Dwain Chambers: Do cheats prosper?

As many of you will know, Dwain Chambers has been selected to compete for Great Britain in the World Indoor Athletics Championships in Valencia, Spain next month. And quite rightly so, according to the ‘first-past-the-post’ selection criteria that UK Athletics (UKA) have adopted. Legally he has the right, based upon those selection criteria that everyone in the sport has to follow, to compete in Valencia. It is the only decision that UKA could have made.

The question is whether the selection criteria are correct, fair and proper. In my opinion, in this case it is not. I believe, and this may not be the opinion of Mobilis, given the amount of time drugs cheats have been among our sport it is hard to believe that this scenario has not been predicted and the consequences clarified. Listening to reports of Neils de Vos, the recently appointed Chief Executive of UKA, I can’t imagine that the present criteria would still be in place if he’d have had his way and had the time to have dealt with it.

The public are looking at all our governing bodies to ‘do the right thing’ both morally and professionally, but UKA have been unable to make a stand against what is clearly an inappropriate selection due to an ineffective selection protocol. In this day of political correctness-gone-mad, can we please have some common sense about this issue?

The problems that I have with this selection are:

• He is preventing a young and promising athlete from competing and gaining valuable experience at a world class event.


• He is compromising how our Olympic athletes, our Olympic movement and even our country are being portrayed.


• It comes over very strongly that we are condoning drugs cheats.

I can’t believe that he will ultimately be allowed to compete. If the threats of Euromeetings (an umbrella body representing most leading promoters) are anything to go by, they are looking to ostracise drugs cheats, and it would not be surprising if this offers further momentum to Neils de Vos’ position. In fact I can’t believe that the ‘powers-that-be’ will not have thought of another obstacle further down the road to prevent him from competing, but still keeping their legal noses clean. Let’s wait and see.

Is Chambers the Tip of the Drugs Iceberg?

The sad Dwain Chambers affair, just reminds us that the drug cheats are still around in the world of athletics and that our testing laboratories are playing catch up to try and find the new performance-enhancing substances. Victor Conte, head of the California-based BALCO Lab, recently said: “The vast majority of athletes in Beijing will be using performance enhancing substances, but they will be undetectable”.

What chance does the ‘honest’ athlete have? And you’d like to think that there are some still out there. Certainly you look at some of our top athletes in the UK and it would be hard to believe some of them are ‘dirty’, but we’ll probably never know for sure.

Talking of our top athletes, one came out of the woodwork yesterday to comment on the Dwain Chambers affair. Linford Christie was once described by one of his fellow Olympic competitors as the most balanced athlete in the world – he has a chip on both shoulders! I'm not sure what Mobilis thinks about this but, I’m not sure why he felt anybody cared what a former convicted drugs cheat (and as a current coach of a convicted drugs cheat) thinks, but he put his two-penneth in today anyway. He believes that British athletics has brought this on itself by not having enough good sprinters to beat Chambers.

I think he’s missing the point really, but then he returned to his usual tack by saying, “A lot of people have given their opinion, but I only look after myself and what I do”. There speaks a true team player and people’s champion. One thing he did say that was quite insightful though was, “at Beijing we should not concentrate on the medals we win, we should be looking at the performances. Our young athletes should be getting the experience they need in Beijing ready to look for medals at the London 2012 Olympics.”

Does this refreshing attitude make him a future Performance Director of UKA? Perhaps not, but he’s absolutely right, with the lack of experience of our younger athletes it would be unrealistic and unreasonable to load the pressure on them to win medals at Beijing, but with the experience from that Olympics, we could be looking at a formidable team in 2012 if we nurture our young athletes physically and mentally over the next four years.

Lets see what happens between now and the World Indoors, lets hope athletics has some good stories to tell in the build up.

Mobilis Performance Partners with Flexi-Sport

Mobilis Performance™ is proud to announce a new partner. Flexi-Sport has long been established in the fitness industry and produces the Flexi-bar, which is an excellent product that teaches you how to engage the core naturally. The Flexi-bar causes the core to work, whether you are trying to engage it or not. In fact, as the core is a ‘reflex’ muscle group (in other words it needs to be able to work without you consciously thinking about it), a core programme is incomplete without this type of training.

To describe how the core works, think about when you bend over to pick something up. You never consciously think to tighten your core before you pick up the object, the process happens automatically. At least it should do.

For many people, this natural and reflex tightening of their core doesn't happen for some reason, often due to poor posture and a history of previous injury. In these cases, the core has to be trained to work functionally again. The Flexi-bar is a great way of doing that.

We are now using the Flexi-bars on our stabilise courses to teach people how to work the core muscles in the right way.

Flexi-Sport also run courses to teach you how to use the Flexi-bars, and these courses compliment the work done by Mobilis Performance. We cover many areas on our stabilise courses, and we now also teach you when the Flexi-bars should be used in an exercise programme and how to best integrate them into your programming.

The Flexi-bar courses, run by Steve Schiemer and Rebecca Small, then take this Flexi-bar training to the next level and give you a variety of exercises and programmes to follow.

We are looking to work together at FitPro (the international fitness conference and exhibition) where both Mobilis Performance and Flexi-bar are presenters.

Mobilis and Flexi-Sport are keen to develop a course structure that allows us to combine the benefits of the biomechanical aspect of Mobilis Performances work, with the practical skills of Flexi-bar. We hope to make this a two-day course and we will keep you informed on the progress of this course.

To buy a Flexi-bar, please visit the Mobilis Healthcare website.

Recent and Upcoming Intelligent Training™ Courses

The recent course we ran for the Professional Golf Association (PGA) was a great success. On the course, we had nine PGA coaches and a personal trainer who delivers bespoke fitness programmes for golfers. They got a lot of the course and their feedback on the course was excellent.

The people who took the course now fully appreciate that you cannot provide the best coaching service to any level of golfer without understanding the biomechanics of the body and its influences on the swing. We used one example of a right-handed, 18 handicapper who typically slices the ball (the ball moves quite a long way from left to right while it’s in the air). This can obviously be due to several set up and swing factors including incomplete shoulder turn, poor weight transference, out to in swing plane, over-swinging and many others.

After working together for a day, the participants on the course now appreciate that no matter how hard they work on someone’s swing, if the golfers have what we describe as ‘intrinsic biomechanical issues’, their hard work coaching and practicing might be in vain.

Biomechanical factors that can cause a slice can include, tight upper back, one leg being longer than the other, a rotated pelvis (which most golfers don’t even know that they have), tight sciatic nerves (the nerve that runs down the back of the leg) and, especially, a tight median nerve (a nerve in the arm). All these factors need to be dealt with before the coach can confidently say that any abnormal swing is due technique.

By the end of the day the participants on the course were confident that they could tell the difference between a poor swing due to abnormal biomechanics and one due to poor technique.

We are working closely with the PGA and will be running these courses throughout the country to teach PGA pros, fitness instructors, allied health professionals and strength and conditioning coaches the implications of this science to the golf swing.

Regarding our athletics-related courses, we are presenting a seminar this weekend (16/17 February 2008) at Birmingham Alexander Stadium at a squad day for their endurance coaches, which will be lead by one of our tutors Rosalind Shuttleworth. The seminar will be about how understanding intrinsic biomechanical principles can significantly reduce the risk of athletes getting injured. On Sunday 17 February, we have another Normalise course that we’re delivering at the Robin Park Arena in Wigan, lead by another of our tutors Nigel Morgan. I (Martin Haines) will also be at both events and hope to see you there.

New Year, New Opportunities

It's been quite a long time long since our last blog entry. Christmas, booking people on courses and planning 2008 has taken up most of our time in recent weeks.

The New Year brings some great opportunities for us as a business and, hopefully, that means we'll be able to run more courses and participate in more seminars and exhibitions, so we can help more sports coaches and fitness professionals.

We're expanding the number of courses for both groups and have planned more than 20 Intelligent Training courses between now and the end of April 2008. The courses are now being run in many regions between the North East and the South West, but we're keen to go beyond these regions and provide the courses across the UK. We hope to be able to reach the other regions by the summer. In fact, we hope to be confirming courses in Wales by the end of January 2008.

This year we're expanding into new arenas. We're starting to run a full series of Intelligent Training courses for golf coaches. We are working closely with the PGA to look at the best ways of rolling out the courses for golf pros. This will help to teach pros to learn more about their students and help them in many ways beyond just improving their golf swing.

A properly prescribed exercise programme can help the swing, as Tiger Woods has proven. It can help the shape of shots and consistency of swing.

Mechanical problems like leg length discrepancies can cause slices, tight sciatic nerves can cause timing and tempo problems. Muscle spasm, that cannot even be felt, can cause restricted movement in the hips and spines.

Similarly to the coaching and fitness arenas, we are keen to make the courses available to as many golf coaches in as many regions as possible. We have a taster course on 1st Feb 2008 at the PGA in the Belfry in Birmingham, which is fully subscribed, and we'll report on its progress in the next few weeks. If you're interested to find out more, please send an email to Mobilis Performance.

East Midlands Sports Personality of the Year - Enterprise in Sport Award – Mobilis Performance

It's been too long since we last made an entry into the blog, but for good reason, we have been inundated with interest about the injury prevention courses. Since we last did a blog entry we have run 2 courses, one Normalise Course in London (Lee Valley) and one Stabilise Course in East Midlands (Loughborough University). They both went down very well and the coaches and personal trainers who attended are keen to get on the next level of course now. We are also beginning to plan ways of keeping in touch with the participants of the courses by way of log books and web updates, so that we can continue to help their development between sessions.

We've also run 2 seminars in the north. One at the North West Regional Coaches Network and one at the Yorkshire and Humberside regional meeting. Both groups were very enthusiastic about the programmes and the interest via the web site has been great since.

Simon Grantham (UK Athletics) was presenting at the North West Regional Network speaking (amongst other things) about athletes funding, it was very interesting to see how the system has been developed. Actually this increased our resolve to press for more courses within the athletics arena.

Although the funding from UKA has increased over the years and is far better than it was, say 10 years ago, but out of all the thousands of athletes in the UK there are only 86 on full funding. In other words only 86 have access to the professional advice that they need to provide, amongst other things, injury prevention courses. At the top end this is catered for by the strength and conditioning coaches and physio's, but below that there is very limited access to top level advice. This makes us more determined to continue to provide coaches (and fitness instructors, strength and conditioning coaches, sports therapists) with the tools to be able to assess their athletes/clients and then enable them to prescribe the relevant exercises to prevent injury and improve performance.

Simon asked some interesting questions after he sat in on our presentation. One was about the difference between nerve stretching and nerve mobilizing. I explained that nerve stretching was for nerves that were inflexible or tight. Nerve mobilizing was for nerves that were bound down or adhered either within or between muscles. He also asked whether nerve issues could affect neuromuscular performance. To that I explained that it most certainly can. Nerve tension can inhibit how muscles fire and so can compromise neuromuscular firing patterns and compromise performance and most certainly increase the risk of injury. I'm sure Simon knew the answers to the questions, he was just throwing them out to the other coaches to show them how far reaching nerve biomechanics could go and how important it was that they understand these issues to fully prepare their athletes.

As well as this we have been to the Back Show Expo which was a great event. I was surprised at the number of people that attended and the number of people who were swarming around our stand! If you weren't aware, as well as being an education provider, we are part of the Mobilis Healthcare Group who provide medical products for a variety of issues, but one area we understand a lot about is back pain. So it was a double-whammy by both presenting and exhibiting at the show. We could help people by educating them how they can help their own backs and also provide them with products to do the same. In fact the interest was so great that we've started to look at running back courses for people with back pain, to help empower them to look after their backs using the latest biomechanical concepts, rather than the medical approach which is becoming recognised as less and less effective.

We have a great few weeks ahead of us with another Normalise Course in the South West this weekend and one up in the North East the following week. Perhaps the highlight will be that we have been nominated for the East Midlands Sports Personality of the Year - Enterprise in Sport Award. We'll know on 26th November if we've won it, but I must say it's an honour just to be nominated. We'll report back next week to let you know how we get on!

Mobilis Wins Customer Service Excellence Award

The Mobilis Healthcare Group has won the British Healthcare Trades Association award for outstanding customer service. Mobilis was presented with the winners’ trophy for their service excellence to physiotherapy, podiatry, occupational therapy and sports healthcare professionals at the British Healthcare Trades Association's Annual Awards Dinner on 8th November 2007.

Mobilis was chosen by readers of Assistive Technologies for their in-depth expertise and experience in the field.

Broadcaster Angela Rippon presented the award to Ian Eaves, who collected the award on behalf of the Mobilis Board. After the presentation, Eaves said:

“This award confirms a recent customer satisfaction survey carried out by Mobilis which shows that over 80% of our customers rate the professionalism of Mobilis staff as good or excellent. This is a clear recognition of our ability to provide expertise across a wide portfolio of Healthcare and Sports sectors. It is a fitting tribute to all the Mobilis staff who, over the last 18 months, have worked tirelessly to implement the installation of a major new IT and logistics system, a key enabler to maintaining the loyalty and goodwill of our customers.”