ON THE PHYSICAL TRAINING SIDE

Many training techniques ignore the need to maintain good posture, but the better your posture, the more efficiently your body will be working (and the faster/longer you can keep going).

To be a competitive athlete, you'll need to have really clear goals and a training programme that supports the realisation of these goals. This brings us to the nuts and bolts of Personal Best's training philosophy - functional training.

Do you know that your nervous system doesn't remember individual muscle contractions, only movement patterns? This means that every time you train, you should be performing movements that mimic those you would do in your chosen sport or activity. In fact, to gain full benefit from any exercise, you need to train a muscle the way it would be used in any given activity.

So - if you're a runner (for example) - and you're training in the strength phase of your programme, we'd need to get you onto some front squats, as opposed to (for example) the incline leg press machine. The act of running is a 'closed chain' activity ... when your leg pushes against the ground, your body moves away from the ground, whereas on a leg-press machine, the weight moves away from your body. Any movement you perform is coordinated by your nervous system, which sends a signal to your muscles as well as feedback to your brain. So, if you did train for running using the incline leg-press, it would be a bit like playing a record on a turntable backwards. You'd be training a movement that would have the exact opposite nervous response to the one you want. The importance of this is that the more times you do a movement, the less conscious control you need to co-ordinate that movement. You ingrain it into your unconscious, which means you need less energy and effort to perform the activity!

Phew. Now that we've got the technical stuff out of the way, let's just say that we can make a phenomenal difference to your endurance, strength, efficiency and performance.