The whole concept of barefoot running has become increasingly popular over the last year and I receive numerous emails from athletes asking how to progress from normal running shoes to barefoot or barefoot-shoes. It is important to first understand that the foot and lower leg were designed to move, and not to be stuck in [...]

When I was a student, a doctor told us a story  about a tribe in the Carribean who were all born with club feet, yet all the children and adults had normal feet. A research team went to explore and found that the grandmothers were massaging (did fascia release) the baby’s feet every day until [...]

A common problem amongst mainly big-gear cyclists is painful VMO’s -medial Quadriceps. The VMO is the small bulky muscle on the inside of your leg, just above the knee. When riding bigger gears, you use mainly the big bulky Quadricep muscle on the outside of the thigh. This muscle responds by shortening, which causes lengthening [...]

Shin splints is a common injury in all running and jumping sports. The athlete complains of pain on the inside of the shin-bone when landing on the foot. If the athlete continues to train through pain, it can result in a stress-fracture which could mean weeks of non-training. It is important to understand the cause [...]

I receive so many emails with questions about orthotics and I will share this recent one with you, including my comments: ‘Hi Benita, It’s taken me a while to get into the program but I’ve switched to your system of Bunkies and stretch tests now and I can see light at the end of the [...]

No, it is definitely not true. If you want to run without injuries, you need the following: 1. A fully flexible, neutral body with no tightness anywhere that might cause imbalance. To achieve this, you need to test your body to find the tightness and then remove it.  Once your body is neutral, running barefoot [...]

“I have worked with sports injuries and particularly runners for the past 24 years. Initially I followed the 20 second stretching rules I was trained to do, and which was supported in most of the textbooks etc.. However since 1995, I worked with professional athletes who were tired of chronic recurring injuries and we decided [...]

I have seen many runners in my career with joint pain, including hip, knee, or back pain, where the sole reason for their ‘injury’ is related to their mind-set on ‘how one should train’. Most of these runners are 40years and older, have busy careers with not much time to train. So whenever they do find [...]

Professional athletes all agree that it is risky to compete in the indoor season, since the camber and sharp bends of the indoor tracks, cause injuries. The same complaint comes from long-distance athletes when they are forced to train or race on the edge of tarred roads where the road runs at a camber. But [...]

I did an assessment of an elite triathlete recently, presenting with a stress fracture of the right tibia (shin). This is a very common injury amongst athletes who do huge volumes of hard training and the findings were quite significant. The History Her pain started about 12 weeks ago on running and gradually got worse. [...]