In sport, posture is something you do
Most people picture posture as how you stand or sit. In sport, the posture that matters is dynamic: how your foot meets the ground, how your knee, hip and trunk line up when you land on one leg, and whether you can hold that position when you are tired, fast or off balance.
That is something we can assess and train. It is also where small problems tend to start, long before anything hurts.
Foot posture: useful, but not the whole story
Flat feet and high arches are both common, and most people with either never have a problem. On its own, the shape of your foot is only a modest predictor of injury, so I will not recommend insoles on the strength of a footprint.
What I look at is how your feet and ankles behave under load:
- Foot posture, using a standardised measure (the Foot Posture Index) rather than eyeballing it
- Ankle mobility, especially how far your knee can travel over your toes
- Calf and foot strength and endurance, such as how many good single-leg heel raises you can do
- What your foot does when you land, push off and change direction
Where foot mechanics do seem to be part of the problem, the answer is usually strength, gradual loading and sometimes footwear advice, in that order.
Proprioception and balance
Proprioception is your body's sense of where it is in space. It is what lets you land from a jump or step off a kerb without looking. After an ankle sprain it is often reduced, and a previous sprain is one of the strongest predictors of another one.
The good news is that balance and proprioceptive training is one of the better-supported ways to reduce the risk of spraining the same ankle again. I test single-leg balance and reach in a few simple ways, compare left with right, and build training that gets harder as you improve.
Landing, cutting and single-leg control
Most sport happens on one leg. How you control your knee, hip and trunk when you land and change direction affects how load is shared around the body, and fatigue usually makes it worse. Structured warm-up programmes that train this kind of control have been shown to reduce injuries in team sports.
Playing basketball myself shapes how I work here. I look at movement as an athlete as well as a clinician, and the exercises I give look like your sport, not just a list of gym drills.
From the desk to the weekend game
Many of the people I see sit for most of the week and then play hard at the weekend: five-a-side, basketball, padel, a long run. Long sitting weeks can leave hips and ankles stiffer and less ready for sudden load, and the gap between what the week prepares you for and what Saturday asks is where a lot of niggles start.
That is where my two areas of focus meet. If your desk-related pain and your sport are both part of the picture, we deal with them together.
What a posture & performance assessment includes
- Your sport, training load, injury history and goals
- Foot posture and ankle mobility measures
- Balance and proprioception tests, left versus right
- Single-leg squat, step-down, hop and landing tests, where appropriate
- Strength checks for calf, hip and trunk
- A clear plan: what to work on, how often, and how to progress it
If you are currently injured, we deal with that first and build the performance work in as you recover.
Who it is for
- Runners with recurring shin, foot, knee or hip niggles
- Court-sport players: basketball, netball, padel, tennis, volleyball
- Anyone with a history of ankle sprains or knee problems
- Players returning to sport after injury or surgery
- Weekend athletes who sit for most of the week
An honest note
There is no perfect posture, in sport or at a desk, and I will not promise to transform your game. What I can do is find the specific things that are holding you back or putting you at risk, and give you a plan to address them that you can measure.