FPF athlete Scott deadlifting like a crane, read the testimonial in the link at the bottom of the page, he has a pretty amazing story

As I alluded to last Wednesday, I now have the Fitness Pain Free Open Training Programming back up!

To be completely honest this programming has been an enormous amalgamation of my own education both from the realms of physical therapy, strength and conditioning, crossfit coaching and personal experience as an athlete.  It’s been reborn completely from my own passion for programming.

The level of intricacy and completeness of the programming has gotten to a whole new level over the past 6 months.  It’s honestly not just a done for you blueprint but a continuing education resource.  Not only is everything completely laid out for you but the thought process behind it all is laid out both in written and video format.  I truly believe that you will come out of the process with a much better understanding of programming from a performance and injury reduction standpoint.  I’ve even had several people subscribe not just for the programming but the educational process of learning how to put it all together.  I honestly don’t think you can find this type of information anywhere else on the internet.  I’m extremely proud of the outcome.

A Brief Snapshot of the Programming:

• 6-days per week done for you program for yourself or for your box (Perfect for affiliate owners)
• Progressive daily olympic lifting, strength, gymnastics, and met-con that fits into a 1 hour block (I know how important it is to fit the entire class into a 1 hour block)
• Two tracks: One for the average Joe looking to stay safe and get fit and another for the competitive athlete looking for success in the open and at competition.  Both tracks …read more
  
  

So if you haven’t noticed I haven’t had my fitness pain free programming available for a little over 6 months.  This doesn’t mean that I haven’t been working like a madman on it.  There has been a boatload of new content built into the programming including:

• 6-day per week done for you programming perfect for a solo home gym owner or box/affiliate owner looking for programming to implement directly into their gym.
• Done for you warm-ups, strength/skill, metabolic conditioning and post workout joint and tissue health programming
• Specific programming for success around the open competition (With options for both the average Joes and Janes as well as the more competitive athlete)
• Self Assessment and Correctives (Find your specific limitations, no more guessing)
• Mobility built directly into the programming (Take the guess work out)
• Specific periodization focused on maximizing gains while minimize risk of overuse injury (That varies along the entire year)
• Specific programming to work olympic lifting technique and strength
• Specific gymnastics skill programming to hone those handstand pushups, handstands and muscle-ups
• Metabolic conditioning focused around working the specific energy systems that will need work throughout the course of the year
• Monthly explainer videos with monthly goals for the month as well as the current phase of training
• Boatloads of videos explaining how all of the exercises are performed

Meanwhile, I’ve still had several clients utilizing the programming over the past several months and years with great results.  One story I wanted to share is from a client of mine named Caleb.  Here are a few gems from some recent emails with Caleb.

“I’ve honestly never gotten better results in my life since I started following your programming. I was the guy who reached out to you a little over a year ago about my issue with femoral acetabular hip impingement. Ever since starting your programming and especially implementing the specific daily warmup and mobility …read more

As discussed in prior articles, ankle mobility restrictions can be a large player in knee pain.  It makes sense that we should probably be correcting these issues if we’re finding them, especially in our patients with knee pain.  One issue I’ve found with traditional ankle mobility exercises is that they can recreate the same knee pain that patients are coming into the clinic to correct.  Obviously if we have a better less painful option it would be beneficial.  Here’s a variation I like better that’s usually well tolerated in individuals with knee pain.

There it is,

Dan Pope DPT, CSCS

P.S. If you enjoyed this article then sign up for the newsletter to receive the FREE guide – 10 Idiot Proof Principles to Performance and Injury Prevention as well as to keep up to date with new information as it comes out via weekly emails.

…read more

Probably not the first step in building a foundation for solid pistols. Steve Cotter is a monster by the way…

Last week we spoke about mobility for the pistol.  Now that you’re all mobility wizards we can get down to the fun stuff, actually practicing pistols.

Super Important Side Note: It’s very important to understand that building stability safely in the pistol is going to take months to years depending on how strong/mobile/stable you currently are.  Doing too much too soon is a great way to end up in my office complaining of cranky knees.  Just looking at a pistol can tell you that it’s going to place high stresses on the knee.  I generally recommend performing some pistol work 1-2 times in a 7-10 day cycle.  I’m also mindful of how much accessory work we’re doing that also stresses the knee in the current cycle.  (i.e. how much squatting / lunging / oly work is currently in my program, and how much volume of these exercises)  Again, too much too soon is a sure fire way to hurt yourself.  

There are 3 things I think are vital to mastering the pistol

1) Mastering the short foot and tracking the knee over the toe properly

We all know just how important it is to keep the knee tracking over the toe during squatting movements.  The amount of valgus I see during pistols sometimes makes me feel like vomiting.  I can’t tell you how often I end up treating this at my clinic.  Now, valgus can happen for a large variety of reasons.  I’ve written about this extensively HERE.  The idea is that we’ve got to promote people …read more

The Pistol – World’s Dumbest Exercise?

I’ve got a little secret.  I used to absolutely hate pistols.  I used to watch people who are good at them and just get mad.  How the heck do they make it look so easy?  At the time I was 170lbs and able to take 400lbs for a deep squat but couldn’t manage to complete 1 stupid pistol?

It’s frustrating.  Everytime I’d go try to go down to the bottom of a pistol it would look like bambi on ice and I’d either fail miserably on my depth or fall backwards on my butt.  I mean, it was really bad.

Over the years I’ve slowly become a little more proficient in the pistol.  I’ve put in several years worth of knowledge, mobility, practice and accessory work to make them both look and feel a bit better.  I wanted to share this knowledge with you.

First off, for proficiency in the pistol you’re going to need enough mobility in 3 basic places:

To test to see if you’ve got the mobility for it you’ll need to be able to squat comfortably with your feet together.  It’s an easy test:

1) Ankle Dorsiflexion Problems

Don’t have it?  Time to see where things fall apart.  First check the ankles:

Failed the test?  Better get to work:

2) Hip Flexion Problems

Pass the ankle mobility test but still can’t squat with the feet together?  Must be either a hip or lumbar spine issue.  You can check hip mobility by seeing if you or your athlete can lie on their back and pull their knees to their chest without their lower back rolling off the floor (Part of the SFMA deep squat breakout).  To be strict try and keep …read more

I’ve been reading and listening to probably what is more than a healthy amount of scapular research and rehabilitation lately.  It’s great for me because I’m currently working with a few athletes with scapular dyskinesia and shoulder pain.  I wrote a bit about scapular dyskinesia some time back and it’s easily one of my most popular articles to date.

Now, it’s important to understand that winging and dyskinesia can happen for variety of reasons.  Pain is a huge player in the mix as well as specific weakness or muscle imbalance.  As a therapist it’s our job to determine why this winging is occurring and troubleshoot how to correct it.  This article is going to talk more about specific weaknesses.

There are also several different types of winging and dyskinesia.  Sometimes the inferior border of the scapula pops up with movement (Type 1).  Sometimes the shoulder is protracted (scap anterior tilt/internal rotation) at rest (Type 1).  Sometimes we get a shrug with excessive downward rotation when we raise our arms overhead (Type 3).  What I’d like to talk about today is medial border prominence (Type 2) as shown in the picture above.  I see this quite a bit in athletes especially when they’re attempting pushups.

This article’s inspiration comes from Ann Cools.  She is a researcher, physiotherapist and professor.  She is an absolute boss when it comes to the shoulder and specifically the scapula.  The clinical reasoning process used in this article comes from her.

First off, when you see this occur in your patients you have to ask the question of why is this occurring?  Dyskinesia could theoretically cause shoulder pain but can also occur because someone is in pain (Maybe an individual is moving differently to decrease stress on a sensitive area in the shoulder).  Ultimately we want to promote symmetry …read more

To recap from last week, as therapists sometimes I feel as if we lack in our exercise selection for certain athletes trying to return to sport.  We do a good job of finding evidence based EMG exercises for specific conditions but sometimes drop the ball when it comes to finding great exercises that are specific to getting back to sport.  Those basic exercises are of extreme importance but what do we do once our athletes have reached their maximum benefit from these exercises and aren’t yet back to their activities.  I work with a decent number of weightlifters and crossfit athletes.  Besides a lack of knowledge of their sport, the second biggest reason for failed previous treatment is a lack of specific exercise progression to get them back to their activities.  Getting someone back to their ADLs pain free and getting them back to high level performance are two different things.

I wanted to put together a series of exercises I use with my athletes to get them back to their sport.  In part 1, the exercises are specific to strengthening and conditioning an athlete along their rehab/physical therapy process to get back to open chain activities like handstands, pushups and handstand pushups. The second example will be a series of open chain exercises.  Populations that would benefit from these exercises would be an olympic lifter, power lifter or crossfit athlete that wants to return to bench press, overhead press, push press, jerks and any other open chain pressing activity.  The exercises are split into phases, so you know how to progress an athlete throughout the course of their rehabilitation.

This exercise progression is by no means a replacement to a thorough evaluation with specific emphasis on correcting deficits and potential causes of injury.  However, I think it provides several ideas on how …read more

I’ve been working with a lot of students lately in my clinical practice as a physical therapist lately.  In my experience most students tend to have pretty good clinical decision making skills, a fairly sound evidence based approach as well as some solid evaluation and treatment ideas.

When it comes time for program directors to visit their students at our clinic they usually ask about ways to improve their physical therapy curriculum.  Far and away the biggest comment I give is the lack of experience with exercise selection.

I also feel that as a profession overall we lack a bit in this area.  We do a good job of finding evidence based EMG exercises for specific conditions but sometimes drop the ball when it comes to finding great exercises that are specific to getting back to sport.  Those basic exercises are of extreme importance but what do we do once our athletes reach their maximum benefit from these exercises and aren’t yet back to their activities.  I work with a decent number of weightlifters and crossfit athletes.  Besides a lack of knowledge of their sport, the second biggest reason for failed previous treatment is a lack of specific exercise progression to get them back to their activities.  Getting someone back to their ADLs pain free and getting them back to high level performance are two different things.

I wanted to put together a series of exercises I use with my athletes to get them back to their sport.  These exercises are specific to strengthening and conditioning an athlete along their rehab/physical therapy process. The first example will be a series of closed chain exercises.  Populations that would benefit from these exercises would be a gymnast or crossfit athlete that wants to return to handstands, handstand walking or any other closed chain pressing …read more