About me
I am Martin Kumm, I am a sports chiropractor with an academic background and more than 10 years of experience working with some of the best athletes and coaches in the world. My main goal is to help the athletes achieve their maximum potential, using a unique method that gives excellent results. The most used method of training as much and as hard as possible will usually end up getting the athlete injured and will never reach their full physical potential. Instead, recovering from that takes up precious time from actually improving the results. My approach, on the other hand, is to work smart, not hard. Despite all the technological advancements, what is often lacking in the current performance world, is smart monitoring and adjusting the training load to individual athletes' needs. Yet, there is a so-called “Green-Zone Window” for training. It's where training/racing stimulus matches neurological and tissue loading capacity - recovery exceeds tissue breakdown (optimal loading). To say it simply - this means that if an athlete is physically and mentally in the “Green Zone” the likelihood of getting injured is minimal and the highest level of performance can be expected. If an athlete trains out of the “Green-Zone Window” the body needs to start using compensatory mechanisms Which in turn and in time leads to a chronic overload which in turn ends up the athlete getting an injury. The question is, how to find the “Green-Zone Window” for each athlete, since it's very personal and depends on the person. That's exactly where I come in. What's the exact process? With athletes I work closely together I use a simple but effective protocol: Test, Treat, Leave It. Test - the simplest and quickest way to tap into their neuromuscular system is to use muscles as indicators to see what is the maximum load where the compensatory systems won't be switched on. When they do the so-called “glitch” happens by the central nervous system as a protection mechanism. It’s my job to figure out using different tests where in the system this “glitch” is and Treat it. To treat the “glitch” I use different chiropractic techniques. After finding and treating the “glitch” in the system comes the most important part - Leave It which means leaving time for the results to show. This part is where the magic happens. Athletes body needs time to react to the treatment and mostly it has 3 outcomes: Got better, stays the same, got worse. Any one of these outcomes carries a very valuable information to me. While using the same tests again I can compare and figure out if the “glitch” in the system is manifesting with the same tests or it has moved. Especially with chronic overload injuries it might take quite a long time before I have removed all the compensational “layers” and I reach to the true cause of the athletes pain. An example of a success story
In 2016 I had the honor to work with Swiss Orienteering superstar - Judith Wyder. A year before she had dominated the orienteering World Championships by winning 3 gold medals. In 2016 her body gave in and she was far from medals. Post Worlds she turned to me to figure out what had gone wrong. She was not able to lift her left leg and had upper back pain. How she still managed to even run at the Worlds beats me. MRI and X-ray scans were all unremarkable - all her doctors said she is fine. We set to work. I used the same principle - Test, Treat and Leave It. I knew as long as she is not able to lift the leg on the treatment table she's far from running. We did multiple sessions per week to monitor her progress. Within a couple of weeks her neurology started to improve. She had regained some hip muscular activity which in turn allowed her to start lifting the leg. Her muscular activity was improving, even though her pain had not changed much. For me this was all good news as 90% of the times muscle strength precedes pain. Even though pain was not completely gone she started training as our indicator muscle tests stayed strong - meaning her neuromuscular system was healed and ready for loading. Within 2 months she returned to racing pain free. Whom have I previously worked with? Teams:
-EHC Basel Ice Hockey Club
-Estonian National Ice Hockey Teams (U20/Men)
-Sm'Aesch Volleyball Team
-Education First - Easy Post Professional Cycling Team. Individual Athletes:
-Robert Rooba (Ice Hockey)
-Marko Albert (Triathlon)
-Judith Wyder (Orienteering)
-Silvan Wicki (Track and Field, sprinter)
-Alexandra Burghart (Track and Field, sprinter)
-Amelie Lederer (Track and Field, sprinter)
-Markus Fuchs (Track and Field, sprinter)
-Ivona Dadic (Track and Field, Hepatlon)
-Anu Ennok (Volleyball)
-Pascale Stöcklin (Track and Field, Pole Vault)
Danijel Vukicevic (Handball)
If you are an athlete or a coach and feel that I could be of help when reaching your goals, find my contacts on www.martinkumm.com and contact me!
