Secret of the Pyramid

Over the past 4 months, we've had something of a dramatic time at Victory: we were flooded by the Starbucks upstairs, and sustained a lot of damage and interruption. We continued to work around it but it's all been a bit of an effort, with a certain amount of playing "musical rooms" as we didn't have enough undamaged space to provide our usual services! However - they've now fixed the damage and we are back on track, rising like a "phoenix from the flood" as it were!

As part of our relaunch, this week I want to explain the concept that underpins all the work we do at Victory: the Health & Performance Pyramid. It’s our diagrammatic representation of how your health works, and if you have all these building blocks in place, then we believe you should have normal, pain-free function.

(c) Nell Mead 2014

Let's start at the bottom layer, the red Foundation Layer. This is all about the health of the cells that form your tissues and organs. Effectively, if you have the right nutrients going in, and metabolites being effectively flushed out, then the environment within your cells will be healthy, and you will be more robust - more resilient against injury or illness, and quicker to heal should you become sick or injured. But if you aren't on top of the Big Four - hydration, nutrition, sleep and stress - then your cell environment will be less healthy than it should be, and you will respond less effectively to injury treatment or fitness training. I’ll write more about this next week.

The next layer is the magenta Health Layer. This is about pain, which occurs when your movement is compromised (either for cumulative reasons such as dodgy posture, or traumatic reasons such as a fall or a car crash). When you come to see us with pain, we'll bring you in for a Health Assessment to work out the underlying cause of your pain - and if appropriate, we'll then create a package of physiotherapy and/or exercise rehabilitation to help you restore and then build up normal movement patterns through our unique RSM Model, so that not only do we retrain your nervous system into new and more functional patterns, but that the retraining is robust and long-lasting. If you need anything we don't provide in-house, we also work with a variety of doctors and other healthcare professionals and will be happy to refer you on.

After this, we have the purple Performance Layer. This is about becoming even stronger and more functional, so that you remain pain free, improve your athletic performance and reduce your risk of future injuries - even if you challenge yourself to do something out of the ordinary! During your Performance Assessment, the team will ask you about your goals for the future, analyse your current situation (flexibility, strength, endurance, movement patterns, body composition) and work out a programme of physio-led yoga and/or conditioning training to help you get from your current state to where you want to go.

Finally, we have the blue Sport Specific Layer. This is where we start looking beyond the flexibility, strength and endurance (which you should have by this point!) to more technical aspects of whichever sport you choose to undertake, should you want to. We can work in-house (our team have experience in a wide variety of sports!) and/or with your own coach to provide you with specific, technical movement patterning drills to help you reach your peak.

So don't wait until you're broken! Whether you're in pain right now, or simply want to improve your health and fitness, give us a call NOW on 0207 175 0150 and find out how we can help you to get better!