Elite Health and Performance

Elite Health and Performance Elite Health and Performance is an allied health hub specialising in sports injury management

28/08/2026

Most hip flexor stretches leave the actual culprit completely slack.

Re**us femoris is the only one of your quads that crosses the hip. It bends the hip and it straightens the knee, so it's working across two joints rather than one.

That's exactly why the standard kneeling lunge misses it. With your back shin flat on the floor and that knee close to straight, re**us femoris has plenty of slack at the bottom end, so you can hold the position for months and never actually lengthen it.

It's also the most likely one to be short if you're active, because it's involved every time you lift a knee and every time you straighten one. Running, cycling, squatting and kicking all load it, and then you sit on it for eight hours in between.

There's a quick way to tell. Do your usual lunge stretch and note what you feel, then bring that back heel up towards your backside. If it suddenly bites hard down the front of the thigh, you've just found the muscle you've been missing.

The two also feel different. Psoas sits deep in the crease of the hip, re**us femoris runs down the front of the thigh.

That's what the couch stretch solves, because the foot up behind you puts both ends on stretch at the same time. Squeeze the glutes as you settle in so the range comes out of your hip rather than your lower back, and give it three sets of 30 seconds most days.

27/08/2026

Mid back pain that catches sharply when you breathe or rotate usually isn't a muscle, it's a rib joint.

Your ribs join onto your spine at small joints, and those joints have to move every time your chest expands. Strain one and every breath tugs at something already irritated.

They glide as you twist as well, which is why the same spot bites when you rotate. Breathing and turning are loading the exact same joint, and that pairing is the giveaway.

It's worth knowing because it behaves nothing like the muscular mid back pain most people assume they have. That kind is dull, spread out and gets worse the longer you sit. This is sharp, you can put a finger on it, and it turns up on one specific movement every single time.

The treatment runs in that order for a reason. Everything around the joint has locked down to protect it, so releasing the tissue and the ligament first is what lets the joint actually move when it's manipulated.

25/08/2026

The ache that lingers after your knee injury often isn't the injury. It's the muscle covering for it.

The Popliteus is a small muscle at the back of your knee, and its job is to unlock the joint. Your knee locks into place when it's fully straight, and this muscle twists the shin slightly to release it before you can bend.

So it's involved in every step, every stair and every squat you take. A very small muscle carrying a very high workload.

After a knee injury, the joint guards itself; you lose a bit of range, and the way you rotate through the knee changes. The Popliteus quietly takes up that slack, and it often keeps working overtime long after the original injury has healed.

That's why the scan can come back clear while the ache carries on. The thing that got hurt has settled, and the muscle that's been covering for it was never told to stand down.

It tends to sit deep and towards the back or outer side of the knee; it's worse going down stairs and downhill than it is going up, and it doesn't catch or swell the way a meniscus does.

If that's the ache you've been carrying since your knee injury, get it looked at. It's usually a much quicker fix than people expect.

24/08/2026

If your mid-back pain keeps returning, posture is usually behind it, just not for the reason you'd think.

The muscles through your mid-back are endurance machines! They're built to hold you upright at low effort all day rather than to produce big force.

But... What they can't cope with is never getting a break. Sit in one position long enough, and the same fibres carry the whole load without ever switching off.

A muscle held under constant low-level tension gets less blood through it, waste builds up, and you end up with that deep burning ache between the shoulder blades that shifting around in your chair never quite fixes.

It's also why it's worse at 3pm than it was at 9am, and why it settles over the weekend then turns up again by Monday afternoon.

That's what a solid treatment resets. Releasing the tissues and restoring blood flow to reduce that ache and improve your range of motion quickly.

Sound a little something like you? Book in today and let's get you back on track to pain free!

21/08/2026

That hitch isn't a tight upper trap. It's an upper trap doing three muscles' work.

When you raise your arm, your shoulder blade has to rotate upwards underneath it, and that job is meant to be shared between a few muscles rather than done by one.

If the lower trap and the muscles working with it aren't holding up their end, the upper trap takes the lot. The problem is that the way it pulls lifts your whole shoulder towards your ear instead of rotating the blade, and that's the hitch you can see.

It's also why rubbing and stretching that upper trap buys you an hour and changes nothing. It isn't tight because it's overworking by choice, it's tight because it's covering for something.

Lying face down is what makes both of these work. You can't hoist yourself up with the upper trap from there, so the movement has to come from the middle of your back.

The swimmer teaches the blade to travel through a full arc under control, and the Y, T, W teaches it to hold position once it gets there. You want both.

Two or three sets of each, slow, light or no weight at all, done before you press or pull rather than at the end when you're already fatigued. If you can see the shoulder creeping up towards your ear, shorten the range rather than pushing through it.

20/08/2026

Most tennis elbow rehab only trains half of what that tendon actually does.

Nearly all of it is wrist extension, which makes sense, because that's where it hurts and that's where the tendon attaches.

But that same group of muscles on the outside of your elbow also turns your forearm over, and that job rarely gets trained at all.

Think about what actually sets it off day to day. Turning a door handle, opening a stiff jar lid, pouring from a full kettle. Most of that is twisting rather than lifting.

So if you only ever train the lift, you've rebuilt one half of the tendon's work and left the other half weak, which is why the same everyday movements keep finding it. That's exactly why supination is on the list here.

The brace sitting a couple of centimetres below the joint is doing something similar. It shifts the pull off the attachment itself and into the muscle further down, so a day of gripping costs the sore spot less while you're building it back up.

Give it three to four weeks before you judge it, and judge it on whether the everyday stuff is getting easier rather than whether the pain has completely gone. Tendons rebuild slowly, and steady progress in the right direction is what you're looking for.

18/08/2026

Tape doesn't fix golfer's elbow. What it does is buy you room to fix it.

Every time you grip something, the tendons on the inside of your elbow take the strain. A strapping like this takes a share of that load off them.

So the same day of work, lifting or training costs the tendon less than it did yesterday. That's the whole point of it.

Tendons don't mind load; what they mind is load that keeps spiking past what they can currently handle. When your job or your sport means you can't just stop gripping, lowering the cost per day is often the difference between settling down and staying stuck for months.

The catch is that tape plus the exact same workload changes nothing. It earns its place when it takes the edge off while you build strength back into the forearm.

One thing that helps alongside it: Golfer's elbow hates gripping with your wrist curled forward. Keeping the wrist straight as you take hold of something pulls a surprising amount of tension off those tendons.

And if you still need tape a couple of months in, that's a sign the strengthening side hasn't been done properly, not that you need more tape.

Save it for the next time you need to strap before work or training!

17/08/2026

An Achilles that keeps flaring usually isn't the problem, it's just where the problem shows up.

It sits at the end of a long chain. Every stride sends load from your hip down through the knee and foot, and whatever those don't handle gets dumped into the tendon.

If your glutes aren't extending the hip properly, you end up pushing off harder with the calf to get the same stride. Over a 10k that's thousands of extra reps landing on a tendon already working near its limit.

The foot does something similar. When the arch and the small muscles underneath stop holding their shape, load twists through the Achilles instead of tracking straight up it, and tendons cope with twist far worse than they cope with straight-line load.

That's why treating only the sore spot buys you about a week. The calf feels better, then the same demand goes straight back through it, and you're where you started.

If you want a read on your own, do slow single-leg calf raises through full range on both sides and count them honestly. A clear gap between the good side and the sore one tells you what's been missing.

That number matters more than how the tendon feels today, because walking around pain-free is not the same as being able to take the load of a run.

If you're ready to fix that Achilles pain for good, book in today and let's get you on the right path to long-term recovery!

You can squat well over bodyweight and still fall apart twenty seconds into the first one of these.That’s no knock on yo...
14/08/2026

You can squat well over bodyweight and still fall apart twenty seconds into the first one of these.

That’s no knock on your training; it’s just that almost none of it asks for this.

Squats, deads, lunges and leg press all happen on two feet, moving up and down or forwards and back. They build serious strength in those directions.

What they never test is whether your hip can hold you steady on one leg, while your pelvis wants to drop and your thigh bone wants to spin inwards. That’s the quality that decides whether you stay square or collapse out on the field or track.

So run the first two movements as a test before you treat them as training.

If your pelvis sags, if you’re rolling backwards to find the position, or if one side lasts noticeably longer than the other, you’ve just found a gap your squat numbers have been hiding.

These might not add 100kg to your back squat, but they will change how your hips hold up when you’re tired and working in unpredictable environments.

Give them a go and let us know how you stack up!

11/08/2026

Sometimes you just hit that sweet spot... 😮‍💨👀

Address

24 Edmondstone Road
Bowen Hills, QLD
4006

Opening Hours

Monday 7am - 7pm
Tuesday 7am - 7pm
Wednesday 7am - 7pm
Thursday 7am - 7pm
Friday 7am - 7pm
Saturday 8am - 5pm

Telephone

+61738526841

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Elite Health and Performance posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category