The pain issue

Up to 85% of people consulting an orthopaedic surgeon in the USA have no idea what caused their pain. Which tells you that most pain isn’t from a traumatic incident — it almost certainly developed over time. And that means you can fix a fair bit of it yourself with the right coaching approach.

Why your nervous system creates pain in the first place

Your nervous system is wired for survival, which doesn’t necessarily mean optimisation. It has to make compromises along the way, starting with your biomechanics.

When you get a niggle, your nervous system instantly creates a new neurological pattern — tightening some muscles to shift your weight away from the injured area while it heals. I guess this evolved to help us keep up with our tribe.

The catch: compensation doesn’t unwind itself

This very clever process of compensation doesn’t just dissolve once the healing is finished. It might have taken three weeks for a simple muscular injury to heal, but in that time you’ve hardwired a new way of moving — and now your posture and movement are compromised.

No longer in your optimal alignment, you’re less able to absorb and cushion the loads of movement. So forces begin to concentrate somewhere else, and the process repeats — layering more ‘protective’ tension on top of the original pattern.

Your nervous system is so good at this in the background that you don’t even know it’s going on — until the original problem is hidden under layers and layers of compensation.

And then you spend money, time and frustration trying to fix that sore hip when it’s still being driven by the ankle you sprained when you were 10.

Your nervous system somehow hasn’t realised yet that there are calories everywhere these days, so it puts a huge premium on conserving energy.

When you get plonked on a chair all day at school, it quickly realises that it doesn’t need to support its own spine if there’s a chair involved. So your deepest core muscles gradually become a lot less active — setting off a killer cascade of compensation.

The work-around your nervous system invents

Strangely, your nervous system realises your deep core is asleep, but it can’t just turn it back on. Instead it comes up with an elaborate work-around: it ropes in bigger muscles further away from the spine to provide support.

That creates problems straight away:

• that’s not their intended job, so those bigger muscles aren’t very good at stabilising the spine
• and if they’re busy patching together this job, they can’t properly do the job they are designed for

Some other bunch of muscles chips in to help these guys out, and we have another layer of inefficient movement. Just another way for the process of compensation to destroy your movement efficiency and leave you open to injury.

Even tiny niggles can start the compensation process. Let’s say a muscle has 1,000 fibres and you tear 30 of them. It won’t feel so bad — but now 970 fibres are doing the work of the original 1,000.

The broken fibres bleed a bit around the injury, and some of that blood clots in the spaces between the fibres. That goes sticky and affects smooth function, adding more load to the working fibres.

Those two factors can combine to create a snowball effect of breaking fibres. At some point, the affected area will become big enough to set off a shift in your posture — and compensation has begun.

Almost never. Your posture is a system of muscle tension and relaxation — at any one moment, there’s a unique pattern of muscles:

• some are holding some of your joints stable,
• others are acting to create movement, and
• the rest are relaxing to allow that movement.

That’s a strong and complex motor program controlled by your nervous system. I’ve found that stretching one muscle on its own just isn’t enough to make a lasting change — the tension returns almost immediately when you start moving around again.

Unwind from two directions

To properly unwind the layers of tension that have formed over years, you need to address the pattern from two directions:

• first loosen the tight bits — make the short, tight muscles less active
• then immediately tighten the loose bits — make the weak & sleepy muscles more active

You’re actually reducing nervous system signals to the over-connected muscles, giving you less interference and allowing more connection between the nervous system and the weaker muscles.

Stretching one muscle on its own just isn’t enough to make a lasting change — the tension returns the moment you start moving around again.

Of course, the trick is knowing which muscles are affecting each other.

It’s pretty common that the muscle imbalances we talked about in “Surely I can just stretch the sore bit?” happen across a joint — tight on one side, weak on the other.

A classic example is your shoulder joint. You get tight, overactive muscles in the chest and underactive muscles in the back of the shoulder, pulling the joint forwards out of its normal position. In the early stages, any pain you’re feeling is likely in the traps (the neck/shoulder junction) and maybe the rhomboids (between your shoulder blades).

The cycles that hide the real problem

That pain might come and go for years in various forms, as your body works through cycles of compensation. Each cycle seems to make the pain disappear by sharing it out among the rest of your joints — but it’s really just booting the problem down the road by adding another layer of ‘protective’ tension.

Eventually, you run out of options to compensate your way out of trouble. There are too many layers of tension in and around the joint, and now structural parts of the joint are rubbing together — or close to it.

This was less of a problem when our life expectancy was lower — now we get to live a lot longer than this system was optimised for.

So you get to choose:

• get chopped open, with not-stellar rates of success, or
• start rolling back the years with a movement screening.

If you want a thorough recovery, you have to look past promises to get you “back to pre-injury condition.” That’s the exact condition that led you to the injury in the first place.

Two stages of recovery

Acute rehabilitation is for a sharp new injury, and it’s best done under the care of a physiotherapist — though we can cover part of your needs at this stage with remedial massage.

Post-acute rehabilitation comes after you progress out of that early phase. Everyone should do the post-acute work — but the problem is, once the sharp pain is gone we tend to forget about the problem and move on, stopping whatever treatments or exercises got us to that point.

Then the pain comes back in two or three weeks, and we go, “aw yeah, that didn’t work” — and so begins the bounce around all of Townsville’s therapists.

Manual therapy needs corrective exercise alongside it

Although we have oodles of fantastically skilled therapists in Townsville, if you’re not doing the corrective exercise work to help them get results, their job is a hundred times harder.

If you’re not doing the corrective exercise work alongside it, your therapist’s job is a hundred times harder.

All manual therapy has its place in your recovery. But if you’re serious about completely recovering from an injury, it’s critical that you’re supporting their work with an exercise program.

It’s just a look at what positions you can get into, what you can’t, and whether you feel pain as you try. You can keep your clothes on, too!

If we find any problems that lie outside our scope of knowledge, we’ll discuss your options and refer you to the most appropriate help in our local network of Allied Health professionals.

What you walk away with

After your screening appointment, you’ll have:

• a short program of priority movement drills that will start the process of restoring mobility and stability to any problem areas that show up ^*
• if we’ve done the full SFMA screening, a report you can take to your manual therapist — detailing the true mobility problems their work will have the most effect on

Continuing with the initial program might be enough to keep you just on the right side of being injured. But if you want to build an extra buffer of strength (highly recommended), you’ll want to book on to one of our coaching packages.

We work in 16-week coaching blocks, with a clear outcome planned. Since this is your project, our aim is always to make you as self-sufficient as possible in that time.

Three types of session

We use three formats and combine them to suit you:

• Classic one-on-one PT — for big upgrades to your program
• Semi-PT — close supervision when you need it, plus program tweaks
• Self-practice — practising your existing program in the gym with light supervision

Why we mix them

Combining session types gets the best results for everyone:

• you learn faster
• which makes you easier to coach
• which accelerates results again
• it’s cheaper than loads of unnecessary PT
• and it empowers you to drive your own success

This is your project — our aim is to make you as self-sufficient as possible inside 16 weeks.

Harry’s also been a practising remedial massage therapist for 22+ years. Layering decades of study in myofascial release work, yoga and biomechanics has only made his treatments more targeted and effective.

Your first appointment is two hours

That’s because we first use the SFMA screening process to sort your niggles into two buckets:

• True mobility problems — which can be massaged away
• Motor control problems — which need technical movement drills to restore specific skills

That way, every minute of your treatment is worth more. We don’t waste any time trying to massage away what turns out to be a motor control problem — and we get a chance to talk about appropriate movement drills as we work on the table.

After 20 years in business, I finally decided to go all in on adopting the Functional Movement Systems™ (FMS) suite of screening and program design systems.

I was actually beginning to use the FMS system around the time I first arrived in Townsville in 2009 — but moving halfway round the world and starting a family does tend to set your plans back a bit. You’ll see what finally caused me to make the shift in the Why TPI? piece.

FMS have been world leaders in movement science for 30 years, and their screening system is used almost across the board in elite US sport — they’re the team evaluating athletes at the annual NFL Combine.

Man, it’s been great to stop wasting energy trying to invent my own better system, and just take it on completely.

With the FMS screenings we get a much clearer picture of where each client is starting from, and a clear path and system to improve their movement out of sight.

Not only that, but it gives us a structured curriculum for educating new staff when we get to that point.

After my initial personal training qualification in 2003, it was pretty clear I’d need to study more to stay interested. So my first foray into studying biomechanics was a CHEK Institute ‘Golf Biomechanic’ course in San Diego in 2006.

But of course, getting home to the harsh reality of trying to run a business in its early stages quickly put such exotic ideas on the back burner. Throw in a move to Australia and a new family, and it almost makes sense why it took something as big as a global health emergency to get me back to it.

The Covid pivot

During Covid I was studying that same CHEK Institute course again online, when I suddenly remembered that the instructor in 2006 had mentioned she was being headhunted by Titleist as they set up TPI — the Titleist Performance Institute — also in San Diego. A quick Google search later, and next thing you know I’m studying TPI’s Level 1 course.

Then it turns out that TPI’s Level 2 ‘Medical’ course was developed with the team at FMS. In fact, the TPI guys helped to create the SFMA screening we use for our injured and high-end performance clients.

That pulled me back to my long-forgotten studies with FMS, and Dean and I have worked through their courses in the last few years as well — making all our screening and coaching fit together seamlessly in the studio.

Why it matters for golfers

TPI has been collecting data from swing analyses of thousands of pro and amateur golfers for over 20 years. Their suite of screenings covers swing characteristics, pain & injury, fitness and power production.

Whatever state your body is in, we can coach you to improve it and get more winning golf, more often.

How I ended up doing this

I’m only doing this because I broke my hip socket during my competitive Taekwondo phase. I was happily off being a mining engineer (and national TKD heavyweight champion!) in South Africa, but I was so unimpressed with my pre- and post-surgical care — and in fact with the pointless surgery itself (there’s still a chunk of bone floating around in there) — that I felt I had to take things into my own hands.

If I’d listened to my surgeon and physios, I’d still be scared to do anything. Their message was “don’t do any sport ever again — oh, and by the way, that shard of bone is right next to your femoral artery, so do be careful.”

I managed two years of no sport, but that sent me crazy. It was Ashtanga yoga that got me moving again.

I decided that if my hip could do all that twisting and I wasn’t dead yet, I could probably ride a bike and play squash too.

Nowadays, with careful strength work, it’s mostly fine for weekly indoor cricket and the annual Goldfields Ashes tournament, heavy landscaping and just about anything.

Spark over the years

That whole broken-hip-socket palaver led me to studying Personal Training in Glasgow, and then biomechanics and corrective exercise. Before starting a family, that meant I got to chase down specialist courses in New York, Copenhagen, Sydney and San Diego — although looking back, the number of trips dropped sharply once I moved to a sunnier country.

All this study was mostly to selfishly fix myself, but at the same time I was getting better results with my clients.

All my clients. Injured clients, general fitness and performance clients — even massage clients were getting better outcomes. My whole concept of the gym changed, and I started to attract folk who needed a more detailed movement-science approach.

Now, the more technical the movement science gets, the less bulky equipment you need in your gym. So I managed to run Spark for the first 13 years in Townsville by sharing a small space with my wife’s business, Live & Breathe Yoga. As comfortable and safe as that was, it did cramp both businesses for growth.

Luckily Dean showed up in 2022, and we decided we could give it a go in our own space. It’s been a busy four years of study, innovation and business development, and finally Spark looks a lot like the diagram I drew over 15 years ago when I first started doing proper business planning. Perhaps I’ll actually get around to doing some structured marketing soon — we’ve certainly talked about it enough.