Blog archives
Sweat, Stigma, and Strength
An Untold Story of Women's Athletic Revolution
01 July 2024
Recently, I spent some time digging into the beginnings of women’s participation in sport and physical activity. Turns out it’s not a very long history indeed. The first sports event that recorded female participation was the Paris Summer Olympics in…
More Lean Muscle Means Happy Hormones
08 June 2024
Did you know that muscle mass helps balance out our hormones? The more lean muscle we have in our 40s, the easier it is for the body to manage stress, regulate blood sugar levels and handle the changing hormones? As we approach menopause, the drop in…
Every Exercise Can Be A Core Strengthening Exercise
...if we add these secret ingredients
03 May 2024
Every exercise becomes a core and pelvic floor exercise if we add these secret ingredients: ✔️ Strong feet - think of making deeper footprints on the floor with every exhalation 🦶⬇️ ✔️ Lengthening through the back of the neck - the head sliding back…
Window Shopping Physiology
15 April 2024
I caught myself staring at the shop window on Oxford Street the other day, but not at the clothes. There was a striking difference in posture between the female and male mannequins. Now, I don’t obsess with a “perfect” or “correct” posture, but as a…
Sore Back When Bending Forward?
Try this trick
09 April 2024
Sore back when bending forward? This trick has been a game changer for many of my clients. Having the pelvis and the ribcage stacked on top of each other, we make sure The diaphragm is right on top of the pelvic floor and they can work in tune to…
Our Daily Movement: From Duty to Delight
05 March 2024
Do you really exercise every day? - a friend asked me the other day. Yes, I dedicate around half an hour each day to looking after my body and that includes moving in the way that my body needs that day. I aim for at least 3 strength training…
Hip Pain Is Never Just About The Hip
27 February 2024
I often get asked what a biomechanist is and how is what I do different from physiotherapy. Biomechanics is a discipline on the overlap of sports science, medicine and engineering, that looks into how and why bodies move and what happens when they…
One Part You Need To Strengthen To Make The Greatest Difference
20 February 2024
A good part of my job is about helping people discover the spots in their bodies that we need to strengthen in order to make the greatest difference in their symptoms or performance. I like to think of these as “mystery blocks” in Super Mario - the…
Returning to Exercise After A Viral Infection
Step by Step Plan + Research Overview
12 February 2024
This winter, my family has been struggling with an ongoing flu or Covid (or both?). It took us weeks to fully get over it. So, I lost some muscle and my husband fell behind with his running practice. It is so humbling to realise that you need to…
Knee Pain in Squats?
04 February 2024
Do squats feel hard on you knees? Let’s see how we can tweak this movement to unload those knees while helping you strengthen your backside. The further your knees are forward in relation to the ankles, the more you use the front of the thigh…
Why I Don't Teach Breathing Correctly
31 January 2024
The other day, a young woman explained in her initial consultation that she would want to learn how to breathe correctly. And this made me think. It’s been a while since I stopped trying to teach people the right way to breathe. This might sound…
Lower Back Pain After Exercise?
Let’s talk about pelvic stability
22 January 2024
After I had my two children, around 1.5 years apart, my lower back and the left hip would hurt after most exercises. I couldn’t do lunges, or yoga warriors or sun salutations. Hardly anything in a pilates class either. For years after my babies were…
Should I Run On Asphalt Or Grass?
15 January 2024
If you are a runner, you might have heard that running on soft surfaces, like grass, or sand, helps prevent injuries. But interestingly, a different surface softness/hardness just means different tissues will bear the brunt of running. As you…
Taking Up Running with A Weakened Core
10 January 2024
I had a conversation with a really sweet client of mine yesterday on the topic of taking up running while working on rebuilding her core with diastasis recti and a hernia. Now, depending on where in your core rebuilding journey you are, your body…
How Our Brains Anticipate Movement
Or the story of my my most ridiculous injury ever
02 January 2024
Do you know that feeling of missing a step at the bottom of a staircase? Your brain expected the step to be there, but instead, your foot just fell through. Or think of attempting to sit on a soft-looking armchair in a waiting room, just to hit your…
Self-Care For The Holiday Season
25 December 2023
Merry Christmas! With the celebrations in full gear, the schools closed and so many things to prepare and finish in time, self-care is probably the last thing you could think of right now. Especially if you are a mum, you might be used to looking…
Progressing Your Training From Rehab To Athleticism
Core rePower - Phases 3-5
12 December 2023
I spent so many years stuck in gentle, restorative exercise. After the births of my two babies straight after each other and a couple of persistent postpartum injuries, my body seemed to be in the recovery phase – forever. I was teaching yoga at the…
Core rePower Explained
The first two phases in rebuilding your core
08 December 2023
Working with many people with weakened core over the years, I’ve learnt that sometimes we need to start with undoing rather than doing. This is why the first stage of rebuilding core strength after injuries/pregnancy or in chronic back pain, is…
The Core rePower Story
04 December 2023
After 12 years of working with movement and rehabilitation, I finally got to the point where I felt ready to create my signature method. Well, I always wanted to create my own system but I didn’t dare. Over the years, as I educated myself…
Can We Cough Better?
24 November 2023
It’s this time of the year again. The runny noses and coughs - coming and going. And sometimes staying for a while. Do you ever leak when you cough or sneeze? Many people do, especially women after childbirth or menopause. I remember a lady who would…
Something I Couldn't Write About For Years
19 November 2023
It took me years to get comfortable writing about abdominal separation. I had started writing so many blog posts about it over the years, but would usually end up abandoning the whole thing halfway through. One of the funniest of the titles of the…
Being A Mum
16 November 2023
Around this day 10 years ago, I would try sleeping on my side while breastfeeding through the night. I hardly got any sleep, waking up every two hours. I was still recovering from an emergency C-section that left me weak, angry and defeated. I felt…
Crunches Won't Tone Your Lower Belly
10 November 2023
Interestingly, the deep core muscles are not just deep in the torso. Your lower belly is the area where the deep abdominal muscles are not covered by the 6-pack muscles (take a look at the first picture on the left). So, having weaker deep abdominal…
Protruding Lower Belly?
You Might Be Bearing Down at Effort
02 November 2023
Does your lower belly stick out and feel weaker than the rest of your abdominals? It might be a habit of bearing down at effort. You can see below the belly pushing out and down as I press into the wall. This often comes together with straining and…
Adding Impact to Your Training
29 October 2023
For most of my exercise life, impact and intensity weren’t really my kind of thing. I was into gentle, low-impact exercise, things like yoga and Pilates. I guess it was a combination of a personal preference for slow and mellow activities and feeling…
Five Signs That Your Deep Core Might Need Some Love
23 October 2023
Greetings from Loire-Atlantique! We are just swapping homes here in a small village somewhere in the Loire River Valley. If you are a parent, you know that children holidays, as fun as they are, are also hard work. I started writing this post twice…
Lower Back Pain and Your Pelvic Floor
16 October 2023
I’ve been reading and writing a lot lately about pelvic health, and I find it fascinating how health of many, seemingly unrelated, parts of the body seems to be linked to the pelvic floor. Yes, we all have pelvic floors! This is a sling of muscles…
How to Protect Your Organs When Lifting Heavy Things
08 October 2023
Did you know that the same weight could feel heavier or lighter for your body depending on how you lift it? If you are struggling with abdominal weakness, back pain or prolapse, you might have heard million times that you “shouldn’t lift heavy”. Yes…
Use The Arms to Tone The Abs
01 October 2023
After having 2 babies straight after each other and a 6-finger-width abdominal separation, I thought I would never wear crop tops again. My belly was weak, stretched and I had a fist-width hole in my connective tissue a couple of fingers up from the…
My 5 Tricks for Relieving Abdominal Bloating
17 September 2023
If you read the last two posts, you probably remember my trouble with bloating and the quest to investigate different reasons why our bellies might feel tight and uncomfortably inflated at times. Generally, bellies could be bloated due to: Gas — In…
Hormones and The Gut
About Oestrogen, Gut Microbiome and Menopause
10 September 2023
It turns out, my friend and I aren’t bloating alone. In a recent survey on perimenopause by the British startup Forth, focusing on 6,806 UK women, most of them between the ages of 30 and 49, 78% of the participants reported bloating and digestive…
Foods That Make Our Bellies Rounder
Welcome to the Bloating Series
08 September 2023
Do you ever experience this uncomfortable feeling of belly tightness, pressure and increased abdominal size? I definitely do, especially towards the end of my cycle and when I end up eating later in the evenings. Sometimes my children make fun of me…
Can We Choose to Move in a “Youthful” instead of an “Ageing” Pattern?
30 July 2023
During my MSc in Biomechanics, I got fascinated by ageing and ended up writing my dissertation in this field, looking at the way people walk and run as they are getting older. It is interesting how much of what we see as ageing is a consequence of…
Is This Thing On?
How Do I know If My Core Is Working?
16 July 2023
Over the years, I’ve worked with many people with weakened core and recurring back pain. And what I keep seeing over and over is the belly pushing out at effort (left), instead of drawing into the body to protect the spine (right). I call this muscle…
Leaking While Working Out
28 June 2023
Last week was World Continence Week so I thought I’d dedicate a post to leaking during workouts. Bladder leaking is much more common than you’d expect. According to the House of Commons research briefing from a couple of days ago, 14 million people…
Biomechanics of Fashion
A Liberated Woman‘s Checklist for Clothes Fitting
25 May 2023
Which of the two photos do you prefer? In the early 1940-es when this ad campaign was created, it was probably a no-brainer to choose the picture on the right - a smiling women, made to please, moulded into a shape the current fashion required…
A flat stomach does not equal a strong stomach
This is how to build a working core instead
18 May 2023
Illustration by Cécile Dormeau It takes much more time and effort to unlearn than to learn something from the beginning. Back in the day, my 4-year-old tried to ride a pedal bike for the first time and it worked. We took off the support wheels so…
Training After the Baby
How to Build Up Your Training Intensity With Diastasis Recti
27 April 2023
Trying to solve a puzzle of my postnatal re-injuries, I ended up at a master’s degree programme in sports biomechanics. Even after years of working with pregnant and postnatal women, completing numerous courses and learning on my own body, I always…
Running safely after becoming a mum
A little checklist to make sure running really serves your post-baby body
14 July 2019
I am fortunate to live next to the Lea river, in one of the greenest pockets of East London, perfect for running. Many of the people who come and see me run regularly and a good part of them are mums. Running is great. It’s empowering, endorphin…
Why not to ‘tuck the tailbone’ in a yoga class
A couple of ideas on having a more pelvic-floor-friendly yoga practice
16 December 2015
It is quite common to hear yoga teachers saying ‘Tuck the tailbone under’ when they want to initiate action from the core (mulabandha). This might be useful sometimes, especially working with people who don’t have much awareness of their pelvic floor…
The forgotten art of untucking the tail
A tiny detail we’ve lost since the hunter-gatherer times and how to fix it
09 November 2015
Illustration by Jillian Nicol at www.livealigned.ca I’ve been spending most of my time lately learning about biomechanics, healthy alignment and how movement affects our bodies on cellular level. The research from the last few years shows that the…
Going to India to Study Yoga
Maybe we need a cultural shock to experience what it really means to live yoga
05 March 2015
An old friend got in touch the other day asking for my opinion about two different yoga teacher courses in India. Both were obviously targeted at the Western audience, being quite daringly priced for Indian standards. Do you think they are genuine…