Chris Cathcart is a teen powerlifting competitor, Virtual Coaching client, and member/contributor at Kabuki Strength Lab. For every change you see in my body, my mind has gone through ten. When I began the journey that I am on in 2015, I was in one of the worst places I ever been. I was 330 pounds, thirteen years old and had just experienced loss for the first time. My first dog had died and I was trying to make sense of the world. I knew things and people died, I had seen things die, I had killed things before, I had never felt the ache of missing that comes with the loss of someone or something near to your heart.The first time I experienced loss it came with a warning. This will be you, and if you change nothing, that will be sooner than you can imagine. My first dog died of disease related to obesity, something that my entire family, human and pet alike was all too familiar with. This comes to my first point. Set Grand Goals. I didn’t know it at the time but I was setting for myself the ultimate Grand Goal. Become better. I didn’t know where to go from that goal, but I had a why and a what, so the how would only follow naturally.Starting out I tried walking once a day for a quarter mile, eating more fiber, and drinking water (like at all). This alone helped me lose 10 lbs due to the horrible condition my body was in. This brings me to my second point, which is that Grand Goals are important, but I think after you set them you should focus on One Degree of Change at a time. If I had set out for myself a workout regiment and...

By Kabuki Strength

 Strength is a science. Rehabilitation from Low Back Injury is a Science. Yet when it comes to low back rehabilitation the health professions (Physical Therapy, Chiropractic and others) seem to turn to anti-science principles and embrace faith based systems.It’s time for the tide to turn. The science that is unnegotiable in medical methodology, is the same science that is unnegotiable in successful rehabilitation. I teach rehabilitation based in the science principles of anatomy, physiology, hypothesis creation and hypothesis testing. The same principles that underlie strength coaching.The further proof of the failure of ‘modern’ machine based spinal rehabilitation methods came walking through my door recently. A person had made an appointment to see me, he had been doing Keiser training to “strengthen his low back” 2-3 times per week for the last 3 years. 4 weeks before seeing me he had gone to his Keiser Training Centre and got strapped into a lumbar extension machine and as it flexed him forward he felt a “pop” and immediate pain.An MRI taken a few days later showed what had been postulated could happen using this equipment, did in fact occur. He had blown a disc using the very equipment he believed was supposed to be helping him.Here is his MRI. I’ve circled the huge disc injury that resulted from being flexed by equipment.Now the mechanism of this type of disc injury has been demonstrated by Professor Stuart McGill (Callaghan and McGill. See comment in PubMed Commons belowClin Biomech (Bristol, Avon). 2001 Jan;16(1):28-37) in his lab.This study showed that a disc only has a certain amount of flexion tolerance under load. The greater the load the less the tolerance to repetitive flexion. When you combine Wilke’s disc pressure study, where the disc pressure has been measured to be more than double when sitting flexed...

By Kabuki Strength