Blog Posts

Guest blog post by: Katherine Prior, B.A. (Hons) Kinesiology, Co-Instructor of Nutritional Counselling for Kinesiologists at First Line Education 

As the dietary supplement industry continues to see steady growth and diet fads become more and more pervasive in social media, it’s easy to assume that achieving the most optimal diet simply requires choosing the most nutritious foods and eliminating “bad” foods. 

As fitness and healthcare professionals, we often look...

Sometimes the simplest of shifts can produce profound results. We tend to believe that the changes needed to improve our health must be radical, uncomfortable and take incredible amounts of patience, willpower and time.

What if I told you it doesn’t have to be that hard? That you can make tiny steps in the right direction and create remarkable improvements to your health?

‘Crazy!’ You yell.

‘I don’t buy it!’ You cry.

‘If it was this easy everyone would...

As I worked with two different clients this week, I realized something that I hadn’t thought about in a while. Both clients presented with very similar chronic pain patterns. And this week for some reason their pain seemed to be much worse than usual.

What if I could help them lower the activity of their ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response - the activity of their sympathetic nervous system?

While we spoke about their past few days, I realized that their pain was idiopathic -...

In Greek mythology there is a riddle attributed to Sophocles who composed the riddle of the Sphinx:

‘What is it that has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed? Oedipus replied, ‘The human body.’

From crawling to walking on two feet to eventually needing a cane, our bodies are a beautiful riddle to be enjoyed, explored and to sometimes solve as we journey through life. For some of us this means exploring the very upper limits of human...

Fascia is the term used to describe ALL the tissues throughout our bodies. Most of us picture fascia as a Spider-Man suit worn just under the skin. We imagine fascia surrounding our muscles, organs and bones - but it’s really so much more!

Some fascia is incredibly dense, like bone. Other fascia is very delicate, like the tissue surrounding our organs. This almost magical substance serves us like a highway. It transmits biochemical signals that control the sensory and motor pathways in...

Have you ever tried to do a test of your own functional movement? Good luck.

Maybe you're trying to figure out how to do a movement screen on a client using Zoom on a small laptop screen? How’s that working for you? 

Our body’s ability to be both stable AND move at the same time is quite a trick! How objective do you think your movement assessment measures can be as you squint to see your client as closely as possible from afar? You’re likely looking at your client in a...

Congratulations! After four long years of hard work, late nights and litres of coffee, you’re ready to graduate and begin your career as a kinesiologist. Yay, you! But first, if you want to practice in Ontario, you have to pass the College of Kinesiologists of Ontario’s entry to practice exam. And let me tell you, it’s a doozy. 

Now, I’m sure at this point you can talk for hours about why the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, you’ve mastered stats...

Ever hear that the best way to get through a tough time is just to keep going? Just barrel through and not look back? Or the more enlightened version: that the only way out is through?

That’s well-intentioned advice, but it doesn’t always help when the experience is uncomfortable, pulling you in different directions and feels painfully slow. When you’re in the thick of a crappy situation you want out NOW and the last thing you want to do is sit in that discomfort.

What you...

When we’re not looking, physical compensations start to change our anatomy and possibly even our physiology. Our bodies are SO good at adapting that we are often not even aware of how subtle the changes are! We may be using entirely new muscles and also not using the right muscles in the right order to perform the tasks we need to do every single day.

So how do we detect these subtle changes, and how do we address them to prevent long term strain and possibly injury and pain? ...

Self-care, awareness, mental health month, end of exams, start of the next phase of your life ...

We’ve all been there: ignoring our body’s demand to flip the laptop closed, turn over the phone on the nightstand, turn off the TV, step away from the fridge, get up from the sofa and go for a walk or to bed.

I get it, and I’m sure you do too. Tough times mean pulling out all our tried-and-true coping strategies, as well as looking for all kinds of adaptations just to get...