Recently we covered a great article about the importance of eating more greens, and we also discussed why saturated fat is in fact good for you! Apart from people eating too much sugar one of the biggest obstacles to people needing help with cancer, diabetes and chronic injury is adding muscle. To add muscle you need to complete strength training program, but you also need to eat enough protein to repair the damaged muscle tissue and enable the muscle to grow. Without enough good quality protein you will eat your own tissue to repair yourself! Meaning you will not get the rewards you are looking for! If your goal is to just lose weight and look good adding muscle is just as important for adding muscle increases your metabolic rate helping you to shed the excess fat and kilos more easily. Lastly protein helps to keep blood sugars and hormones under control stopping the food cravings from kicking in and ruining all of your health and fitness efforts. To help get your head around all these factors here is an article put together by our Exercise Physiologist Trainer Nathan Fejes as he is very passionate about nutrition, and especially the value of protein. Enjoy.

As most Australians are well aware, in recent years there has been a great deal of publicity around our great game of Australian Rules Football and the possibility of creating a National Women’s League. Fortunately over the past 5 – 10 years, the prevalence of young women playing football has increased and the need for a league allowing these girls to continue playing football through their teenage years into adulthood has been recognized.  It is because of this that there is now almost 50 teams in the Victorian women’s football league alone, and similar to the men’s league, we now have a women’s youth team for the up and coming, and talented girls are now scouted to form our ‘Vic country’ and ‘Vic metro’ teams. And just like the guys, the need to improve your skills across many facets of the game is essential if you want to be one of the girls who makes it into the "big time". For this sport is growing so quickly, the need for conditioning and a professional approach to training will be as important as the skills part of the game.

You must be thinking what is this exercise? Well it has many names depending on where you learned how to do it. Being CHEK Practitioners we tend to refer to this as Horsestance, Pilates instructors refer to it as Quadruped, and many Americans including famous back pain researcher and author of great books on back Stuart McGill call this Bird-Dog! While the name may differ with different institutes, they all agree that this movement is one of the best you can do to treat injured back pain and also prevent it! This exercise not only targets the back but also the hip extensors, which in many cases is the whole problem. The lack of hip mobility and stability forces the spine to move too much with simple movements like bending and squatting. The spine is saved from high compressive loads in a four point position and allows people to work on creating stability and good extension of the back. McGill has found from his research that this exercise is a major contributor to desensitizing back pain!