INJURY
& REHAB
A REVOLUTION IN FITNESS AND PAIN RELIEF?
What if the principles we have been taught do not honour the principles of the body –
and even create conflict within it?
WORDS: DOUGLAS HEEL
new training client comes to you
with pain and dysfunction that
they have had for a long time.
Desperate to find an answer, they’ve been to
many therapists and trainers before with
limited or no success. They are frustrated
and have resigned themselves to living in
their state of discomfort. They are tough to
work with because they hurt when they
move, and fear doing more damage. As
such, your efforts with them achieve limited
results.
This is a story I hear continually, all over
the world. As they say, insanity is doing the
same thing over and over and expecting
different results. Sound familiar?
We have learnt to have incredibly low
and limited expectations of what we and
our clients can achieve, both in movement
and function, and in overcoming pain and
dysfunction. The body is such an amazing
thing, yet the results we expect are so limited.
Somehow we believe the constant struggle
and fight with our body is ‘just the way it is’.
But what if the principles we have been
taught do not honour the principles of the
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body? In fact, a lot of them violate these
principles and create a conflicted state in
the body. So, no matter how good we get at
them, no matter how many different tools we
have, we are still using them the wrong way
for the body and what it needs.
It may sound like I’m up for a fight, but all
I really want to do is share a different way of
looking at the body in order to give it what
it needs to perform and overcome pain and
dysfunction.
The ideas I share are under a system
called Be Activated, which focuses on
the priorities of the body. Put simply, the
body will sacrifice anything else in order to
breathe and move – functions that constitute
our drive to survive.
Be Activated is the science and art of
getting your client’s body to work the way
it is meant to, and in doing so allowing
it to break free of pain and dysfunction.
From here it can move into higher states
of performance on all levels. For each
client what this means will be different.
Performance to an 80-year-old woman is to
be able to safely and confidently get out of
The 30-second article
• We have learned to have incredibly
low and limited expectations of what
our bodies can achieve
• The body often ‘cheats’, with certain
areas compensating for others
• A cheating body will lose strength,
power, flexibility and endurance
• Be Activated is the science of getting
your client’s body to work the way it
is meant to, and in doing so allowing
it t