There's an expression in sports that 'you play, you pay'. And this refers to getting injured. You play frequently enough and push yourself enough and you will suffer an injury. It's not a case of 'if' but 'when' and when that happens, check more for personal injury lawyers. Most athletes know what I'm talking about and have spent time in an ER, in a sling, on crutches or a wheelchair. I'd have to say being injured is the worst part of sports. Worse than losing. Because when you're injured you can't play. You can't help your team. And if things aren't going well it's even worse. You have to wait it out, go for your rehab appointments and wait for the OK to return to training and competition. A recently study looked at how training the non-injured side minimized the losses that typically occur to the injured side. What the researchers did was have 30 subjects, male and female, between 18-34 years, put their non-dominant arm in a sling for 8 hours per day. The elbow was bent to 90 degrees and then immobilized for the 8 hours. The non-dominant arm was determined as the non-writing arm. All subjects had the non-dominant arm immobilized for 8 hours per day. The 30 subjects were then assigned to one of three groups. The first group did no exercise, the second did eccentric and concentric exercise and the third group did eccentric only exercise. The tempo for the eccentric and concentric group was 2 seconds up and 2 seconds down. And for the eccentric group the participants took 4 seconds to lower the weight. The exercise performed was a biceps curl over a preacher bent with a dumbbell. For the eccentric only group the researcher grabbed the dumbbell at the bottom of each rep....

If you are an active person there are probably still aspects of fitness that you don't enjoy. For example, we all know someone who is really fit but doesn't enjoy running. They will do almost anything else rather than run. They will swim, bike, row and even go hiking. But go for a 5 or 10 km run? Never. This reminds of the dinner hour at the Collins household. Alexandra does a great job of preparing delicious meals each evening. But with two little girls there will be something that's been prepared they don't enjoy. With Vangie, 4 years old, this could be peppers. It doesn't matter the colour i.e. red, yellow or green, she has an equal distaste for all of them. If you try to hide them in chili or something else she will pick them out and set them off to the side. Sometimes we have to do the things we don't like in order to get better. Given the choice if every meal were ice cream, cookies and pudding she'd be OK with this. And it's tough for her to recognize that her mom and dad feed her foods to help with her growth, development and overall health. So there are the foods she'd like to eat and then the ones she needs to eat. And it's trying to find the balance to make sure gets what she needs and every now and again she gets a little bit of what she wants. This is kind of be how fitness is for many people. Maybe we are already active. We go to the gym. We squat, bench and deadlift. The numbers are all going up. We're getting stronger. And everything is great. Until it's not. And it stops being great when we have a new physical demand...

When you get out of the shower are you happy with what you see? Based on the title of this blog I'm obviously talking to the guys here. Although there may be a few wives that quickly answered for them before their husbands had a chance. But seriously though are you happy with the way your body looks? No sucking in your gut. No standing sideways to the mirror. No adjusting the dimmer switch to create the perfect lighting conditions where you look your best. There are a number of things working against here and you can quickly see the difference a few decades can have on the male physique. From when we were teenagers and could eat anything any everything and burn off all this extra energy. To our twenties where we first heard the term 'freshman ten' or in some cases 'twenty'. And later to our thirties where some of the cool styles and fashion trends don't necessarily suit the body of the out-of-shape thirty something. And now that I'm in my forties I see more and more people of this vintage looking more like their parents than their kids. We look less like our high school grad pictures and more like the old pictures of relatives we would smile at when looking through photo albums. Why does this happen? And more importantly, is there anything we can do about it? Well to answer the first question would take more than a blog post unto itself. But the short answer is that we aren't the young kids smiling back at us in those pictures from summer vacation 15 or 20 years ago. We aren't producing anywhere near the same amount of androgens as we did up until our early twenties. The levels of testosterone, DHEA, androstenedione (Mark Maguire) in...

Hey there: This past spring I was contacted regarding training a few Special Olympics athletes. Richard, Glen and Andrew compete in track in field and were looking for some help in getting ready for the Nationals in July. So I agreed to do my best to help these guys out. What a great experience it was.At the very first meeting we sat down and discussed their goals, training history, previous injuries, rest habits and anything else relevant to realizing success in track and field. And I was really impressed how much focus these guys had. They were dedicated to their training. They avoided empty calories and made sure to get at least hours of sleep a night. If I remember correctly Andrew told me he really likes having stir-frys for dinner. Unless there's pizza!And so we got started. I didn't realize their level of dedication until one day Richard was quoting one of my more recent emails that you all receive. It didn't make sense how accurate he was it being able to recall the content until I realized he was printing them all off and collecting them in a binder. He would bring the binder to our training sessions and then share them with others.Lastly I'll remember Glen for going for runs into between our training sessions. Even if his training partners were busy he'd still be out there putting in his mileage then come inside the gym for a workout. Although I seem to recall him teasing me about how poorly Italy did in the World Cup.Recently one of these guys received a very admirable acknowledgement. Richard was named Special Olympics Canada's male athlete of the year. While Richard will be receiving the award all there of these guys are deserving. And knowing Andrew and Glen they are proudly...