Michael Hobbs Chiropractor | Businesses

Michael Hobbs Chiropractor

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23.01.2022 Is it painful or uncomfortable? I was working with a client yesterday to improve their hip mobility, and every time he squatted down, he commented on how painful it was. I kept pulling him back up and checking him again. His form was good, he was unloaded, his knee positioning looked good and his back and hips were fully supported by the bands that I was using. There were no visible signs of distress and when I checked his back, knee and hip mobility on the table, I knew that... he had enough mobility that he should be able to do this movement without pain. I asked him to describe his sensations to me. He said, "It's not painful, it just feels uncomfortable." We dissected this further and came to agree that what he was trying to communicate with me was that the movement still felt new and unfamiliar. It wasn't painful, he was still just apprehensive about doing it. We had just spent the past 30 minutes improving his squat depth by over 30 degrees and he said this to me as he squatted ass to grass for the first time in over 15 years. It felt new and unfamiliar because it was new and unfamiliar! It left me with a lot of things to think about. Are we real with ourselves about whether something is truly painful or just uncomfortable? How do we differentiate between the two? Are some types of pain good (such as muscle soreness after a workout aka DOMS)? How do we decide what is acceptable pain and what is unacceptable pain? When we are working on something new, are we being patient enough with ourselves or are we expecting our bodies to have it all figured out straight away? How long does an adaptation process take? After our short chat and a quick reframe in my client's mind, he was able to demonstrate that he could hold a deep squat position for nearly 30 seconds with minimal assistance. He said afterwards, "It wasn't painful and I don't feel sore even, just tired but excited." I'm excited too. I'm seeing him again in 2-3 weeks and I have a feeling that when we next catch up, his squat will have dramatically improved (provided he practices it!). I believe he became a wiser mover yesterday, and in having the language to better describe his experiences, also proved to himself that he was much more capable than he had originally thought. #MakeYourMove https://www.michaelhobbs.com.au/#

18.01.2022 Collaboration, not competition, is actually what history teaches us. This is one of the key learnings that I've taken from Alex Pavlotski's 9-week anthropology of embodiment course (highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning about anthropology, bodies, and embodiment). We are all very familiar with the survival of the fittest rat-race model. If we go back to early Darwin's writing (who came up with this idea), however, he talks a lot about how integral collaboratio...n between humans is for survival. I think somewhere along the way we forgot this narrative. We're born severely undercooked. We are reliant on our tribes, and can't do a lot more initially than breathe. One of the reasons for this is because social conditioning is an important part of how we have survived as a species. We are conditioned to be hyper-vigilant about where we do and don't fit in, because at one point in our evolutionary history, fitting in with the tribe meant life or death. Lots of anthropological data points to the idea that we are interdependent as a species and if we had operated as individuals, we wouldn't have survived for long. To me, it's important to remember this in my business and how I live day to day. I love a good competition, however I also tend to get hyper-competitive and hyper-independent at times. We are collaborative creatures more than we are competitive creatures. Working together is the way of the game! #MakeYourMove https://www.michaelhobbs.com.au/#

13.01.2022 The reality is that for a lot of injuries, healing isn't linear. Old injuries and niggles reoccur. Not always, but commonly enough. This pattern is particularly true for back injuries, where we commonly see relapses and re-aggravations over the years. I think that it's dishonest for health practitioners to try and predict to clients that they will never experience pain again (particularly if it's a pain that "comes and goes"), and that it's unfair of clients to expect this f...rom their practitioner. I'm not God. How on Earth do I know what your life has in store for you? I only know where you're at today. I can help you identify your unconscious habits, help make sense of previous niggles and injuries and help you help yourself prevent them from recurring. This way, if life throws you a curveball, hopefully you're prepared enough to 1) prevent a re-injury; or 2) if you do re-injure yourself, you know what to do and heal quicker as a result. If you're looking for crystal ball predictions, then go get a tarot card reading instead. #Makeyourmove https://www.michaelhobbs.com.au/#

09.01.2022 Tension isn't good or bad, we just want to learn how to work with it. We actually need some tension in the system. If we didn't have any tension in our bodies, we wouldn't be able to upright ourselves onto two feet and then hold ourselves up in resistance to gravity. When you are lifting weights at the gym, you purposely want to increase tension even more, to help you resist the forces pushing you down into the ground as you move. I used to think that perhaps more mobility-ba...sed practices such as yoga and dancing, that I weren't as familiar with, were about becoming as flaccid as possible. I've since learnt that nobody likes limp af anything. Limpness is only useful if you are static/not moving. What I have learnt is that even in these practices, you maintain some tensioning in the body. In fact, you want some degree of tension. You probably don't want as much tension as when you are weight lifting, but there is still some tension somewhere. What you are actually learning to do is to work with how you control and disperse the tension throughout your body as you move. I think of "tight" muscles as being like "stuck" tension. If you experience tightness somewhere, the lesson and the challenge is to learn how to disperse that tension back throughout the rest of the body. There is a motion that is not occurring, that is resulting in that kinetic energy getting stuck. Sometimes we need to stretch the tight muscles, sometimes we need to strengthen them, sometimes we need to re-learn how to sequence that body part with the rest of the body, sometimes we need to do all of the above. I encourage my clients to not think of their tension as good or bad, but simply to think of it as information. How you wish to move based on that information, is entirely your choice. #MakeYourMove https://www.michaelhobbs.com.au/

06.01.2022 Kinesiology/muscle activation techniques: One of the techniques I use in clinic is kinesiology, also known as muscle testing or muscle activation techniques. What we think we are doing when we use this technique is not only testing muscle strength, but also testing muscle awareness and 'proprioception' (in other words, how well does your body know where it's joints are in space). I think of it as testing how easily can your body recruit the muscle fibres it needs to. More sim...ply, how prepared is your body to efficiently perform an action? Are the muscles getting the electric signal they need or is there a dimmer switch on somewhere? This can be a really useful technique for highlighting to clients what their unconscious habits are, where the 'blind spots' are in their movements, as well as the relationships between different muscles. Because the body wants to complete the task you set for it, if it can't 'activate' a muscle somewhere, it will tend to over-recruit a muscle somewhere else. We all have lots of these compensatory strategies based on previous injuries, development, movement history, posture and a million other factors. Kinesiology is just one way of helping identify what the compensatory strategy may be. It does come with a caveat: the evidence is still very limited for this kind of technique. We need a lot more research. It deals with habits, dysfunctions and movement patterns, much harder things to define than injuries or damaged structures. Another argument is that by itself, it won't create long-lasting change. Duh- nothing done passively on the table will change your habits long-term if you're not also actively working on changing your habits! I use it in conjunction with other techniques and the rest of my assessment for this reason. It needs to be used in context with everything else, and shouldn't be relied upon solely for formulating a diagnosis. And as always, it's not a panacea. It doesn't get you out of doing your own work. DM me if you want more info on kinesiology and how I use it! #MakeYourMove. https://www.michaelhobbs.com.au/#

04.01.2022 UTA 50km done. Despite some hypothermia around the 40km mark (it was -1 degrees celsius in the morning!) and what felt like a never-ending ascent (2.4km of elevation up to the finish line), I got my first ultra marathon done. Special thanks to @hanporteous for lending me pretty much all the warm clothes, @lululemonausnz for the amazing jackets and @koarecovery for the normatecs for our recovery. Congratulations to my clients who also competed. There were some great results all around.

04.01.2022 Happy Global Running Day! Wednesday, June 2nd is Global Runners Day. I am fortunate to have such a wonderful running community and I'm looking forward to continuing to expand it. You don't need to run races or long distances to be a runner. You can just be starting. If you are running, you are a runner. Often, we get caught up in the labels associated with running: what distances we should be achieving, what times we should be running in, what shoes we should have etc. Yet l...et me tell you what I've learnt from working with runners for as long as I have: people keep coming back to running because it always offers new lessons and new surprises. Being a runner is about who you are becoming when you run, not about the times or the finish lines. Perhaps you run because it makes you feel fast and powerful. Perhaps it's a meditation. Perhaps it helps keep you fit and active. These are all great reasons to run. Wherever you're at on your running journey, happy runners day to you and may you keep learning new things about yourself as you continue to run! #MakeYourMove

01.01.2022 Join me on Monday, June 21st for my New Rules Of Running Technique Workshop and learn how to be adaptable and resilient in your running technique, working with, rather than against, your body. Limit to 15 spaces. #MakeYourMove

01.01.2022 #MakeYourMove is my call to action. It's a reminder that actions speak louder than words; that in order to learn the thing, you need to do the thing. It's an assurance that I always have some agency, even if it is small. It's a cue to stay focused on the next step, rather than losing myself in lofty grand plans; to stay committed to the process, rather than being paralysed by perfectionism. It's an assertion that how I choose to move is how I will create the life that I want ...to live. What moves are you making? #MakeYourMove https://www.michaelhobbs.com.au/#