stretching | Top Form Fitness

How to Warm Up Properly to Improve Performance & Avoid Injury

An effective warm up can improve your performance in your workout or sporting activity as well as prevent injuries. However, some common methods of warming up may actually increase risk of injury and reduce your strength and performance. For example, many people still perform passive stretches before working out, which can temporarily dampen the nervous system activation of the muscles you stretch and leave them weaker for a couple of hours. This not only reduces performance in your training session but can also lead to joint instability which increases risk of injury. Another popular way to warm up is to run on the treadmill or hop on the bike for a long, slow, low intensity cardio session before hitting the weights. While there may be some benefits to a brief cardiovascular warm up, there is no need to expend a significant amount of energy doing cardio before training. There are [...]

Josh Hewett2020-06-08T16:39:49-04:00

Building a Bulletproof Body – (Injury Prevention)

My last few blog posts have focused on injury prevention and fixing sore joints and muscles, specifically feet / ankles, knees, lower back, shoulders, and neck. This post is a summary or culmination of each of those previous topics, which I am collectively entitling "Bulletproof Your Body". My hope is that this will serve as a convenient reference for those suffering from aches, pains, weakness, and / or injury. Let's start by outlining my fundamental approach to injury management: 1. Fix muscle imbalances by addressing your weak or inhibited muscles rather than trying to stretch out the tight ones. The key is to address the root cause, not just the symptom. This is why I suggest to avoid passive stretching, and instead to employ active stretching, isometric exercise, and corrective isolation exercises. Learn all about this in my recent blog post: => The Truth About Safe & Effective Stretching 2. [...]

Josh Hewett2013-12-03T11:27:47-05:00

Stretching Can Cause Weakness and Injury

As in many aspects of our society, in the fitness industry there are things that many of us accept as true based on dogma rather than science and facts. An example is the persistent myth that “eating fat is bad for you”. Once an entire system of training (or nutrition) has been developed around a certain (erroneous) belief, it becomes very hard to change, regardless of how much evidence is presented. Cognitive biases are formed over time, which are inflexible by definition. This is why it is SO important to keep an open mind and to become a critical thinker! Stretching and flexibility training is one of the aspects of strength and fitness that really seems to be dragging it’s ass. Despite the abundance of mounting research and evidence to indicate that passive stretching can lead to muscle weakness, joint instability, and increased risk of injury, there still seems to [...]

Josh Hewett2020-06-20T12:52:51-04:00

Is Foam Rolling Really Such a Good Idea?

There seems to be strong trend developing in the personal training / strength and conditioning industry involving the use of foam rollers to perform soft tissue work. This appears to be another fad which was borrowed from physical therapists, similar to when “wobble board” training became all the rage. I look at this as an example of a useful tool being taken out of context and significantly overused, to the detriment of this profession, in my opinion. Great trainers and coaches (even some of the best) have become foam rolling fanatics, prothesizing the many benefits of raking various muscles over these rigid cylinders. In no way does this detract from their expertise or credibility, but I do think it is time to take a more critical look at the growing “religion” of foam-rollers. The proponents of foam-rolling often describe it as a form of “self-myofascial release” (SMR). No, despite how [...]

Josh Hewett2011-03-19T15:50:27-04:00

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