Muscle inhibition, sometimes called pain inhibition, is where you become unable, or at least find it difficult, to contract a muscle that tends to be around a joint that is in pain. We do this in response to pain. So if you’ve injured your knee then it can become difficult to contract your quad muscles …..
Category: Uncategorized


Hip bursitis – how do we treat it?
We’ve done a previous blog on bursitis, but thought this time we’d dive into a fairly common one at the hip, which is (currently) called greater trochanteric pain syndrome. To recap from a previous blog, a bursa is a fluid-filled sack that sits between different layers of body tissue (be it tendon and bone, or …..

Tendinopathy – what is it, how is it caused and how is it treated?
We’ve done blogs on tendinopathies before, but what exactly are they? A tendinopathy can be thought of as a pain originating from a tendon where the structure of that tendon is altered. This is as opposed to a tendinitis, which is simply an inflamed tendon How do tendinopathies develop? Body tissues adapt to strain – …..

How to treat a rotator cuff tear
As mentioned in our last blog, the shoulder is inherently an unstable joint. Apart from the labrum, a group of structures called rotator cuff muscles have a big role to play in its stabilisation, these are; supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor and subscapularis. A common misconception when learning about these muscles is that each does a …..

Labral/SLAP tears – how are they treated?
Some basic shoulder anatomy The shoulder is a ball and socket joint but, unlike the hip joint, the socket in the shoulder is very shallow. The advantage of this is that you can get a lot of movement from the joint enabling you to do things like reaching overhead. The disadvantage is that the joint …..

Bursitis – what is it and how is it treated?
Most frequently trochanteric bursitis, these odd-looking words will make far more sense after we’ve started with just a little bit of anatomy. As can be seen from the the picture below, the hip joint is a ball and socket joint made up of the head of the femur (the ball) and the acetabulum (the socket). …..

Chronic pain – what is it and how does it work?
Chronic pain doesn’t exactly sound good and it’s not something anyone would want to be suffering from – but the chronic part is a bit misunderstood and refers to the fact that it’s been there for a long time (as opposed to an acute injury which is one that happened recently.) Also called persistent pain, …..

How do we detect pain?
We’ve all been in pain at some point, whether it’s stubbing your toe or as a result of a more serious injury but whatever the cause it’s less than ideal. Pain is a complex subject but here we’ll talk about the most basic – nociceptive pain. But first – the back story. Pain is basically …..

Osteoarthritis – How to treat it
In the last blog we looked at the causes of osteoarthritis and here we’re going to look at the treatments. Do I need a joint replacement? This is a common concern from patients but osteoarthritis can be managed in other ways. In the last blog we talked about muscles offloading joints – by training muscles …..

Osteoathritis – is this the end of me??
In this blog we’re going to take a look at a fairly common complaint and one that tends to get people worried – osteoarthritis. This first blog will take a look at what this actually is and how it’s caused, then in the second we’ll look at treatment options. So what actually is osteoarthritis? Osteoarthritis, …..