Improving strength is more than increasing the size and function of muscle, as tendons and other connective tissues play important roles in modulating force production.  This course lays the foundations for all the courses by taking an ultrastructure look at the tissues responsible for force production and transmission. The three component model helps you understand the contributors to active and passive tension/strength. By understanding the influence of these various tissues you are better placed to understand how to measure and prescribe exercise to improve their capacity whether it be for injury prevention, return to play or human and sporting performance. Your ability to progress and regress exercise prescription is advanced given a tissue focus rather than an exercise or movement focus.

Now that you have an understanding of strength from a tissue perspective, this course will focus you in on the key drivers of tissue adaptation. You will be introduced to a process called mechanotransduction. Simply put, mechanical loading of tissue drives molecular signalling and therefore tissue remodelling. So your understanding of mechanotherapy, where exercise is prescribed to promote the repair or remodelling of tissue is a focus of this course. In this module you will examine in detail two key mechanical relationships that are integral to all movement and central to mechanotherapy, the force-length and force-velocity relationships. As a result your understanding of isometrics, eccentrics and concentrics will be taken to new levels.

‍

Now that you have a strong mechanical and physiological foundation, this module will focus on improving your understanding on muscle morphology and how you can change it. Your ability to increase the size of muscle (hypertrophy), change muscle architecture and/or drive fibre type adaptation, will certainly influence patient outcomes and affect human and sporting performance. There is a preoccupation for physical medical practitioners to measure and monitor the maximal strength/peak force of muscle, however, there are other variables such as rate of force development and impulse, that you should be aware of that can provide a higher level of diagnostics in terms of tissue repair, neuromuscular recovery and readiness to return to activity/play/work.

‍

Where do you start with your exercise prescription for your client/athletes? There are most likely a few areas that could guide your diagnosis of client/athlete needs. Movement screening prior to gym based training, landing ability prior to plyometric prescription, and understanding inter-limb asymmetry, are some areas that will guide your programming to better effect, and hence provide the foci of this course. Specifically, this course will: 1) introduce you to the movement competency screen, a tool that will help you determine the ability of the client/athlete to execute certain gym-based movement patterns and guide your programming in a systematic manner; 2) develop your understanding of the injurious nature of landing impact forces and provide you with training strategies to increase the resistance of your client/athletes to such injuries; and, 3) explore the area of inter-limb asymmetry in depth from both an injury and performance perspective.

Can't decide which course to do? Why not do all of them? This Physiotherapy Bundle gives you access to our first 4 online courses:

• Optimising Strength and Power: A  Tissue Perspective
• Eccentrics, Concentrics and Isometrics Unpacked
• Shaping and Shifting Muscle
• Movement Screening, Landings and Asymmetries

Each course is approximately 10 learning hours. You will have access to all of these courses for the lifetime of JC Online!

This short course aims to help you make sense of balance, and the various types of assessment that can inform better diagnostics and programming. Specifically, you are introduced to:

• The mechanical and physiological determinants of balance are discussed and balance assessment, and an exercise continuum to address problematic balance is introduced.
  
• Static and dynamic, qualitative and quantitative as well as field and laboratory assessments of balance are introduced. Force plate analysis of balance is a particular emphasis the various tests, variables and conditions discussed. A data set is presented and interpreted.
  
• A three phase model of exercise prescription for balance training, and the progression from static to semi-dynamic and dynamic exercises is discussed in detail. Exercises are introduced to address various diagnoses, and the data set from the assessment resource is used as an exemplar of how you would translate these various diagnoses into a progressive balance training program.

This 10 module online course aims to take your understanding of asymmetry to new levels. The topics covered in this super course are:

• Masterclass on lower limb asymmetries
• Four Assessment Zones on lower limb asymmetries, force plate technology, bilateral and unilateral assessments and multi-directional and multi-hop assessments
• Five Exercise Zones on the countermovement jump, countermovement jump advanced, elastic enhancement, slow and fast SSC performance and landing diagnostics and asymmetry progressions.