How much soft tissue therapy is best?

Posted on 2nd December by John Hampshire

Sports event massage at Skipton TriathlonRecent events have demonstrated to me how important it is to maintain an appropriate amount of contact time with each client.

Clients prior commitments have dictated that they have missed a few massage therapy sessions with a couple of our clients, resulting in the appearance of a few niggling injuries, which in turn have lead to a slight negative edge and lack of the usual motivation to train. All this is understandable and when combined with the dark nights, colder weather and a little work stress put some pressure on the usual progression of training and racing.

I also recently read the autobiography of Gerard Hartman, Mary found it and thought it looked good before it’s release and I signed up for a copy. It is good and it also highlights the amount of intensive physical therapy that appears to be the norm amongst the elite athletes - up to 6 hours a day in some cases during hard training! If this is what the elite do, it is no surprise that people training at a high level appear to thrive on two or three sessions a week and start to lose a little form when they miss sessions.

I’m about to leave on a trip for Mallorca to join Paralympic handcyclist, Karen Darke, for a two week training camp. Karen considers massage therapy to be key to her getting through the training necessary to reach her peak in the World Championships last September, seeing Kay when at her base in Sheffield, Christine when with us and helped by Scottish Institute of Sport when she is in Inverness. 

No doubt we will be employed to keep her going during our upcoming training camps in Mallorca, Lanzarote and Aviemore in the run up to the Olympics. You can come along to some of them - the more the merrier, we hope to make them a regular thing where like minded people get together, train hard and have a good time.

Recent blogs:

April Fool?

(Posted 1st Apr)

Ironically, this April fools day showed me the reality. I have been fooling myself into ignoring the sad state of physical fitness I have drifted into.... ..... over recent weeks/months, thinking that I have a good base of fitness; recently introduced to Strava cycling and being slowest of my friends..

Read Story

Best warm ups for cycling and running

(Posted 7th Aug)

All this Olympic mania is very exciting and the GB team are performing amazingly well. More locally, I was chatting with a friend yesterday and he mentioned seeing a Tweet saying that Yorkshire would rank higher on the medal table than Russia! I haven’t checked but Yorkshire is certainly pretty good for sport at the moment.

Read Story

A good training camp?

(Posted 19th Jan)

It’s coming to the end of our first Fit for Purpose training camp, in Puerto Pollensa, Mallorca. Most people have gone home and I’m pondering how it went. There were 9 of us, joining in for different periods of time and with differing objectives; including five runners of varying abilities, one fit but non-competitive cyclist, an elite mountain biker, an elite paratriathlete and an elite handcyclist. Fit for Purpose staff were Christine, Mary and John.

Read Story