Downsignal

Thank you to Victress Digital for inviting me in to deliver this employee well-being mobility class! Really enjoyed taking the team through some movement and stretch, and working through some useful mobility drills to loosen you up when life / desk work / driving / the gym gets you feeling creaky. Thanks for joining me on your Monday morning! ☺️

Love to see companies investing in employee wellbeing, they are now trialling the Downsignal mobility app as an employer funded benefit for staff 🤩😍🚀💛

We may be a team who works between the office and our homes, but it definitely doesn't stop us from getting together when we can.

Whether it be a fantastic mobility session with Ren from Downsignal, or a chat about self-esteem with John Niland from The Self-Worth Academy, we love getting our minds and bodies moving together ❤️

Now officially achieved my level 5 certificate in Soft Tissue Therapy. Thanks ☺🚀🥳

This qualification focussed on devising and applying gym-based rehabilitation techniques for a range of injuries, and really helped to develop my thinking around the manual therapy / movement / rehab/ training continuum (headlines/spoilers/"ask me about"s: movement is king, strength is fu***ng important and the nervous system is even importanter, manual techniques / treatments can support the process but they aren't the process. Rest is very important in context but can also be a dangerous diversion into staying injured. Understanding our own pain, what it does and doesn't mean, can help us to work with it, through it and maybe even past it. We can (nearly) always find a version of your desired activity you can tolerate, and when we do that, we can move you towards doing the thing you wanna do).

Having had some chance to integrate the lessons from this qualification over the past 9 months in practice with clients and seeing some flipping amazing results on longstanding issues and injuries, along with increases in strength and performance and new skills unlocked for clients, I've been changing a few bits up at Downsignal HQ.

Current vibe is a holistic and integrated approach to strength / performance training and injury rehabilitation, through movement / biomechanics assessment and individualised training plans including strength, skill, mobility and (hold the fu***ng phones Ren, what?) cardio/fitness work (possibly the world's most underrated mobility and recovery tool? Ugh lowkey hate myself for facing this truth tbh, still coming to terms 😭).

Manual therapy will remain in the mix, but I'm going to be challenging my clients more and more to leave the comfort zone of the massage couch and walk through the fire with me, to learn to work with their bodies, increase their movement options and grant themselves capacity to do fu***ng amazing things.

You in?
🔥🔥🔥

My PT client had been doing what we all do when something feels super tight. She'd been stretching and stretching and stretching. But the pain in her butt cheek would not leave. Tale as old as time right?

So sometimes s**t's tight because it's tight, sometimes it's tight because it's weak and sometimes it's tight because its the only muscle in a group pulling its weight and its just fu***ng tired and irritated and spasmy. (Other reasons too ofc but these are our relevant ones).

How do you figure out which it is? Pay me £££ of course 🤣🤷🏽‍♀️ ORRRR you could just try some s**t - get the area around it moving, get some blood flowing to the tissues and then firmly request that your surrounding muscles please do their jobs!

Nickys four day pain in the butt was gone in a 10 minute warmup and she smashed out the full session as per usual 🙌🏽

This is how we resolved Nickys butt pain, its how I've resolved people's back and knee pain and its why fundamental strength movements and routines like this one are part of my downsignal prepare / recover app (morning and evening routines to shake off the niggles / desk job / training / long drive and get you ready for action). £10/mth if you wanna join the app and move, stretch, get strong and flexible with meeee! We roll around on the floor a lot its dead chill.

If your pain persists after trying some really basic vanilla s**t or if it hurts to do the stuff, book a 1:1 and we will figure out what your specific stuff is and what movement-based magic spell needs casting to make you feel better. 🥳🥳🥳🥳