets. So you and I have two choices;

1) Stay ignorant, blame someone else, keep doing the same. OR

2) Take control, educate yourself for your own gains. Change today. 

If you are in the first bucket, we are sorry to see you go but wish you well. Our only ask is that you don’t blame time as an obstacle. Read a book, listen to a podcast, invest a couple of hours this month. It isn’t time, its priority. That’s OK but call it what it is. However if your health markers are a priority for you then come join us, the water is lovely..

For all you second bucket’ers, welcome to the lowest hanging fruit in your search for a stable energy balance and body composition goals. The science behind the below rules are plentiful and backed by peer reviews but more importantly they are easy and free to achieve. Yes you will require willpower and a runway of 3 - 6 months to really reap the dividends but as we see it that is time well spent. Christmas is coming anyway, we might as well use our days with nutritional intentionality.  

So what are our ultimate goals? Firstly to remove the victimhood mentality, accept that shops and companies are capitalist and want our money, so does the health care system. There are no immediate incentives for food manufacturers to care about our health (costs are higher) but that doesn’t mean we get to blame Nestle when we tuck blindly into a second bar of indulgence. Secondly and tangibly to remove refined sugar from our diet! Myopically. Fanatically. Immediately. It serves no purpose (no one needs a blood sugar kick if their intake is balanced) and only escalates a damaging insulin hormone imbalance, and significantly impairs our health acutely and chronically. *Read, there is no scientific benefit to refined sugar (Sucrose, Fructose, Glucose). Cut it. Today. 

Below are our five guardrails for the easiest reduction in sugar in your day. 

Do’s

1. Drink only water, tea, or black coffee - fizzy drinks are killing us. Next. 

2. Eat a bowlful of vegetables at the start of every meal. Packed with digestive slowing fiber, they regulate blood glucose spikes. “But my kids don’t like vegetables”, no they won’t if you usually give them white bread rolls. They (you) probably don’t like irregulated sleep either?

3. Replace your breakfast cereal with high protein alternative (or intermittent fasting for adults who are inclined). Easy win but it does mean avoiding a colourful shopping aisle. #sorrynotsorry

4. Quit snacking. Except on Christmas day, then you have license to go big or go home!

5. Move for 30 minutes per day. Groundbreaking? We doubt it. But if you can’t find 30 minutes of movement in a day (I am not going to patronise you with ideas) then what pill are you waiting for us to invent? 

Into gamification? So are we. Write these on a whiteboard and tick them each day. Three to four per day gets you a draw. All five gets you a high five win!

Want to learn more about butrition and make better lifestyle choices? Pinnacle can help you!

Why we believe in subscribing to your fitness.

By Tom Summers

Showing my maturity (read: age) I remember taping the Top 40 from the radio each Sunday so that I didn’t have to buy the CD. Cheap Yorkshireman certainly, but I would argue I wasn’t alone and we were all accepting of the world of musical and television subscriptions. Now in 2023, everything is at our finger tips in consumable subscription models many hundred of hours deep. Want to binge on Netflix? That will be US$ 11 per month please. Want to listen to music all day every day? That’s US$ 7 on Spotify please. 

Stepping back from the dopamine entertainment hits to life and careers, raise your hand if your university charged you by the hour? Of course not. What about the schools your children attend? Public or private you still pay at the start of the year in taxes or fees. So why does all this matter and why has 99% of the coach led fitness world got it wrong? Why do most coaches charge by the hour? 

Well fundamentally all the examples above and the reason Pinnacle prioritise subscription memberships is that it provides stability and projecting power for the business. The school that has fees confirmed can employ the best coaches and upgrade facilities. The streaming services with the highest number of sign ups can out market the competition and capitalise the industry. But as a consumer it goes deeper than that. We can all relate the wonderful meal that was tainted by paying the bill at the end or the hotel stay that was dwarfed by analysing the invoice and spending the final hour of your holiday in a queue to pay for the experience. Daniel Kahneman notes that the ‘Peak-End rule” is the realisation that memories store the best (peak) of the experience at the end; vis-a-vis, load up the costs and logistics before the event and you will enjoy it all the more by ending more enjoyably. 

So in the capitalist world of attention marketing and uniquely also for our mental health, paying upfront is better for us. We agree and strongly advocate for your fitness being a lifestyle subscription instead of a transactional bill on your table!

“OK Tom, so you have made a case for why Spotify is better than individual CD’s and we all know the business model of Apple and crew, but why is this important to fitness?” Well put bluntly, fitness is the last into your schedule and the first out (sense the tone of frustration referring to the rate of cancellations in the industry when “a meeting has come up”). If you are willing to postpone a training session that is directly correlated to a better and longer life for a meeting about some paperwork crap that will be forgotten the moment you leave, imagine how big the barrier is to even commit to a plan that will have success. Put simply, every time you need to pay a bill for the expert fitness coaches you need you question it not based on a 20 year plan, but on a cash flow that day. Is your longevity and health at 60 really something you want to look back on and remember that at 35 a new iPhone was more important? We don’t believe so. 

So why is the industry so backward? Why are the most readily available options for knowledge based fitness (coaches) transactional? Because the world doesn’t think fitness is a subscription commitment and something as important as your mortgage. We think it is a nice to have extra or something that 3 x 60 minute sessions will complete each week. Newsflash, it isn’t. If you view fitness as a costed extra you will put it last and miss the best opportunities to be your best self and achieve results when they matter. 

But let’s be clear. We are not advocating for cheap, 24 hour unlimited access to a sweaty treadmill in the corner. No. We are advocating for a coaching subscription service that puts your commitment to your health first and combines the business needs for stability and forecasting at the top of the tree with your human emotions to avoid paying for things that take effort. 

Regardless of the services and the fee pay, if the value aligns to your budget and fitness needs then you are literally off to the races. By budgeting for a fitness service to be part of your life every day for the next 10 years you are prioritising your quality of life and significantly impacting the results you will achieve and your enjoyment.

Subscriptions enhance utilisation. In entertainment they walk us down a line of lost hours and un-productivity.  Flip that model to your benefit. Don’t stop at subscribing for your media diet, keep going and commit to your nutritional, physical, and mental diets. If subscriptions handcuff us into the 3rd hour on YouTube each day, imagine the power of that extra session or extra coaching consult that you have already enrolled to!! We promise that you will get out of bed for the habit you subscribe to instead of the one you pay to attend. Your body and your results will thank you for it. 

So ask if you can settle the bill when you arrive next time you go on holiday and enjoy lying by the pool knowing you have paid for it instead of racking up a bill that is going to niggle you in 7 days time. And when you get back convert your fitness packages into subscriptions that commit you to a journey and maximise the brains power for using every bit of something you have already paid for.

About Tom

Tom is the CEO and Head of Strength & Conditioning at Pinnacle Performance. He now leads a team of full time coaches having spent his coaching career with professional athletes from World Cup Cricketer’s and Footballers, to Sprinters and Triathletes.