Your client is filling out your massage intake form and hesitates over the question about pregnancy. “I tested positive on a home pregnancy test this morning, but I don’t know how accurate the test is,” she tells you. “I’ll re-test in a couple of days to confirm if I’m really
A 2025 narrative review published in Sports found that movement screens, such as the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) and Y-Balance Test (YBT), have “limited utility in predicting injuries due to their [injuries] context-specific nature.” Researchers from Kean University — led by Dr. Adam Eckart — included 75 studies and
Static stretching is a type of stretch where you hold the lengthening position of a muscle for a period of time. While many have followed the stretching ritual before a workout for many years, scientific research in the past decades has found that static stretching has mixed results in improving
An editorial in Nature Neuroscience argued that biological tests, such as brain scans and biomarkers, do not prove or disprove a person’s pain. However, a responding researcher said that doesn’t make biomarkers “futile or conceptually flawed.” Lead pain researcher Jan Vollert at the University of Exeter and 10 colleagues argued
Trunk muscle activity may not play a major role in explaining lifting-related low back pain among manual workers, according to a 2025 study published in Musculoskeletal Science and Practice. The findings challenge a long-standing assumption in occupational health and rehabilitation that people with low back pain change the way
A 2018 study found that using standing posture assessments to find whether someone has low back pain to be “irreproducible.” The researchers of this study, led by Dr. Hendrik Schmidt from Charité–Universitätsmedizinin Berlin wrote that such lack of reproducible results can lead to misinterpretation of imaging measurements, wrong diagnoses and
Current research finds that you don’t need to lift heavy weights like the beefiest guy at the gym to get bigger muscles. A 2022 umbrella review of 14 meta-analyses reported that training volume and frequency may matter more than how heavy you lift. Volume When other variables are held constant,
Key takeaways Mechanical tension and mechanotransduction are currently the strongest evidence-based explanations for how muscles get bigger. Current evidence suggests that anabolic hormones, cell swelling (“pump”), and metabolites have little to no effect on muscle hypertrophy. A Canadian exercise scientist suggests a few ways for academics and others to disseminate
Although we still have a lot to learn about how muscles contract, we do understand the basics of how the nervous system initiates a series of actions that contract a muscle. What about muscle movements that we don’t consciously decide to make, like breathing, digestion, and heartbeats? And what about
Walk into any gym, and you’ll likely find a variety of balance equipment stacked on racks or strewn about the floor, like wobble boards, BOSU balls, and foam pads. But how effective is balance training for improving athletic performance and injury recovery? Let’s see what the research says. Strength and
Even as clinical guidelines discourage routine imaging for low back pain, many patients continue to ask for MRIs, X-rays, or CT scans. Not necessarily for diagnosis, but for something harder to measure: reassurance. A 2025 study published in BMC Primary Care suggests that imaging is less about medical necessity and
A 2025 editorial published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine argued that increasing muscular strength is not the main driver for reducing pain. Instead, they wrote that strength training is one component among several factors that contribute to pain reduction, based on the biopsychosocial framework of pain. These other