Singapore Sports: Coaching Team Singapore Silat

The Senior Instructor of Genesis Health & Performance, Coach Edwin Chew just wrote his first article! woohoo. This one is about his experiences coaching the National Singapore Silat team as their strength and conditioning coach. Read it here!

Singapore Fitness Coach Talk: Agility - For athletes and everybody else too!

I recall a story about Paula Abdul and how she hurt herself pretty badly trying to avoid stepping on her dog. While I don't mean to laugh or poke fun at the misfortune of others, there is a point we can learn here.

Agility is not just for professional athletes.

Paula tore some cartilage, and had bruises all over. It could happen to anybody. But with the correct amounts of strength, coordination and balance, the chances of you or I hurting ourselves is FAR less.

As a fitness and sports performance coach in Singapore, I experience situations like this in real life too.

I have a client who blew out a knee ligament avoiding a person who accidentally stepped into his way. This is unfortunate! Now we have to spend months building back his pre injury strength levels. It's not the end of the world, but it is unfortunate.

My philosophy in injury is that all non-contact injury is preventable. If you get injured without somebody hitting, kicking, tackling or assaulting you, that injury can be prevented with correct training and recovery methods.

That is why my website says "Athletic fitness for all" because that I what I want to give my clients.

We train like athletes (of course adjusting to each individuals current fitness and ability) so we don't just look good, we can also avoid our dogs or other small animals that get in our way without hurting ourselves or the small animals in question! What a wonderful Win-Win situation.

I train people so we don't hurt you

Singapore Fitness Coach Talk: Rehab - Adductor/Groin Strains

More than 1 year ago I had an adductor/Groin Strain. I am not even sure how I got it, but groin strains are part of playing sports where change of direction and quick acceleration and deceleration are common. Basketball, soccer, rugby etc.

As a fitness coach and sports performance coach in Singapore I deal with groin strains quite often.

The first thing about rehab is to train around the injury. NOT rest at home.

"Oh I'm injured, I'll lie in bed" is a wrong mindset for training with an injury. In general I recommend training stuff that does not hurt.

The limit is "dull pain for a few seconds after the exercise is over".

So sharp pain means stop immediately and so does dull pain that lasts a long time.

This recommendation helps blood flow to the area which boosts recovery, at the same time it is pretty sure not to re-injure that area.

Also, continuing training makes you feel empowered and it maintains strength in the rest of your body.

For adductor/groin strains, the exercises you choose should be of 2 kinds. As you can see in the video.

• Wide Stance
  
• Single Leg

Doing more of these also help prevent groin injuries (as well as a good warm-up and good movement mechanics).

Since then, my groin has been bullet proof! Yay!

Singapore Sports Performance: Young Athletes

Working with young athletes to build up their injury prevention and sports performance is fun. I work with athletes age 13-18 from my former school. Here are some pictures of us in training. I wrote a short article about them on my site as well.

Singapore Sports Performance: Track Speed

Ok, I'm no track coach (although I have read almost all of Charlie Francis' work which I consider some of the best sprinting stuff out there) but I do like speed!

Speed is the dominating factor not just in track and field but in just about every real sport (no, bowling doesn't count).

Now I'm training for it.

By the end of 2008 I want to run the 100m dash in under 100 seconds. This is hard for a guy with no coaching and no track background. And I think in Singapore there are less than 10 guys who can do it at any one point in time.

But why not me?!

I have given some details about my training program in my forum and will be updating it as I go.

Singapore Fitness Coach Talk: Athletes...Are you leaking energy?

One of the more interesting ways of looking at the way athletes move and perform I first read about from therapist Gray Cook.

He has the theory of "energy leaks" in movement. I like this way of looking at things. More importantly it is a way that I can easily communicate the importance of movement training to athletes.

If you have an imbalance, if you are tight, if you are inflexible, if you have scar tissue from a previous injury, if you have trigger points, if you have a lack of mobility in a joint, if you are not strong enough, if you are not skillful enough... energy leaks from your performance.

Wow thats a long list to fix, but thats why we do screening and testing of athletes so we can figure out exactly where they are leaking energy and not maximizing performance.

This is why I find it good to read widely from sources in fitness, sports performance, rehab guys, psychologists etc... anything that helps me and my staff coach our clients better!

Singapore Fitness Coach Talk: Setting and achieving goals

As a fitness and sports performance coach, getting athletes to set goals is critical. A person needs to see in the "mind's eye" what he/she is to become before it can be accomplished. I choose to see each and every client as being great. Sometimes better than even they see themselves.

How many people do you know (gym or otherwise) who constantly set, and peruse goals? I suspect that those who you know who do that are really successful.

This is the same for physical goals.

For the year 2008, one of mine is to dunk a basketball 2 handed. For that I will need to jump about 15cm more than I do now. (I can currently dunk a soccer ball 1 handed).

Let the training begin.

Here are some jump lunges