About Personal Best

Personal Best caters to sportsmen and women wishing to improve their performance.  We employ international techniques learned from practitioners whose training techniques are at the cutting edge of modern sports conditioning.  Not only is our focus on producing stronger and faster athletes – we also aim to produce long-lasting ones!  A key aspect of our approach is to focus on posture. The better your posture, the more efficiently your body will be working and the faster/longer you can keep going.

Competitive athletes require clear performance goals and a training programme that supports the realisation of these goals.  This brings us to the core of PB’s training philosophy – functional training.

By way of explanation, your nervous system doesn’t remember individual muscle contractions – only movement patterns.  This means that every time you train, you should be performing movements that mimic those you would do in your chosen sport or activity. To gain full benefit from any exercise, you need to train a muscle the way it would used in any given activity.

For example if you are a runner training in the strength phase of our program, we would supplement running by performing front squats and we definitely would not want you near the incline leg-press machine.  Why not? The act of running is a ‘closed chain’ activity – when your leg pushes against the ground, your body moves away from the ground, whereas on a leg-press machine, the weight moves away from your body.  Since any movement you perform is co-ordinated by your nervous system, one signal goes out to the muscles and another sends feedback to the brain.  

If you did train for running using the incline leg-press, it would be a bit like playing a record on a turntable backwards – cool music, but bad exercise!  You would be training your muscle into the exact opposite nervous response to running.  The more times you perform the correct movement, the less conscious control you need to co-ordinate that movement, which means you need less energy and effort to perform the activity!

Personal Best offers an integrated approach to training.