Joanna Lawn: Multisport

Jo arrived as a client immediately after Ironman 2002, referred by my colleague Roger Gooch, Jo's massage therapist. Her main objective was to improve her strength and power for triathlon, and to minimize injury risk by improving her core stability. She is a dedicated and highly disciplined person, so took her gym work very seriously and has consequently had excellent results.

Before we began, I needed to find out where Jo's strengths and weaknesses lay. Consequently her assessment was vital to writing her a programme specific enough to begin her strengthening process.

Assessment Findings
Jo had a "sway back" posture type - a flat lumbar (lower back) curve, long and exaggerated thoracic (mid back) curve, forward head posture, and forward translated hips. We are designed to operate in "spinal neutral" for a reason. Because of her body position, Jo’s biomechanics were affected in a way that could slow her down significantly.

Weak core stabilizers
Jo had several weaknesses as a result of her adopted posture type. These were mostly stabilizing muscles around her spine and pelvis: long weak hip flexors (vital for run and cycle the hip flexors are strong); weak left leg generally (smaller than right); weak lower abdominals (Transversus Abdominis - key stabilizer for the lumbar spine and pelvis); and weak Gluteus Medius (meant inability to stabilize foot strike in running).

Strong overdeveloped mobilisers
A couple of strong muscles that were working overtime needed to be switched off a little to let the weak muscles that should have been working do their thing! Jo had an over facilitated Tensor Fascia Lata / Ilio Tibial band (causes knee problems and poor leg alignment particularly in running) and a strong dominant Rectus Abdominis and External Oblique (pulls chest towards pelvis inhibiting strong upright body position and breathing). Her hamstrings and hip lateral rotators were tight. She was also lacking trunk rotation - particularly to the right side, an important factor for swim technique.

Exercises
Jo is a high performance athlete, therefore the type of exercises needed to be quickly progressed to those with a high level of coordination and neural control in order for her body to carry through the changes into her sport. We had to be cautious to begin with however to make sure she had excellent control of the weak core stabilizers - this was the key for our first two to three months of gym training.

We began with lots of low intensity stabilization - long, slow (and boring); teaching Jo how to activate her core stabilizers! It was necessary to switch off strong dominant muscles with a good stretch prior to exercises: TFL / ITBand , Piriformis, Biceps Femoris (the lateral hamstring), Rectus Abdominis (the "six pack" muscle), right side trunk flexors including Quadratus Lumborum and External Oblique. The stretches were held for a minute or more; this helped convince the muscle that switching off or shutting down for a while was a good idea.

We progressed over the next few months to exercises that began to integrate her core stabilizers into movements that incorporated her whole body. Jo started to develop a great understanding of whether the muscles that we required to be working were doing their job.

The swiss ball has been a key ingredient in her programmes as it has allowed us to stimulate both her stabilizing muscles and mobilizers at the same time. If you can balance on a swiss ball and do complex exercises whilst maintaining correct posture then you can do the same on a bike or running a marathon when you are starting to fatique. Triathlon is mostly a sagittal plane sport (it only allows movement in a forward direction), the only exception to this is the swim. So generally the muscles that control movement in the sagittal plane get overused. We have spent lots of time strengthening muscles involved in frontal or transverse plane movement, building unilateral strength and good strong rotation. This also contributes enormously to being able to hold great technique swimming, biking and running - particularly for ironman events where the day can be pretty long.

The following photos show some examples of the types of exercises that we have used over the past year in the gym. We have emphasized strength and endurance - mostly training within the 12 - 20 rep range zone, sets of 2 - 4 depending on weaknesses (weak sides do more reps or sets). For the exercises training the stabilizers only we have used very light weights and held tempos for much longer - more than a minute at a time. This means that those muscles are working much more like they do in an ironman event - at low intensities for long periods of time.

The next year for Jo is going to be huge from a racing perspective - two more ironman events in the next seven months along with numerous other shorter races and training at altitude. Her gym work is vital to keeping free from injury and strong enough to handle the demands of her sport. She is in the middle of a heavy weight period at present - for two weeks we drop the rep range down to between 4 and 8 and load the weight very heavy for exercises such as barbell squats, lunges, cable leg curls, bent over rows, cable twists, pulls and presses. This is intended to stimulate the nervous system into adapting to the extra load and getting strong very fast without building muscle bulk - something that would be detrimental to Jo's performance. She then maintains a good core stability training programme while away, and comes back in November ready for another 2 week period of heavy and hard. These heavy periods are repeated once every 6-8 weeks and interspersed with core stability work.

Working with Jo has been fantastic and has really emphasized to me the kind of absolute discipline and dedication it takes to be a sporting legend - a lot of hard work!!!

Rebecca Underdown is a personal trainer at Bodysmart Gym in Victoria Park Market. She specializes in training for injury rehabilitation and high performance athletes.