Ambition Performance Lab

We are very excited to announce our partnership with Mudgeeraba Soccer Club moving into the 2024 Season and beyond. Get to know our team below 👇

Tim Rice - Head of Performance and Rehabilitation
Tim has 5 years experience coaching and rehabbing athletes across a number of sports including Football (Soccer), AFL, rugby union, basketball, Muay Thai, track and beach sprinting, kayak, equestrian, and more. A Rehab Strength & Conditioning Coach by trade, Tim has completed a Master of Strength and Conditioning, Master of Clinical Exercise Physiology, Bachelor of Sport and Exercise Science, and is currently studying a PhD in youth athlete development at Bond University. Outside of coaching and studying, Tim enjoys playing Baseball, hiking, spending time with family and cooking.

Jack Hanson - Sports Massage Therapist
Jack has experience working with professional teams across a number of sports including Brisbane Roar, South Sydney Rabbitohs, Canberra Raiders, Wallabies, Rugby 7’s, V8 Supercars and more. Jack has a Bachelor of Sport and Exercise Science from Griffith University and is a qualified Remedial Massage Therapist. Jack is passionate about injury rehabilitation, prevention and pain relief. When Jack isn’t treating athletes, you can find him playing Golf, Oztag or at the park with his dog, Guiness.

It’s a simple process when you break it down 💯

Figure out what adaptations you need to target, then design the program around achieving those adaptations 🧬

Overall volume load and the fatigue-fitness paradigm should be considered to ensure athletes are as fresh as possible when they need to be. The goal of the S&C program is to improve sports performance, so if athletes are too fatigued going into team training or games/competitions, we are missing the mark 🎯

💥💥💥 Tuesday Feb 8 💥💥💥

We are super excited to announce the launch of the Gold Coast’s very own Youth Athlete Development Program!! 🏀⚽️🏈⚾️🎾

This program is a combination of Youth Athlete Development Classes designed to prevent injury and improve overall athleticism, and One-on-One Coaching Sessions designed to develop sport specific physical capacities. These will take place in the state of the art Robina🏋️

This program goes beyond the physical components of athlete development, emphasising education around sleep, nutrition and stress management, and how they impact performance on and off the field 🧠🫀🫁

Yes we aim to produce the next generation of professional and elite athletes… but perhaps more importantly, we strive to develop mentally stronger and more resilient human beings 🥷🪖

If you would like more information on the program follow the link in the bio, or send us a direct message!

PAIN DOES NOT EQUAL INJURY

Pain is our bodies way of telling us that there is an actual or potential injury that we need to pay attention to. The key word in this sentence is ‘potential’. Just because there is pain in or around a particular area, does not necessarily mean there is an actual, biomechanical injury or issue. There are many contributing factors to pain symptoms and these should be considered within the biopsychosocial model.

This means that you can have a sore back and not have any physical injury. Similarly there is a percentage of people walking around without any back pain whatsoever, who would be shown to having a bulging disc if examined with MRI. There is no ‘one to one relationship’ between pain and tissue damage.

This is pretty good news for practitioners and patients alike. Gone are the days where we don’t push through pain during rehab for fear of causing further injury. If pain did equal injury, then it would make no sense to cause pan during the rehabilitation process. If however, pain does not necessarily indicate injury, this gives us greater freedom to become slightly more aggressive with our rehab protocols.

The key is not to cause an excruciating amount of pain. With all of my client I use a 0-10 pain subjective pain scale. An important step is to allow the client to establish a level of pain or ‘discomfort’ that is acceptable to them. This could be 3/10 or 8/10, but this is determined by the individual. Then we keep this number in mind as we go through the rehabilitation process, if we are below the number, we are okay to keep going. If however we go above that number, we immediately stop and reassess.

The goal is to stay within the acceptable level of discomfort whilst treating injuries or chronic pain 🧠💪🐅

Lifting weights is not just for young people!!!

There are many benefits of resistance training for older individuals. Besides the obvious benefits in body composition, undertaking regular resistance training is imperative for older individuals to retain their total body strength, which decreases as we age.

One thing I tell all of my older clients is you should NEVER lose your ability to pick yourself up off the floor. As soon as you do, it’s game over unfortunately. You cannot call yourself an independent individual if you have to rely on other people to help you up from the floor.

It is use it or lose it when it comes to our ability to perform activities as we age. When we stop taking the stairs everyday, taking the stairs becomes difficult. When we stop getting up and down from the floor, it becomes difficult.

Why should we stop doing things just because we have gone around the sun a certain number of times. Age is just a number 🧠💪🐅

The days of thinking the mind and body are seperate entities are past us. In 2021 we know that, unequivocally, there is a direct link between physiology and psychology. This occurs most acutely through the autonomic nervous system (fight or flight vs rest and digest), but also more chronically through things like systemic inflammation, body composition, cardiovascular fitness, chronic pain, nutrition, hormones, neurotransmitters, etc.

Taking care of your physiology, through engaging in regular physical activity and sound nutritional habits can mechanistically improve feelings of anxiety and depression.

Like a good friend, your psychology in turn takes care of your physiology. Through mindfulness, mediation and breathing practices, we can adapt our body’s stress response to act more appropriately to life’s day-to-day stresses and help strengthen our immune system.

It doesn’t have to be complicated, just follow these simple steps… exercise daily, eat wholesome foods, stress less, drink more water. While these guidelines are suitable for most people, there are some that may need/want something more specific to their circumstance or condition. If you need help, slide into the DMs. 🧠💪🐅

Health… it goes beyond just the physical.

The reason I love my job as an exercise physiologist is because we are responsible for looking at the human as a whole, ensuring all aspects of health are considered, not just the aesthetic. Educating individuals to understand how their decisions effect their health as a whole empowers them to make decisions which benefit them in the long term. Our focus is on long term behaviour change and health outcomes, rather than 6 week body composition transformations.

Too often in today’s “fitness” industry we see people equate body composition to health, leading to reductionist views on calories and food quality.

Food goes beyond calories, health goes beyond appearance and actions go beyond the individual. There’s levels to this. 🧠💪🐅

Is it possible to be generously selfish?

In these uncertain times, we need to look out for our friends, families and significant others. But be mindful to look after yourself FIRST. Imagine you have a cup full of water, each time someone needs something from you, you pour out a portion of your water into their cup. Each time you do this, you are left with a smaller amount of water in your own cup. If you only worry about filling up the cups of others, sooner or later you will run out of water in your own cup.

Now this may not seem like an issue to you, you may rather see other people’s cups filled than your own; but what happens when someone is is need of some water and you have no more left to give? This is why it is important to fill your own cup up FIRST, so that you then have some to give to those who need it.

Today more than ever, people’s cups need topping up. Take the initiative to top your cup up first so that you are in a position to afford some of your valuable resources to those in need. In this way, you can be generously selfish 🧠💪🐅