'Autumn - the Season of Metal' You already know it! The bread & butter of health is lifestyle. Lifestyle is the total collection of how we fill our day. How we fill it in terms of movements, emotions, behaviours, internal demands, as well as the demands & stresses that our external environment creates. We as human beings are a counterpart in an extremely large system and so the influence of our external environment plays a huge role. The Daoist adepts did not feel they had the authority to determine the objective distinction of things. Therefore the human being is as much the cosmos as the electrons are that makes up our body. 'cycles within cycles' We are a counterpart of these celestial cycles, this means the days, months, years, processions, big years, great years and other planetary relations. This ever-permeating spiritual ether that we call "qi" regulates, communicates and expresses itself through the natural cycles. It gives rise to day & ni

This catchphrase “Functional Movement” is all the rant and rave these days! A few decades ago we never really heard the term. The term represents the correction to DYSfunctional movement. Dysfunctional movement is a much more common and older term when it comes to the field of kinetic medicine. Dysfunctional movement is simply, ‘when the “pieces” of the body do not work together as they were designed to’. W e have this many bones, muscles and cables of dense connective tissue, they take on specific shapes and they connect to very specific locations... This is all for a reason! There’s this nice little quote that goes “nature uses as little as possible of anything.” (Johannes Kepler). Nature is lazy; it only invests energy into expressing material forms when enough time and persistence deem it a necessity. The same goes for the structural design of our modern day human body! So, with all this said. DYSfunctional movement happens when muscles (aka our active movers) have a pattern of ov

As an athlete our number one priority should always be the capability to move functionally. This is the backbone of strength & conditioning! Moving functional means that the joints are capable of moving with strength and control through all the necessary ranges that our specific sport demands. It also means that the base movement patterns, such as running, lifting, rotating/pivoting, throwing, jumping, and more are done so using efficient biomechanics that effectively integrate the entire body into each movement. Each of our muscles must play their part in a balanced way! And to top it all of this, we need this to be habitual or second nature. When movement becomes dysfunctional, or simply if range of motion displays differences between sides, then any time spent developing strength & conditioning as well as simply playing/training your sport has a risk of locking in dysfunction further, leading to aches, pains, and injuries that could have been preventable. Sound movement is

5 PHASES Pre-Competitive Phase (3-6 years old) As coaches developing gymnasts in the pre-competitive phase we’re establishing the base of a passionate love and understanding in the sport. If we were to liken this to growing a tree, this phase would deal with first selecting the seeds and then deciding where exactly we’d like to plant them. This phase is so important as its from which everything else must stem. Let’s begin with selection. In order to achieve competitive success we must first ensure that we’re investing our time and skill into the gymnasts with the most talent. If not then we’re not doing our best job as a competitive coach. The quality of gymnastics we produce is a product of both controllable and uncontrollable factors. Talent is one of those uncontrollable things, but how we select it is completely controllable! We just have to make that selection very early on and with a limited amount of information. There are 3 classifications of talent: 1