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Strength and Conditioning

Amanda Heading


When we talk about health and performance, exercise is an obvious part of it. 


Every-day or functional exercise is key to health, but we need to do more than this to sustain our health and fitness through injuries, life-stage and ageing. Due to the busy-ness of life, we often squeeze our training in around our daily demands, or convince ourselves we’re doing enough in our manual jobs: this lack of time means we use our sport - or physical work - to keep us fit, rather than training to improve our fitness and resilience for pain-free work or sports performance gains. 


I see this a lot in my Clinic: the athlete continues to train despite the injuries increasing, albeit at a lower level but with greater frustration, and the manual worker who thinks their work will keep them fit, despite all the aches and pains they’re carrying (as well as the increasing waist-line). 


When I first worked in physical therapy, I thought my active job would help my endurance running - instead, it just tired me out before I even went for a run!  So, I had to change the way I trained to ensure I was fit to work AND fit to run without getting injured, ill or just too tired out to bother to run at all.



This is where strength & conditioning (S&C) comes in: the use of dynamic and static exercises, with and without weights, to improve physical performance.  It encompasses strength, power, stability and agility – all aspects which are key to both better health and optimal performance. 


It can be a general workout or a more specific plan for your sport, but it needs to be tailored to the individual, progressive, and have a measurable objective, in order to motivate you to carve out the time and maintain your adherence.  It’s more than just ‘going to the gym’ – it’s what’s going to help you achieve your goal


Better health? Better performance?  Better resilience?  It can achieve all three.


Strength and Conditioning, done properly, can provide both health resilience and sports performance: faster and more complete injury rehabilitation, prevention of injuries, increased strength and power, better mobility and agility, as well as reduced pain and confidence gains.



It can be done at home or in the gym, using different weights, resistance bands or simply bodyweight. I started S&C in my early ‘20s, and a client of mine is loving it in his ‘70s.  So, we don’t have to listen to the nay-sayers telling us to ‘slow down at our age’: we don’t necessarily have to do more, just do things differently – and continue to gently nudge our bodies to keep alert and alive!


It’s never too late to start…



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