Friday, June 5, 2009

It's Tricky

...an old Run DMC song, and also a reference to back pain.

JOSPT June '09- "Fitness, Motor competence, and Body Composition Are Weakly Associated With Adolescent Back Pain"

Here's what I get out of this article.

1. This is not the first study to find a correlation between low back pain & increased trunk flexor strength (Newcomer et al in Acta Paediactrica, '96)
2. Watch that waist line
3. I don't think you can have a healthy back without strong, powerful 3D leg strength.
4. The Sit & Reach Test is a waste of time.
5. I said this before in previous posts, but I believe that athletes in sports of a repetitive nature should spend some time in the recovery-restoration process running backwards, throwing with the opposite arm etc.

3 comments:

Juan Ruiz-Tagle said...

I wonder if yo could give me some feedback on my last few post at backtofunction.blogspot.com. and if you do I would appreciate if you could be as raw and as critical as possible.

Thanks, Juan RT

Juan Ruiz-Tagle said...

Some questions that you may have more experience with...

1. In a team of a very competitive athlete, what percentage of those athlete would you expect that would get permanent injuries (labral tears, meniscus tears, rotator cuff tears, spinal dysfunctions, etc.) and in your opinion what is acceptable part of the sports and what is just poor coaching?

2. Do you stop the athlete from playing for a while and rehabilitate or do you rehabilitate without taking time off ?

Kevin Moody said...

Joe,

I agree with your statment about the "sit-&-reach test" not being useful. I have used a distance of heel of hands to toes (inchworm) position for general flexibility at times. However, I have no normative data to use, just pre & post rehab/training.

Do you have any general flexibility test that you favor?