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With a lot of our student athletes competing abroad or going home to train, we have had a little more breathing space over the last couple of weeks!  (slightly)

We chose this period to complete a trio of educational seminars delivered to our high performance team at the University of Birmingham. Included in this team are strength and conditioning coaches, nutritionists, performance lifestyle consultants, sports psychologists and sports physiologists.

The three areas discussed were the Sporting shoulder, the hip and groin and the foot and ankle. We delivered presentations based around the up to date approach to assessing and treating these areas and further discussed how we can integrate with the performance team to ensure a speedy recovery from injuries. A persistent questions in all seminars was ‘what is normal?’, ‘what should I expect to see?’

So, what is normal? To define this you have to have extensive knowledge in a specific area, and a lot of people to help you complete research! ‘Normal’ is actually a unusable term in our area of physiotherapy. I prefer ‘optimal’. As each activity or sport has its own adaptations that make that particular joint or muscle work optimally, and so, redefining what is ‘normal’. To know this about a sport, research is done on the most successful athletes in those sports. You can then create a picture of the physical characteristics of the best performers in that sport, and you can be sure there will be a lot of similarities!

For example, in the shoulder, if you perform a sport that requires you to use a single arm overhead, (tennis, water polo, cricket) it is preferential for you to have different levels of strength across your two arms and this will create (not so subtle) postural changes. If you try and apply those same changes to a swimmer, you will find a lot of ‘non-optimal’ readings and observations.

Just look at this video of an athlete throwing a ball and watch how far his right shoulder rotates backwards, quite incredible! (you will be redirected to youtube.com to watch it):

So next time you are comparing yourself to what you think is ‘normal’, remember, you are a product of years of going about your business in a certain manner, we all develop differently!

Have a good few weeks!

Continued good luck to all our Commonwealth (ex)patients, you are doing us proud!