I've just spent the last five days doing one of my Osteopathy residential weeks. It's been damn good in parts, and dull in others. Even a healthy dose of PhD's wired was hard pressed to keep me awake through six hours of clinical medicine on one day.

One of our lectures about spinal mechanics, though, got me thinking again about MMA and the problems that fighters tend to pick up.

How often do you hear someone say something like "I can train five times a week and don't get injured, and then I wrecked my back just getting out of bed the other morning"? Or "I don't know how it happened, I didn't do anything to it in training, I just woke up one day and it had started hurting"? If you've been around the sport a while, you probably know someone this has happened to, and there's a good chance you've said something similar yourself at some point.

The thing is, as I keep telling the fighters I work with, injuries don't "just happen". Most have been building up for months or years, and then something insignificant just pushes them over the edge and suddenly you're in agony. Not wanting to be too gloomy about it, but there are a hell of a lot of MMA fighters out there walking around with ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. Often the very training that is supposed to be "conditioning" the body and making it stronger has the effect of storing up chronic long term problems that might appear years later, perhaps just as the fighter is hitting the peak of his career. At MMA shows, I see these fighters walking around. Just by looking at them, I know that if they don't already have an injury in a particular place (often neck and/or shoulders) then they soon will have. So what could they do differently?

Wear and tear on the body is sometimes seen as an inevitable result of being a fighter. We know we're going to end up shredding the cartilage in our knees, or giving ourselves arthritis when we're older... but we try not to think about it because, well, it's depressing.

It IS worth giving some thought to, though, because there are plenty of ways of minimising the damage. An intelligent, balanced approach to training, and catching potential problems early on before they develop into bigger ones can make a huge difference to the length of a fighter's career, and his long term health. It's with this in mind that I've been writing a series of articles for Fighters Only Magazine about the common postural imbalances that fighters tend to pick up as a result of training, and a few simple exercises and stretches to help combat each one.

Of course, this isn't a substitute for getting individual advice from a professional, but my main aim is to raise awareness that MMA "conditioning" should be about more than having great cardio and being able to lift large weights. Having a body that is balanced with the right amounts of mobility and stability at each joint will not only keep you in the game longer, but will also improve your performance.

(Originally posted on my personal blog)

Well, here I am waiting to hear about my next fight. Training has been going well recently, and I've started using PhD synergy more regularly. I find it's great for drinking before and during weight training sessions, and together with the glutamine it's definitely helping with my recovery between training sessions.

I've been trying to pay more attention to my diet just recently. It's easy to get a bit slack in between fights, but I always notice the difference in performance if I'm not eating well. I've always been a fan of porridge for breakfast, and someone showed me a recipe for chocolate protein porridge the other day, which is great. I don't really measure quantities when i cook, so it might take some experimentation....

porridge oats
semi-skimmed milk
PhD chocolate cookie pharma-whey
frozen raspberries
honey
cinnamon

I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the photo shoot we did for PhD the other day. Hopefully some good pics :)

So I'm just back from my fight in Vancouver (http://sports.bodogbeat.com/mma-news-results-for-bodog-fight-vancouver-74101.html).

This was my first fight with PhD as my sponsors. Having packed several tubs with assorted powders, I was glad not to be stopped at customs and asked to explain myself! I also took along a whole box full of "smart bars" to make sure I had some healthy snacks for the journey.

The whole trip was a surreal emotional rollercoaster of an experience. It was great to meet up with fighters from all over the world, some who I'd met and spent time with before on previous trips, others who I knew only by reputation. For ten days, we were put up in a luxury five star hotel, with all food provided. The ballroom was turned into a fully equipped training facility with a ring, separate mat areas, treadmills, bikes and punchbags. A separate hotel gym had a weights room, a pool and a sauna. Bodog certainly know how to treat their fighters!

Thanks to a great strength and conditioning program, together with PhD's "pharma gain", I was coming in a bit heavier (and a lot stronger) for this fight, and it was my first real experience of weight cutting. I was worried that it was going to leave me pretty drained but as it happened we got it right. After gradually cutting carbs during the week before, drinking extra water a few days beforehand and then spending some time in the sauna on the morning of the weigh in, I eventually weighed in right on target at 126 lbs.

Getting to the right weight is only half the battle though. The important bit is the recovery and rehydration afterwards. After some research and a few calculations, we decided to use Battery +/3 with a little extra salt added for rehydration. This worked like a dream, and just a few hours later I was right back to my original weight of 136 lbs.

By the following evening, I was ready to go. For an added kick, I took a dose of PhD "Wired" just before I started warming up. This is my all time favourite sports nutrition product. As well as helping me feel physically ready, I also find that it has a great effect on my state of mind - it helps me combine my pre-fight nerves with the right degree of focus and confidence that I need to perform at my best.

As for the fight itself, it should be out to watch sometime in the next few months on http://www.bodogfight.com. Look out for the PhD logos.

On the basis that you are what you eat, and that if something’s in your fridge then you’ll eventually eat it (with the exception of the three week old vegetables you bought with good intentions, and some amorphous furry blob that perhaps used to be cheese); I figure that you can tell a lot about the state of someone’s current and future health from the contents of their shopping basket.

So there I am in tescos, smugly filling my trolley with bulgar wheat, spinach and free range chicken and glancing self-righteously at the overweight blob in front of me who clearly lives on coke, burgers and doughnuts. And then a thought occurs to me: hang on a minute, I’m trying to put on weight. As a woman, this is counterintuitive, but I’m on the light end of my weight category, and putting in a lot of work on my strength.

There is good evidence to suggest that what, how much and how often people tend to eat has very little to do with what their body actually needs at that given moment. It is far more to do with contextual cues. People eat because it’s meal time, because there’s food in front of them, because they’re bored, depressed or avoiding exam revision, because the Sunday roast cooking next door smells good, or because just thinking about chocolate makes them hungry. Variety makes a difference: eat the same things every day and your appetite will go down. So to lose weight, and keep it off, it makes sense to find ways of reducing your appetite. If, on the other hand, you want to put weight on, then how much you feel like eating is crucial.

People who persistently surround themselves with tasty, fattening snacks feel the urge to eat more often. On the contrary, stuffing your cupboards with brown rice and lentils is a sure fire way to lose weight. Sure, you’ll eat them if you get hungry enough, but somehow that doesn’t seem to happen quite as often. Firstly, you have to figure out how to cook the damn things, which takes forever, and it all seems somehow not really worth it when it tastes like cardboard anyway. Just the thought is enough to take the edge off your appetite.

So here I am, trying to eat healthily because I’ve got a fight coming up, but at the same time I need to keep my calorie intake high. I realise that if I’m serious about this, I need to have stuff in the house that makes me actually want to eat 5 or 6 times a day. There are several ways to do this. One is to compromise a little. As a doctor told me when I was pregnant, sometimes what you are eating has to take second place to the fact that you are eating. Sometimes it’s important to just get the calories in.

That’s not an excuse to stuff my face with whatever junk comes to hand, however. The right balance of nutrients is vital for performance, and there’s no doubt that the body trains, recovers and performs better on a healthy diet.

The nice folks at PhD nutrition have sorted me out with some pharma-gain and battery (energy drink), which are a huge help, but man (or woman) can’t live on high-tech nutritional supplements alone, no matter how tasty and well researched they are.

Convenience is the key. I’ve often thought that if tasty, healthy snacks were as easily available as chocolate and crisps in newsagents and vending machines, then as a nation we’d be a lot healthier. So I make up pasta salads in advance and keep them in the fridge, stock up on fruit that I can pick at during the day, and keep a whole load of healthy meals in the freezer that can be microwaved quickly. I have a stash of PhD’s “smart bars” which are fantastic for travelling and those times when I need something to eat quickly. I make sure I always have quick and easy meals in stock: beans on toast or tinned mackerel in tomato sauce with a baked potato. High energy snacks like malt loaf or low fat cereal bars.

The important thing isn’t the detail here – everyone has to find what does or doesn’t work for them. It’s the concept. If you want to gain healthy weight, you need to find healthy stuff you want to eat, and make sure you have it handy.

My shipment from PhD arrived yesterday... wahay! I'm very excited to be working with them. I've tried a lot of different brands of nutrition products, but I really like what PhD have come up with. They're designed with the needs of athletes in mind.

This month I'm using pharma-gain, battery/+3 and smart bars. I'm about seven weeks out from my next fight, and I'm on a strength training phase at the moment, trying to put on a little weight. I'm on the light side for my weight category, and once the pre-fight training really kicks in I find it hard to keep the weight on. So what can I say about pharma-gain? Mmmm...chocolatey goodness... One of the things that I like about these products is that they actually taste good! I've got a feeling this box of smart bars is going to disappear in no time.

I've also been trying out the "Wired" pre-training supplement, and oh boy, does it do what it says on the tin! It's got tyrosine in, which I think is one of the best kept secrets in the sports nutrition business. At the moment, I'm training twice a day, and it's inevitable that sometimes I turn up at the gym feeling a bit tired, sore and not really raring to go. That's when Wired can turn a ho-hum training session into a great session, and leaves me still buzzing a few hours later.