Fit for Purpose

Blog moved

2011-09-17T15:10:00.001+01:00

Our blogs are now posted on the Fit for Purpose main site http://www.fit-for-purpose.co.uk/index.php/blog/page

Holisticity!?

2011-04-23T07:24:00.001+01:00

It's funny how some mornings you wake up and an idea hits you in the face. Well, yesterday was one of those days; not a new idea but perhaps more a change of thinking.

Life at fit for purpose is getting more and more interesting, our massage work is building nicely and we are starting to work in a more holistic way, as we had always intended. Not holistic in the herbal medicine way but in the way that we address a challenge.

Biomechanical Analysis

Our objective quickly crystallised to that of providing a service to those who are 'at the end of their tether'; for want of a better phrase. What does that mean? Well, people who are struggling to find a solution, have seen lots of people, spent loads of money and are just down right frustrated - maybe at the point of giving up.

This approach isn't easy, it means there is a chance of failure but it is rewarding and we work hard to develop integrated skills and knowledge that allows us to discuss everything; physiology and psychology, at a detailed level, referring where necessary but mostly able to work within the Fit for Purpose environment.

What of the idea that hit me in the face (first paragraph)? Well, our marketing and pricing is a list of items whereas our product is an integrated service - massage stands alone in it's own right but other things like physiological testing, nutrition, nlp/hypnotherapy are more tools to form part of a solution. This realisation brings clarity to our marketing strategy and perhaps more importantly we know what to say when we are in the pub and someone says "so what is fit for purpose?", "... it's a place where people come for a solution, to get back on track and progress to a higher level by using an integrated range of techniques that work holistically, not disparately... that makes fit for purpose unique".

Elite or just one of the guys?

2011-03-01T18:47:00.000Z

It has been an interesting few weeks, Christine has passed her advanced remedial massage exams and now tells me she can adjust various body parts to get the same effect as an osteopath but without the cracking phase. This is a slightly slower process but reduces the muscle trauma sometimes associated with the more vigorous dynamic movements, all things have good and bad points.

John Graham winning the Rotterdam Marathon

I have done some sports psychology and it has been rewarding how a chat with a friend in a cafe resulted in my suggestions for prerace routines having a significant impact. I hope to do more with this athlete to help them realise what the coach and others think is a tremendous potential.

I had a day at British Cycling with Karen Darke, I was privileged enough to be invited to some meetings to discuss an aspect of technical strategy for London 2012 - it was a very interesting day and I hope to be involved as detailed plans and options are developed into the future.

I have also been pondering what makes good, great and mediocre athletes and if I were pinned down to say what one thing the best athletes have in common, I would say it is the willingness to have a go. I went to see a talk by Alistair and Jonny Brownlee a couple of weeks ago and the striking thing was their willingness to keep trying in the face of uncertainty; just trying to stay in the group or maintain the lead until the next corner, taking everything one step at a time. An attitude, 'have a go', that was perhaps put into more direct terms by the climber and personal friend, Andy Kirkpatrick, in one of his talks "...if you do something stupid, you will achieve something amazing or die... " in his case the die bit is quite literal but for most of us, it is just metaphorical and the consequences of failure are only short term disappointment, a chance to rethink and hopefully come back stronger.

My first exposure to the real elite was training with a chap called John Graham, he once related a story of running the New York Marathon, going through 10 miles in 48 minutes or something and thinking that it was only 5 seconds slower than his best '10', he was prepared to give it a go, sometimes he succeeded and sometimes not but he was a great athlete and friend who ran 2 hours 9 minutes 28 seconds to win the 1981 Rotterdam marathon, breaking the Scottish record, that time has still only been bettered by one Scot and only by two seconds when Alistair Hutton won the London Marathon in 2:9:26. Aside from athletics John was always just a down to earth chap who had time for everyone and never stopped talking.

Finally, we went out for a run in the hills yesterday - and it really came home to me what sort of environment we are living and working in. I am certainly not the runner I used to be but a 1 hour run saw me overtaken by a couple of runners who breezed past me chatting away, I kept up for a few minutes but had to let them go, a bit depressing, these two athletes were Mary Wilkinson and Alan Buckley, both GB internationals or maybe a personal friend and my brother-in-law. At the cafe we bumped into Alistair and Jonny Brownlee eating cakes in the middle of their bike ride with friends or one could say elite development squad - just normal guys shooting the breeze about their 'theories' on nutrition. I overheard one of the crowd state the best source of antioxidants to be a Mars bar and another that the best source of fish oils is fish and chips. It would be easy to get over awed and think how can we associate with people like this but why - may as well give it a go and see where we get.

Fit for Purpose is already doing amazing things and it can only get better.... these people are just normal guys who are willing to give it a go, stick at it and see what happens - anyone can do that, can't they?

Why not you - you might do something amazing! I bet you won't die...

Fit for Purpose? Why that name? It's the philosophy...

2011-02-13T09:18:00.000Z

Why fit for purpose? Well, it all started with massage therapy and then a realisation that we could do something special; provide a service that makes a real difference to people’s lives. It is hard to believe that massaging someone can help them change from a person with crippling pain and restriction to someone able to enjoy activity and exercise once again but it can and does. We experience transformations of varying degrees every day. Not miracles but skillful application of therapeutic techniques to relieve stress and tension to restore freedom of movement.

‘fit for purpose’: we decided that we would try to help people become fit for their particular purpose, whether that be to walk along Skipton high street or compete in the Olympic games.Massage helps provide freedom of movement and freedom from pain, so then what else might someone need? Freedom from anxiety or restrictions of the mind? Mind and body are united in each of us so we learnt how to help people see things differently to overcome life’s difficulties.

So that’s it - we want to help people become fit for their purpose, we enjoy what we do and take great pleasure in seeing others enjoy their lives.

Finally - a quote from Karen Darke’s blog that we like:

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.

Watch your words, for they become actions.

Watch your actions, for they become habits.

Watch your habits, for they become character.

Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

….. ‘Life is Good’ goes… “Do what you love, love what you do”

Please come and see us, phone or e-mail for a chat.

Christmas and the New Year

2010-12-28T08:11:00.000Z

It has been quite a year for us and 2011 is going to be another interesting and exciting one. We are up and running in our Skipton premises, situated at 1 Albert Street in the town centre. The client base is building up and everyone we have seen likes to see us there. Have a look in if you are passing and please let us have any ideas or comments you may have, good or bad, they will help us enormously.
Our main business up to now has been from massage, we have had lots of successes and a wide variety of clients, varying from pregnant ladies coming for relief from aches and pains, injured walkers and sportspeople, including a few professional athletes and people who need to relax from the rigours of life. It's great and we enjoy seeing all our clients, some we see until they recover and others return every few weeks to keep on top of things or just because they like it.

The other areas of business are starting to build up as well, our greatest coaching success to date is probably hand cyclist, Karen Darke. We have been working with her for about a year now and she has developed from racing on the domestic scene to joining the British Cycling Federation Academy as a funded member of the squad aiming for a medal at the 2012 Paralympics.

It has been a pleasure working with Karen, using our full range of services to provide coaching, physiological testing, nutrition, massage and sports psychology/hypnosis to get the best performances possible. You can read a copy of a blog she has written in our shop window and buy signed copies of her book from us if you are interested. She is training in Majorca at the moment - wish I was there!!

Our NLP/hypnotherapy services are starting to be noticed and used. The techniques are tremendously powerful and we are looking forward to seeing lots of happy, relaxed and relieved clients leaving our premises.

So things are looking good and in this period of New Year resolutions we are hoping that people will use us to help them overcome the initial pitfalls and make their resolutions into permanent changes.

We hope you had a Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!

Moving to Skipton

2010-10-11T19:37:00.000+01:00

Things are moving fast with our move to Skipton, we are working from the Craven Swimming and Fitness Centre on Wednesday and Thursday evening and on Saturday mornings. One idea that is going really well is a 20 minute 'no booking' massage for £10. People can just pop in for a 20 minute session as they are passing our room outside the swimming pool changing area. We are getting all sorts of interesting and friendly people, some with sore back neck and shoulders, some with tired legs from heavy training and some with other sports or life related aches and pains. It's great! The picture shows the room we are using, no posters yet but we are getting there.

We are getting involved with local clubs, Christine went running with Skipton AC and we went to have a look at the Yorkshire Vet's cross country round that the club organised on Saturday. The weather was good and everyone appeared to have a good time on what looked like a proper cross country course. Here is the winner, Daren Burnley (M45) of Pudsey Pacers, crossing the finish line.

We are learning as well, attending Willie Fourie's course on lower limb treatment. Focusing on soft tissue techniques relating to connective tissue I think everyone learnt a lot and I have certainly started to modify the way I treat my clients using the new techniques and renewed enthusiasm. The course was organised by Janine Midgely of West Yorkshire Physiotherapy so a big thanks to Janine.

John has been suffering a bit at the hands of his sister-in-law, Anne Buckley, and her partner in crime, Mary Wilkinson. A relatively innocuous bike ride in the Dales resulted in him finding his maximum heart rate is 10 beats higher than he thought and that was in the first 20 minutes of the ride. Here is a picture of Anne wearing her latest disco gear.

So it's all good and we should have our premise at Albert Street very soon. The consultation for the 'change of use' planning process finished on Sunday so watch this space or our facebook page for details of an opening event of some sort.

Lots going on

2010-09-04T10:21:00.000+01:00

No blogs for quite a while - you may be relieved or disappointed, sorry if you are disappointed. The lack of action here hasn't been due to lack of action elsewhere. We have been really busy as business keeps picking up.

We have been developing our skills further and now offer formal psychotherapy to complement our massage, sport, exercise and nutrition services. This capability is a real strength in a number of areas, the obvious ones are to help with stress, phobias, fears and anxiety helping us to help our clients make changes that benefit their day to day lives in many ways. We are also developing a specialism in special psychological techniques for sport that will allow our clients to focus on both mental and physical fitness for competition.

Talking of sports, Karen finished 4th in both the time trial and road race at the World Handcycling Championships in Canada. It is a fantastic achievement in her first real season of international competition. I'm sure there is more to come though, we are hoping for a medal next year. You can get the full story from British Cycling at http://new.britishcycling.org.uk/gbcyclingteam/article/Gbr20100822-Day-3---UCI-World-Paracycling-Road-Championships-0.

We are also in the process of opening a new facility in Skipton, North Yorkshire. We hope to take over a place in the town on Albert Street in 6 to 8 weeks. John is in Skipton at the moment looking for somewhere to use as an interim location so that we can start developing things. We plan to have someone working down there on a regular basis from now on so if you are in the area and would like to use us get in touch. We will keep you posted on progress.

World Cup success and Bike Balmoral in the rain

2010-06-14T13:11:00.002+01:00

Karen went to her first Handcycling World Cup race in Spain with hope of a good result and quite a few nerves. Third place in the 44km road race and the 17km time trial showed that she really is a world class athlete and given her lack of experience at that level is fanatastic performance and a sure sign of success for the future. Well done Karen.

Back at home, Christine and John went to the Bike Balmoral mountain bike races on the Balmoral estate. It rained all day but that didn't dampen the enthusiasm, although we saw quite a few damp and muddy competitors. Indie and Katherine show the happy and friendly attitudes of the competitors that made this such a good event (Christine is in the middle). Put 12th June in your diaries as the provisional date of the race next year, we certainly aim to be there again.

Sheltered housing and Dr Jeffrey...

2010-05-31T19:15:00.000+01:00

This week has been a bit less sport oriented, on Tuesday and Friday we visited sheltered housing residences to give talks and demonstrations of massage therapy. Both visits went really well and we are going to return one morning each month to provide treatment for the residents. The talks were great fun with plenty of banter but also the chance to make those who volunteered to be guinea pigs for the demo's feel a lot better.

Christine had the first weekend of her advanced remedial massage course, which is obviously going to be a lot more than just massage - day one involved realignment of various parts of the hips. Something a lot of people will benefit from.

On Sunday we had a visit from Michelle Jeffrey, we had a good chat about things both work and pleasure. It was great to catch up over a stroll along the beach, a coffee then some wine and an Indian meal.

Busy week!

2010-05-23T17:41:00.002+01:00

It has been quite a week, last weekend we were at the cycling festival in Aberdeldy, there was lots going on but I found myself hanging around with Karen Darke and her hand cycling 'come and try it' event.

I had a go on a Top End Force R racing cycle, it is very impressive - really stiff and aerodynamic but also comfortable and ergonomic. It's a long story but we now have the demo machine in our living room...

Then John was on a coaching course in Aviemore before we headed south for a couple of days in the Yorkshire Dales. John spent Saturday doing a bike ride over the hills with his mad sister-in-law - Anne Buckley the mountain runner. Christine went for a run with Anne's boyfriend Triss and then we sat outside a cafe in Feizor getting roasted with the Buckley's, Karen Darke, Andy Kirkpatrick and his kids.

This morning was the Aberdeen Baker Hughes 10k, which went very well - five or us were busy providing pre- and post-event massage from 8am until 1pm.

From left to right - Sam, Christine, John, Suzanne and Suzanne. I hope everyone who came to see us is starting to feel the benefits already.

New massage couch and credit card machine

2010-05-13T17:52:00.002+01:00

We got a new hydraulic massage couch yesterday and a credit card machine. They should make things even better for our clients and us. The couch is really comfortable.... and the machine really snazzy...

We have been thinking of getting a couch for a while and I'm glad we have decided to. It will be of real benefit because we will always be at the right height and position to give the best treatment. The benefits of the card machine are obvious for everyone, more convenience. Both a really positive move for us.

Bike Balmoral

2010-05-09T18:10:00.001+01:00

On Saturday we went to help Al Simpson recce the Bike Balmoral route. It was pretty cold at first but in the end the weather was really nice and we had a great time - Al was good enough to provide a couple of beers for rehydration in the sun.
It is a mountain bike event at an introductory level, there will be several races that are all really nice and scenic. The longest is a 30 miler that goes up the tracks towards Lochnagar. It isn't particularly technical but it will be tough enough for most.
The website is www.bikebalmoral.co.uk, one of us might have a go at a race and a few of us should be there to offer some therapy to weary legs. It is on 13th June - see you there...

Run Balmoral

2010-04-28T20:38:00.001+01:00

The Balmoral 10k was a success and hopefully we helped a few people. Some sore legs and also some sore necks and shoulders and a few more serious aches and pains that could do with some rest and recovery but that is runners for you. Had a night out in Ballater with the organisers afterwards.

Our next event is the Aberdeen Baker Hughes 10k on 23rd May, come and see us for a free massage or just a chat.

Weekend in Edinburgh

2010-04-19T20:11:00.001+01:00

We had a good weekend in Edinburgh, met Colin Russell for lunch. He has just started working for a company that is encouraging alternative means of transport to work http://www.findabetterwaytowork.org - they seem to be well funded and going well. It is associated with the Edinburgh Bike Station.

After that we visited one of our technical team (Dr Michelle Jeffrey) for a night out and a few drinks. We struggled out into the rain and cold for The Tour of the Meldons, cycle time trial on Sunday and Michelle managed to finish 2nd female - a successful finish to a good weekend. You will be surprised to find that the photo isn't last weekend in the Meldons, it is the Majorca training camp. Michelle is seated on the left and Colin on the right.

New website

2010-04-16T15:11:00.003+01:00

New website in place www.fit-for-purpose.co.uk

UK hand cycling

2010-04-15T18:27:00.001+01:00

Karen won the first UK Series handcycling race last weekend - really good. Now she is training in Majorca with Christine. All the hard work seems to be paying off.

Cycle Power Challenge 2010

2010-03-10T16:56:00.000Z

We’re just about to start our Cycle Power Challenge, we have £100 prizes for the first male and female competitor so it should be a good competition. We’re looking forward to some exciting evenings if we get a few groups together. Come along and have a go...