My 4 Favorite Areas to Treat With the EDGE Mobility Ball.

"C'mon baby make it hurt so good."...except I don't make it hurt.

Howdy Readers! Today's post will be short and sweet and it really isn't all that informative. I just wanted to take a moment and share with you all the four areas that I have found to be most effected by me using the EDGE mobility ball.

I have been playing with this thing since I got the Mobility/Stability Combo Pack and I have really taken a liking to it. I'm not saying these are the four places where other people should use it, they are just my favorite for my body! There is a lot of other areas that can be treated with the ball.

Fibular Head/Lateral Gastrocnemius (Calf)

The lateral calf/fibular head area is often a must treat area when I assess my patient's when doing IASTM or working on restricted ankle dorsiflexion. It is no surprise that this is an area in need of treatment for myself either considering my history of terrible ankle mobility. 

Suprapatellar Pouch/Quadriceps Tendon

I don't have tight hip flexors but man do I have a mobility issue in my quads. I actually had a slight calcification of my distal quadriceps tendon when I had an x-ray done this past summer. If I don't work at this very often on my left side I actually get issues when trying to achieve full knee extension like in a plank position.

Posterior Shoulder - Teres Major & Minor/Infraspinatus/Lats

I have pretty poor shoulder mobility in many different directions. However, after spending 5 or 10 minutes on a few areas around the posterior shoulder and my lats while doing large arcs or shoulder circles I was able to rapidly improve my shoulder motion. I'm talking about going from a -1 FMS score to a modest 2. Instantly.

Intrinsic Foot Musculature/Plantar Fascia/Abductor Hallucis/Flexor Hallucis Brevis

Need a free pedicure? Roll this ball along the plantar aspect of the foot for a few minutes and you will be bound to hit a few "spots". This is definitely something I need to try and do more of considering how terrible my great toe extension/dorsiflexion is. This is something you can do sitting at a computer desk or watching TV...No reason not to spend a couple of minutes getting better.

In fact, using something like this mobility ball, a foam roller, or a stability/corrective exercise only take a few minutes out of your day to complete them. You can do a large majority of them while doing other mundane tasks like brushing your teeth, watching TV, checking emails, reading blogs, or surfing Reddit. There isn't really a good excuse to not being on top of this if you have issues. As Gray Cook would say, " it took a habit to get you into that pattern, and not it's going to take a habit to break that pattern. "

That's it for today, don't forget to sign up for my giveaway!

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EDGEility Tool Free Giveaway!

Howdy Readers! To go along with my Ultimate EDGE Mobility/Stability Combo Pack Review that I posted yesterday...I am giving away one of the pieces of the pack. I am going to be giving away one EDGEility tool courtesy of Dr. E himself, the man behind the entire EDGE Mobility System. Want to know what this tool is and haven't seen my review video yet? Well check it out and see if you want one...for free!

You can enter below by liking my Facebook Page or following me on Twitter. The entry period will go until next Tuesday Night at Midnight! Good Luck! 

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Movie Monday: The Ultimate Mobility/Stability Combo Pack Review

Howdy Readers! Today is Monday so that means it is time for another movie! This week I have a video product review for you. In this video I will be looking at the Ultimate Mobility/Stability Combo pack from The EDGE Mobility System. I am no stranger to the EDGE Mobility System but recently they started to sell their products as combo packs instead of just singular items. However, you can still buy each item individually as well!

What Does The Ultimate Mobility & Stability Combo Pack Contain?

• 1 EDGE Mobility Ball
• 1 EDGEility Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization (IASTM) Tool for Self-Treatment
• 2 pairs of EDGE Mobility Bands
• 2 pairs of TowEDGE Toe Spacers 
• 1 EDGE Mobility System Carrying Pouch

What Did I Think of The Combo Pack?

I had a lot to say about these products and I had to edit this video a ton to get it even close to watchable in length so I apologize for it being around ten minutes in length! I will leave most of my comments for the video but I must say that I am a fan. I think that these "combo packs" would make a great Holiday gift for grapplers, brazilian jiu jitsu players, judokas, crossfit athletes, gym rats, runners, triathletes, I could really make this list go on and on. Additionally, this would be a great gift for athletic trainers, physio/physical therapists, chiropractors, and students of all these professions.

So What Do I Do With This Stuff?

If this is one of your first thoughts after getting interested in these products from my review video then don't have any fear. I have several videos and articles on how I've used the individual pieces of the EDGE Mobility System. There are many more to be found on the creator's website, The Manual Therapist. It may be worth checking the new but cheap E-Book, An Introduction to Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization, by Ove Indergaard and I believe you can also find it on the Kindle Store.

My Previous Articles Related to EDGE Mobility System Products:

• Tibial Internal Rotation Mobilization w/ The EDGE Mobility Band

• The EDGE Mobility Band Review

• Can EDGE Mobility Bands Really Improve Mobility? Let Us Investigate.

• Case of The Week: Bilateral Plantar Fasciosis

• Bilateral Femoral Acetabular Impingement In a Collegiate Soccer Player

• Case of The Week: Persistant Postural Headache

• HEP for the HIP: Self Hip IR mobilization!

• Quick Video Update: Ankle Dorsiflexion Mobilization with Movement Variation.

• Quick Vid - An Ankle Sprain And a Loss of Mobility

• Concussion, Cervical, TMJ/TMD or a Combination Thereof?

Previous Videos Using EDGE Mobility System Products

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Video Request: How To Tape Turf Toe

Howdy Readers! After posting my latest Movie Monday video I was asked by an individual to post a video on how to tape the great toe when suffering from turf toe. First of all, turf toe is a forced hyperextension of the great toe or first metatarsophalangeal (MTP) joint which results in damage to the plantar aspect of the 1st MTP joint.

Often times this can result in damage to a structure known as the volar plate. Due to the nature of this structure, this injury can be very debilitating for athletic activity and can even cause suffering with simple things like pushing off  with the foot while walking. This taping technique is commonly used by certified athletic trainers to allow athletes to return-to-play after minor or moderate injury and it can be used to protect, rest, and allow proper healing of the joint after initial injury.

However, this should only be used as an acute intervention and other rehabilitative exercises and manual therapies may be warranted. While limiting great toe extension may allow a person to remain physically active with such an injury or lower pain levels with activities of daily living...it is a necessary and crucial motion for the great toe joint to have. Therefore, it is imperative that pull pain free range of motion be restored after suffering a great toe injury such as turf toe.

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Movie Monday: How To Tape a Sprained Thumb

Good morning readers! Another Monday and so I bring you another movie! This week's video is another how-to for taping but this time it is for your thumb. In this video I show two variations on how to tape an injured thumb with two different levels of support/restriction. There is one more modification that could be done with this tape job to take it to the ultimate level of restriction and that is called "The Hood". However, I thought the video was long enough as is and I reserve that for football lineman normally. Here it is! 

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October Blog Traffic & Income Report

Howdy Readers! I wanted to start a new tradition for the blog and it is something that I have long contemplated. As I have continued to blog over the last year or so I have gotten more interested in the  art, science, community/culture, and "theories" of blogging.

I have learned a lot from other bloggers by reading their content, seeing them lead by example, and I have also learned a lot from their advice/content directed at blogging specifically. My blog was started as a way for me to network with others, share ideas, practice my writing, and to hopefully help others.

I never started a blog with the intention of making any money and I didn't even know it was possible to monetize a blog in the beginning. I have watched others make life changing decisions as a result of their blogs and I have seen some people make substantial amounts of blogging. I do not make any substantial amount but none of us would make any money if it wasn't for the readers/traffic that we generate.

Therefore, I wanted to become more transparent with my blog and any income that it may generate. I want to focus on several key areas with this and these posts.

• How I have done with traffic generation and revenue.
• What has generated changes in the aforementioned
• What I have learned from the changes.

I have seen others such as Lindsay & Bjork from Pinch of Yum and I think that it is an honest, open, and educational dialogue to have with you readers, the blogging community, and potential new bloggers. I am still learning a ton but I hope that I can share ideas or lessons learned along the way with others that may be curious. While I do not make much money from this endeavor (like I said this is not the goal) I think it is only right to stay transparent. Therefore, I will be sharing my monthly traffic and ad revenue reports with you in these posts.

So let's begin then...because this is my first post and there is nothing to compare it to - I will post the statistics from my previous 3 months.

Traffic

This sort of traffic is laughable by many in the blogging community. Some people average this many page views by the second  or minute. However, we must all start somewhere and it is a big increase from when I started blogging where I was happy to see 400 page views a month. Some additional traffic stats that I have to share are:

I am encouraged by my relatively low bounce rate. The bounce rate is the % of people that leave my blog after visiting only one page. This is associated closely with the pages per session stat which is how many pages people view on average while looking at my blog in one viewing session.

So how much did I make? Well for one...I forgot to mention that these statistics are for my blog only and do not include my YouTube video stats. I will however include my earnings from my YouTube video ads. I have three sources of revenue that I use to monetize my content. Google Adsense for ads on my blog, YouTube (technically Google Adsense) for my videos, and Sovrn (formerly Lijit) for my website ads as well.

So what is the breakdown you may be wondering? Well here it is by source:

A couple of things stick out at me from the past few months when I look at this table:

1. I had an error with my Sovrn Ads and I obviously wasn't very observant of this and it went quite awhile without me fixing it. Once I fixed it there obviously was a big increase. I am excited to see where this goes over the next year if traffic continues to increase.
2. Secondly, I see a definite and consistent increase in YouTube ad revenue as I start to create more YouTube videos and increase the amount of subscribers to my YouTube Channel. I hope to create more YouTube videos that are of better quality with better content over the next several months so I am curious if this trend will continue in a linear fashion.

Well...There you have it folks. I will do this at the end of every month. I am definitely not bragging about these stats nor do I see my blog ever making me rich. Some people have made it rich from their blogs and that is impressive. Those scenarios took the right mixture of hard work, great content, dedication and the right niche of readers. I see quite a few flaws with how I run my blog to ever reach it big but fixing some of those flaws also creates a better overall experience for my readers and creates a better looking blog overall. So who knows...

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Once a Student - Always a Student

So if you have ever read my blog before you probably know that I am a big fan of The Manual Therapist and Dr. Erson Religioso, III, DPT. Its true and I have learned a lot from him, his blog and his videos. One of his mainstays is the ability to be dynamic, open-minded, and ever evolving and that is why he calls the way he practices The Eclectic Approach.

These are great qualities for clinicians and I have tried to adopt this style of practice myself. I learned about basic resets and repeated movement exams/treatments from Dr. E's material. I thought I had a pretty good handle on the basics. However, ask any expert in anything...The basics are basic but they are not basic. What? I mean that even if you try or practice sometime a hundred times...there is still something new to be learned or nuance to be perfected over time. So what is the point?

Well I have been struggling with some neck pain and muscle spasm for the last week as a result of my brazilian jiu jitsu training. I hadn't really done much for it because most clinicians suck at self-assessment and treatment. I at least made sure that I didn't have any fractures or other major red flags which thankfully I do not. So instead I set up a consultation with Dr. E and I was able to learn a few things even though we technically didn't do anything that I didn't already know! Check it out!

So what did I learn about using repeated-motions that I didn't know before?

• I wasn't aware that I was compensating out of fear-avoidance when attempting to treat myself using repeated-motions (specifically on repeated cervical extension with retraction)
• I didn't realize how profound of an impact there would be by correcting this
• A little bit of resistance while performing the repeated-motion like an active PNF can be immensely helpful for getting to end-range.
• I was not aware of how quickly I was going with my repeated-motions. Slowing down the pace of movement seemed to help lower the perceived threat and opened up my range of motion.
• I didn't think this had much an impact previously, I used to let my patients go to town doing their repeated motions as quickly as possible. There were some cases where the repeated-motions didn't net the effect that I was looking for and this could be why.

So what is the moral of today's post? Don't be afraid to get a second opinion or second set of eyes when trying to treat yourself as a clinician. Doing so doesn't make you a bad clinician, dumb, or incompetent...It just means you are currently a patient and not a clinician. Secondly and more importantly, ALWAYS keep an open mind and be prepared to learn something new every day, every hour, every minute. Lifelong learning = lifelong enjoyment.

This isn't quite what I had in mind.

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Movie Monday: How to Buddy Tape Your Fingers!

Good Morning Readers! I hope nobody has a case of the Mondays...Today we have our second installment of Movie Mondays. This video will share with you a common, basic, easy but often screwed up taping technique. Athletic Trainers are pretty much the experts at taping athletes and have been for over a decade now.

However, some tape jobs like this can be done by individuals themselves. Which could obviously come in handy when an athletic trainer is not present or when you participate in a sport where it is not common for athletic trainers to be present. This is a great taping technique when a person has suffered an injury such as a minor interphalangeal or metacarpophalangeal (finger) sprain and needs additional support to allow participation while the injury is still healing. This could be done with several types of tape from light stretchy stuff, to somewhat flexible elastikon to a more restrictive but cheap and common athletic/white/coaches' tape. It just depends on the amount of support you want versus the amount of movement or function you want/need.

Additionally, this could be used prophylactically in sports where the fingers are at risk for injury when isolated...I'm looking at you football linemen, rugby & judo players, brazilian jiu jitsu athletes, or grapplers of all shapes and sizes.

There are a lot of taping techniques that an athlete could apply themselves and I hope in the future I can share some more of them with all of you. However, somethings like an ankle tape job are not very feasible for an untrained person to do alone. Especially when you could save time and money by getting a decent ankle brace instead. That sort of product or scenario doesn't exist for this tape job.

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Movie Monday: The Vertical Compression Test

Howdy Readers! Today is Monday and hopefully the beginning of a new tradition here at Eat.Run.Rehabilitate.! I hope to continue to upload and post videos weekly and sometimes even biweekly if I get overly ambitious. I have been trying to take some time and pre-record some videos so that way when I do have time to do some editing and posting it will allow me to be more caught up on everything.

Anyways, today's video is going to be about the Vertical Compression Test. This is another test that I learned from Jay Dicharry's Anatomy for Runners book. I've said it before and I'll say it again...not a bad book to have around for reference! This is a great way to go about assessing a person's overal posture on their postural stability and its effect on the entire kinetic chain. Check out my video below!

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What To Look for When Looking at Running Gait

Howdy Readers! A lot of people like to talk the talk when it comes to assessing running gait/form. However, a lot of what people seem to say regarding gait sometimes boils down to just that...all talk. Some people look at a still frame or picture of an individual running and make claims based off of one moment in time. Somebody hook these people up with Miss Cleo because they must be able to look into the past and the future! Amazing!

In reality, there are very specific things that you should be looking at from very specific reference points. Specifically, to best evaluate a person's running gait you would want to be able to evaluate their form from both frontal plane and sagittal plane views. Do you know what they are already? Well I didn't have this handy dandy knowledge until after I attended the Healthy Running conference (see my review here) and learned this from Dr. Mark Cucuzzella and Jay Dicharry, MPT, CSCS.

 Before this I put most of my faith into my clinical assessments and often shied away from visual gait assessment. You shouldn't try to separate these two entities...they should be combined together to draw conclusions. There were two main reasons for this. One, I didn't have a nice high-speed camera for this. It is pretty difficult to be sure of what you are seeing unless you have the ability to record at higher frame-rates. Secondly, I didn't have this nice little handy-dandy checklist that I am about to share with you. Note: Please remember to compare left to right for these items when possible.

Frontal View
Back when I first started running, on the left in the white.
Excessive Heel Strike!!

The Frontal View

• Step Width
• Narrow, Neutral, or Wide?
• Arm Movement
• Abducted, Cross-over, or In-line?
• Trunk
• Ipsilateral, Neutral, or Contralateral tilting/lurching?
• Hip Stability
• Adduction vs.  Abduction?
• Internally vs. Externally Rotated?
• Neutral?
• Dynamic Knee Alignment
• Valgus vs. Varus vs. Neutral?
• Midstance Foot Position
• Supinated vs. Pronated vs. Neutral
• Cadence
• Slow? Excessively Quick?
• Other Abnormalities?

The Lateral View.

The Lateral View

• Vertical Displacement
• <4cm li="" limited="">
• 4-6cm = Optimal
• >6cm = Increased
• Arm Movement
• Excessive anterior/forward motion
• Neutral
• Excessive posterior/backward motion
• Torso Orientation
• Anterior vs. Posterior vs. Neutral
• Lumbopelvic Posture
• Lordosis vs. Neutral vs. Flat
• Hip Extension during Toe off
• 15-20 degrees = normal
• 5-15 degrees = limited
• <0 degrees="severely" li="" limited="">
• Knee Excursion during Stance
• >25 degrees = flexed
• 20-25 degrees = optimal
• <20 degrees="stiff</li">
• Foot Strike Pattern
• Heel vs. Midfoot vs. Forefoot
• Neutral Contact point vs. Foot contacts anterior to COM (Center of Mass)

We all run different, but there are general things that we should look for and look to avoid for all running gaits!

Conclusion: There you have it folks! A simple check list to use for each view! I don't really use a posterior view anymore but you could still use the frontal view checklist for a lot of the same things that you might see on the posterior aspect. Additionally, don't assume that a duck is a duck when performing these analyses. Just because a person runs with zero hip extension does not necessarily mean that they have zero hip extension! Check their passive mobility! This could easily be a stability or motor control problem. 

Another example of this could be that just because you see something like excessive dynamic knee valgus don't assume they have a weak set of glutes! It could be due to poor ankle dorsiflexion that produces compensatory subtalar joint pronation and then causes compensatory knee valgus. Practice these assessments to work on being able to assess these things individually but quickly. You want to get to the point where you notice the "abnormal" instead of having to check for "normals" everywhere. 

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