Found a couple of great bits of kit that are keeping people on their bikes and riding even after suffering with painful perineal problems.
These two saddles are from different lines of thinking, but both seem to be getting the job done i.e. no pain from the owners in previously painful areas!
If you’ve been thinking that your cycling days are over lately, spend five minutes taking a look at these websites!
Happy Cycling!
Norwich Personal Training loves box squats for real results!
Box squats are one of those funny types of training that have been modified from the original purpose. Power lifters such as the guys at westside barbell and others popularized the box squat for sitting back and using the glutes (backside) and hamstrings more than the traditional quadracep (front thigh) dominant technique.
With my clients I use various techniques in the squat depending what is suitable but I nearly always use a box for a different reason. Watching Mike Boyle in action gave me another one of those ah ha moments that he dishes out often! The box enables you to keep the quality of the movement high on every repetition by measuring the depth of the squat. This makes sure that if you ask someone to do six repetitions, they will actually do six repetitions, not six half repetitions! If you tap the top of the box not actually sitting down, you know you can come back up again. So we don’t de-load, or bang into the box stressing the spine with a heavy load on our backs.
This has proved to be very effective over the last few years really improving the quality of the squatting with everyone I work with. The great thing is with this, you don’t need expensive plyometric boxes or anything fancy. As you can see from the photo danny is using step block risers and an airex pad, this is kit you’ll find in most good gyms – or something similar.
So there you go, get to it, measure your squats on every rep and you’ll reap the rewards of consistent depth.
Norwich personal training is working on the hamstrings again!
This exercise is a real favourite for several reasons.
1 – Leg curl machines don’t give you hip extension! That means the hamstrings could gradually build a dominance over the glutes in your backside. This would not be good. The order should always be bum, hams, then adductor magnus for good function.
2 – Instead of sitting in a chair, which most of us do too much of already, when performing a body pod or stability ball leg curl we have to work hard to stabilize and control hip tilt. You have to focus on your bum and abs with these exercises – make sure you don’t let the low back arch into what we call an anterior tilt.
3 – I really like the body pod variation because it has more sideways/lateral stability than the ball – this is important because when you’re learning, like Vicki in the photo above, it means you can focus more on your low back shape and hip tilt – very important!
Sam below however is doing a great job on the stability ball, but remember it is very tough to consistently get this right.
Be careful with both of these exercises if you’ve not tried them before. They can be tougher than they look and cramp is a real possibility!
Be ready with a good hamstring stretch from the posts below if this happens.
