Sam Bayliss Physiotherapy

Sam Bayliss Physiotherapy Empowering you to understand your body and learn exactly how to heal from your injuries.

22/08/2026

Home visits in Gungahlin and North Canberra now available.

This could be your point of view!

24/06/2026

I'm not a fan of the 'no excuses' type of posts

You know, the ones where there's an 80-year-old man with one leg and only two fingers on his left hand and a crocodile hanging off his shoulder because he had to swim across a river to get to his gym. And the caption says, "What's your excuse?"

I AM a big fan of recognising opportunities and yesterday while my kids were playing Australian rules footy, I saw this fence and thought, " I bet that would be quite fun to do some stability training."

When I'm speaking to people about therapeutic exercise, they often tell me they don't have time or that there are various things about their setup that make it impractical for them. I always try and come up with creative solutions like this because quite often there are little odds and ends of time that we have as parents which we could productively use for rehabilitation, recovery and in general for exercise and strength training if we only learn to recognise them.

15/06/2026

Pain is a really interesting topic and I recognise that it's genuinely complex. However, I think a lot of the reasoning in pain science that leads people to make the kind of recommendations this guy is talking about comes down to three main issues:

1. Thr inability of people to wrangle with complex biomechanics.
2. The necessity to homogeonise large populations in research and the results this has on the effectiveness of interventions that are tested at scale.
3. People being too smart for their own good!

I realise that was three things. Evidently I am not too smart for my own good.

10/06/2026

It's an interesting question in rehab how to discern signal from noise in both one-to-one testing and also in the research.

We know that greater grip strength is correlated with greater life expectancy and this has led some to some people including me recommending increased grip, strength work, especially in older people.

But the truth is that grip strength probably does not lead directly to longer life expectancy except in edge cases. For example, you're falling off a boat and you have to grab and hold onto the rail!

It's more likely that grip strength acts in the research as a proxy for a number of other physical capabilities. In my opinion, it's likely that the most critical one of these is neuromuscular control. Our hands are some of the most densely innervated structures that we control and the ability to rapidly and powerfully use the muscles operated by our hands is a pretty good proxy for overall neuromuscular function.

So should we not train grip strength? I'm pretty sure it's a good idea, but we should bear in mind that people have limited numbers of hours available to them and we should always be seeking to design the best approaches possible to achieve our chosen goal.

09/06/2026

Complexity...

Part 1: the point CLINICIANS miss about exercises.

What IS the point? What IS the goal?

08/06/2026

There are a million people on the internet giving different advice and that's not even including the clinicians who you might see in person

It's really critical to have one voice guiding your recovery. If you're pulling in 10 different directions, it's really hard to get better.

Honestly, even if the person guiding you is not the very best person you can choose, it's probably still better to listen to them rather than to split your attention.

Recovery is hard enough without confusion added into the mix.

07/06/2026

Form is variable subjective and we shouldn't feel locked into one idea of 'good form'.

However, if you have lower back pain form is probably quite important to reducing and improving your experience of lower back pain.

It's important we think about who we're speaking to when we communicate about movement. When I speak to people who don't experience back pain, I think there's a much wider range of techniques for a given exercise which I consider acceptable.

But if you already have pain, then why would you use a technique that concentrates force onto a limited range of structures? You'll either concentrate it onto the already damaged structures and possibly damage them more and almost certainly increase their pain in those areas. OR you'll offload those already damaged structures and increase the pressure on structures which are already compensating for the damage ones.

It doesn't make sense.

If you have back pain you should ignore people that tell you form doesn't matter.

05/06/2026

Are deadlift dangerous? Yes

Is not deadlift dangerous, yes

If you can't pick things up off the floor without hurting your back, you are in trouble.

If you are becoming osteopenic because you haven't loaded your skeleton enough to build bone mass, you are in trouble.

There's a lot of nuance to these discussions in real life and sometimes answering easy questions like 'is a given exercise dangerous' can take us down a not-very-useful road.

04/06/2026

Hanging is like most interventions. It makes some people better, it makes some people worse and for some people it does absolutely nothing at all!

I'm a big believer in trying lots of different interventions if you want to get the absolute best results but trying them in a sensible fashion, based on what's actually going on with your spine.

I have a guide to trying out hanging techniques I included in my upcoming Low Back Foundations course.

The best hanging traction setup I've ever tried is from . It's not the one in the video! It's way better (called the Big Ray Strap and Godzilla Band. And if you're in Australia you can buy this setup from (no affiliation despite the name!)

04/06/2026

Adding Nuance to social media!

I get frustrated sometimes with the lack of nuance in discussions of exercise, back pain, rehab and all kinds of things on social media. So this is my humble effort at adding some more Nuance to discussions that I think can benefit from it.

The video I'm looking at here is from an orthopaedic surgeon and I'd like to start by saying that I'm sure he is trying his very best to communicate his experience effectively to his audience. The fact that I happen to disagree with some of what he's saying is not an attack on his character and I hope no one takes it that way!

As clinicians I believe we are allways trying to do the very best for our clients. And a reasonable discussion of the ins and outs of the things that we say and the things that we practise is the best way for us all to become better clinicians.

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