Recovery is the goal.
Christchurch United have a new ace up their sleeve: focal vibration technology.
Football is the most popular sport in the world with an estimated 265 million players globally. It’s also the world’s largest spectator sport, the 2018 Football World Cup final between France and Croatia had an audience of over a billion people.
Football is a game that’s easy to learn but hard to master, with ever-expanding tactics and strategies. It’s also a physically demanding sport, players need a high level of cardiovascular fitness to play well as they can run up to fourteen kilometres in a 90-minute game. That’s not at a consistent pace either. Backwards running, lateral running, sprints and jogs are all mixed in.
Although football is not technically a contact sport, injuries through collisions with other players are common. Running at high speeds, falling over due to tackles or bumps, having to stop suddenly and pivot direction quickly to catch another player all add to the physical burden of football and stress on the body.
Myovolt has recently partnered with Christchurch United Football Club, one of New Zealand’s premier amateur sports clubs. CUFC has teams at all age levels from under fours, up to their adult First Team, which owner Slava Meyn refers to as a stepping stone to the professional game.
“We want the Christchurch United First Team to be a trampoline for young players who want to be professional players. We have to provide the best opportunities and the best environment for this.”
With such high ambitions, Slava says that he’s replicating the professional environment as accurately as he can with the facilities at CUFC. This is a multi-layered effort on all fronts but with athlete well-being at the top of the list.
“Keeping players healthy is extremely important to us. We want to create as close to a professional environment as possible for our players. Strength and conditioning, injury prevention, training, rehabilitation and mental fortitude are all areas of focus.”
“You need to put the pieces in place now when you’re young because it’s too late when you’re 30.”
Common injuries for football players are sore knees, hamstrings and lower backs. These are all connected with one another with back pain often due to leg related imbalances. The hamstrings can be expected to take the majority of the workload if the quadriceps, glutes or calves aren’t working optimally. If one part isn’t picking up their slack, the whole workplace can fall behind and start to have issues.
So how do you avoid this? Football players need to be extremely diligent, ensuring they warm up properly before training and matches. This could include specific routines, including stretching exercises but the CUFC staff all emphasised the need to prehab injuries.
“There are plenty of guys around 22 or 23, playing through injuries just because they can,” says Paul Ifill, Christchurch United’s First Team head coach and ex UK premier league player. “But if you can get on top of that now, you’re going to prolong your career. I’m still playing at 42 at the same level as these guys, and I think a lot of that is due to the work I would do before games to keep me right. You need to put the pieces in place now when you’re young because it’s too late when you’re 30.”
And Paul would know. He’s had a phenomenal career playing in the English Premier League for teams such as Millwall and Sheffield United. He moved to New Zealand in 2009 to play for the Wellington Phoenix. After retirement, he started coaching, moving to Christchurch in 2021 to work with Christchurch United.
First Team player and captain of the squad in 2021, James McClay, agrees that getting ahead of the game when you’re young is important, but can often be overlooked.
“When you’re young, you think you’re invincible. I definitely thought that. You get on the training pitch and the first thing you want to do is smack balls at the goal. You look over and see the older guy doing his warm-up routine and you think “what's that idiot doing”. But I’m that guy now.”
“As you get a bit older, you appreciate that playing sports is a short career in general and you want to prolong that as much as possible. If I could turn back time I would take my mobility and stretching a bit more seriously and not think I was invincible.”
Recovery is the goal.
Christchurch United have a new ace up their sleeve:
focal vibration technology.
Football is the most popular sport in the world with an estimated 265 million players globally. It’s also the world’s largest spectator sport, the 2018 Football World Cup final between France and Croatia had an audience of over a billion people.
Football is a game that’s easy to learn but hard to master, with ever-expanding tactics and strategies. It’s also a physically demanding sport, players need a high level of cardiovascular fitness to play well as they can run up to fourteen kilometres in a 90-minute game. That’s not at a consistent pace either. Backwards running, lateral running, sprints and jogs are all mixed in.
Although football is not technically a contact sport, injuries through collisions with other players are common. Running at high speeds, falling over due to tackles or bumps, having to stop suddenly and pivot direction quickly to catch another player all add to the physical burden of football and stress on the body.
Myovolt has recently partnered with Christchurch United Football Club, one of New Zealand’s premier amateur sports clubs. CUFC has teams at all age levels from under fours, up to their adult First Team, which owner Slava Meyn refers to as a stepping stone to the professional game.
“We want the Christchurch United First Team to be a trampoline for young players who want to be professional players. We have to provide the best opportunities and the best environment for this.”
With such high ambitions, Slava says that he’s replicating the professional environment as accurately as he can with the facilities at CUFC. This is a multi-layered effort on all fronts but with athlete well-being at the top of the list.
“Keeping players healthy is extremely important to us. We want to create as close to a professional environment as possible for our players. Strength and conditioning, injury prevention, training, rehabilitation and mental fortitude are all areas of focus.”
“
You need to put the pieces in place now when you’re young because it’s too late when you’re 30.”
Common injuries for football players are sore knees, hamstrings and lower backs. These are all connected with one another with back pain often due to leg related imbalances. The hamstrings can be expected to take the majority of the workload if the quadriceps, glutes or calves aren’t working optimally. If one part isn’t picking up their slack, the whole workplace can fall behind and start to have issues.
So how do you avoid this? Football players need to be extremely diligent, ensuring they warm up properly before training and matches. This could include specific routines, including stretching exercises but the CUFC staff all emphasised the need to prehab injuries.
“There are plenty of guys around 22 or 23, playing through injuries just because they can,” says Paul Ifill, Christchurch United’s First Team head coach and ex UK premier league player. “But if you can get on top of that now, you’re going to prolong your career. I’m still playing at 42 at the same level as these guys, and I think a lot of that is due to the work I would do before games to keep me right. You need to put the pieces in place now when you’re young because it’s too late when you’re 30.”
And Paul would know. He’s had a phenomenal career playing in the English Premier League for teams such as Millwall and Sheffield United. He moved to New Zealand in 2009 to play for the Wellington Phoenix. After retirement, he started coaching, moving to Christchurch in 2021 to work with Christchurch United.
First Team player and captain of the squad in 2021, James McClay, agrees that getting ahead of the game when you’re young is important, but can often be overlooked.
“When you’re young, you think you’re invincible. I definitely thought that. You get on the training pitch and the first thing you want to do is smack balls at the goal. You look over and see the older guy doing his warm-up routine and you think “what's that idiot doing”. But I’m that guy now.”
“As you get a bit older, you appreciate that playing sports is a short career in general and you want to prolong that as much as possible. If I could turn back time I would take my mobility and stretching a bit more seriously and not think I was invincible.”
Michiel Buursma, the head of methodology and coaching at CUFC believes that all injuries are avoidable, it’s just a matter of early intervention.
“I think all injuries are preventable. If I could, I would put that on the wall. I see injuries sometimes and think okay, you’re eighteen, this injury was preventable when you were twelve. You should have worked on coordination at that age so that now you won’t make that weird turn. You won’t put yourself under such stress that you can’t perform with that injury. It’s always preventable.”
“If you’re young, and you do the basic movement right and learn how to move and to be functional, you put a base down that’s brilliant for later in life.”
Slowly bringing players up to speed is key. At CUFC players will do around four training sessions a week, what they call “contacts”. Each contact could be a fitness session, regular training, or game. The focus in the pre-season is periodisation, getting players up to a good fitness level without making them peak too early.
The trick with football, according to Michiel, is managing load and loadability. It’s the focal point of Michiel’s philosophy, and he spoke at length about the training mindset at Christchurch United. He says although load is more show, loadability is the go.
What he means is, the amount that you push your players, and how you increase their capacity to be pushed. For example, load could be the maximum a player could run and let’s say that’s six kilometres. Loadability is a process through which, a coach might start to program in some smaller runs, sprints, squats, little things that will, over time, allow the player to more comfortably redline their body and increase the maximum they can run.
“What we can do on the loading side is very visible. But what we’re interested in is the loadability. If we can make the player more loadable, we can increase the load with no problem. We can increase the loadability of the player sometimes as easily as programming in some core stability exercises or a few more training sessions in preseason. Sometimes it’s more difficult things like specific sprint or mobility training that you need to increase your range of motion or mobility in general.
“
One of our goalkeepers had a little pain in his back, and because of Myovolt he was able to play and succeed. Could he have played without Myovolt? Probably not.”
Michiel Buursma, the head of methodology and coaching at CUFC believes that all injuries are avoidable, it’s just a matter of early intervention.
“I think all injuries are preventable. If I could, I would put that on the wall. I see injuries sometimes and think okay, you’re eighteen, this injury was preventable when you were twelve. You should have worked on coordination at that age so that now you won’t make that weird turn. You won’t put yourself under such stress that you can’t perform with that injury. It’s always preventable.”
“If you’re young, and you do the basic movement right and learn how to move and to be functional, you put a base down that’s brilliant for later in life.”
Slowly bringing players up to speed is key. At CUFC players will do around four training sessions a week, what they call “contacts”. Each contact could be a fitness session, regular training, or game. The focus in the pre-season is periodisation, getting players up to a good fitness level without making them peak too early.
The trick with football, according to Michiel, is managing load and loadability. It’s the focal point of Michiel’s philosophy, and he spoke at length about the training mindset at Christchurch United. He says although load is more show, loadability is the go.
What he means is, the amount that you push your players, and how you increase their capacity to be pushed. For example, load could be the maximum a player could run and let’s say that’s six kilometres. Loadability is a process through which, a coach might start to program in some smaller runs, sprints, squats, little things that will, over time, allow the player to more comfortably redline their body and increase the maximum they can run.
“What we can do on the loading side is very visible. But what we’re interested in is the loadability. If we can make the player more loadable, we can increase the load with no problem. We can increase the loadability of the player sometimes as easily as programming in some core stability exercises or a few more training sessions in preseason. Sometimes it’s more difficult things like specific sprint or mobility training that you need to increase your range of motion or mobility in general.
“One of our goalkeepers had a little pain in his back, and because of Myovolt he was able to play and succeed. Could he have played without Myovolt? Probably not.”
“And another aspect is - if I load up high, how fast can I recover? If I can recover in 48 hours, how can I cut that to 24? What would I use?”
Michiel is a big fan of supplements to increase loadability in players. Christchurch United believe in setting their players up right - with a focus on education and proper training habits. Part of that comes to nutrition, monitoring players workloads, and developing good training schedules. But he says there’s no one-size-fits-all method for helping players develop.
“Every individual footballer is so complex. What works for you, might not necessarily work for me. You need to find your own way. There’s plenty of ways to do that, tracking devices that measure how much sleep you need and find what nutrition you need.
“You can find the little hacks for yourself. It’s a lifetime search, but if you’re willing to experiment and look for yourself you’ll prevent injuries along the way.”
Michiel specifically brought up foam rolling and using Myovolt - but says that the latter is more flexible.
“While foam rolling before training can be counter-intuitive, Myovolt works well to warm the body up as well as help it recover. If you have a little niggle - Myovolt gives the pulses to make it right to train - increasing loadability.”
He’s also used Myovolt to get the most out of one player when they were debilitated with a back injury.
“We would take Myovolt to tournaments. One of our goalkeepers had a little pain in his back, and because of Myovolt he was able to play and succeed. Could he have played without Myovolt? Probably not. So he was able to play and we gave him a big rest once he came home.”
Implementing Myovolt into football training is easy, affordable, and a fantastic addition to training programs. It can cut through the time spent in recovery from injuries and niggles. Its hands-free design means that players can use it on the go, and don’t have to take time out of their day doing arduous routines. Easy to use, with fantastic results, why not give Myovolt a go?
Coach Paul Ifill says people just need to try it to understand that the hype is real.
“I think people will be on board once they give it a go. That’s what got me. Over the years I've seen so many gimmicks and bands and treatments and they’re crap. Most of the time you try it, if it doesn’t work you never use it again. But Myovolt, I tried it, it was good, I tried it again, and it really works.
“With the price point it’s at too it’s value for money. It’s not a one-time treatment.“
First team captain James agrees.
“After the first couple of days, I noticed that the stiffness around my knees was getting better, that it was freeing up and I wasn’t as stiff. I could sit for longer and getting up was a lot easier. Just thought, what's the worst that could happen, and it’s had a positive benefit.”
Using Myovolt can help any athlete looking to improve their recovery. Increasing beneficial outcomes, making sure that you can run, jump and move the way you want to. Myovolt is an easy to use product that has been proven in clinical trials to help increase recovery and help warm-ups.
If you’re looking to create a better life for yourself, run up the field a few more times, and develop a game that will last you a lifetime, consider a few of the elements covered in this article.
Prehab to stop rehab. Get a qualified professional to diagnose imbalances and work to stop them from developing into injuries
- The basics: Diet, fitness, and sleep are still the most important tools in an athlete's arsenal, and don’t be afraid to search out what you specifically need for performance.
- Load and loadability. Don’t always redline yourself. Take some time to increase the loadability of your body, to increase beneficial outcomes.
- Myovolt can help you out with a hands-free, physio on-the-go tool. Focal vibration therapy could be the key to getting rid of aches and pains as they occur.
Myovolt. Good vibrations. Great recovery.
“And another aspect is - if I load up high, how fast can I recover? If I can recover in 48 hours, how can I cut that to 24? What would I use?”
Michiel is a big fan of supplements to increase loadability in players. Christchurch United believe in setting their players up right - with a focus on education and proper training habits. Part of that comes to nutrition, monitoring players workloads, and developing good training schedules. But he says there’s no one-size-fits-all method for helping players develop.
“Every individual footballer is so complex. What works for you, might not necessarily work for me. You need to find your own way. There’s plenty of ways to do that, tracking devices that measure how much sleep you need and find what nutrition you need.
“You can find the little hacks for yourself. It’s a lifetime search, but if you’re willing to experiment and look for yourself you’ll prevent injuries along the way.”
Michiel specifically brought up foam rolling and using Myovolt - but says that the latter is more flexible.
“While foam rolling before training can be counter-intuitive, Myovolt works well to warm the body up as well as help it recover. If you have a little niggle - Myovolt gives the pulses to make it right to train - increasing loadability.”
He’s also used Myovolt to get the most out of one player when they were debilitated with a back injury.
“We would take Myovolt to tournaments. One of our goalkeepers had a little pain in his back, and because of Myovolt he was able to play and succeed. Could he have played without Myovolt? Probably not. So he was able to play and we gave him a big rest once he came home.”
Implementing Myovolt into football training is easy, affordable, and a fantastic addition to training programs. It can cut through the time spent in recovery from injuries and niggles. Its hands-free design means that players can use it on the go, and don’t have to take time out of their day doing arduous routines. Easy to use, with fantastic results, why not give Myovolt a go?
Coach Paul Ifill says people just need to try it to understand that the hype is real.
“I think people will be on board once they give it a go. That’s what got me. Over the years I've seen so many gimmicks and bands and treatments and they’re crap. Most of the time you try it, if it doesn’t work you never use it again. But Myovolt, I tried it, it was good, I tried it again, and it really works.
“With the price point it’s at too it’s value for money. It’s not a one-time treatment.“
First team captain James agrees.
“After the first couple of days, I noticed that the stiffness around my knees was getting better, that it was freeing up and I wasn’t as stiff. I could sit for longer and getting up was a lot easier. Just thought, what's the worst that could happen, and it’s had a positive benefit.”
Using Myovolt can help any athlete looking to improve their recovery. Increasing beneficial outcomes, making sure that you can run, jump and move the way you want to. Myovolt is an easy to use product that has been proven in clinical trials to help increase recovery and help warm-ups.
If you’re looking to create a better life for yourself, run up the field a few more times, and develop a game that will last you a lifetime, consider a few of the elements covered in this article.
Prehab to stop rehab. Get a qualified professional to diagnose imbalances and work to stop them from developing into injuries
- The basics: Diet, fitness, and sleep are still the most important tools in an athlete's arsenal, and don’t be afraid to search out what you specifically need for performance.
- Load and loadability. Don’t always redline yourself. Take some time to increase the loadability of your body, to increase beneficial outcomes.
- Myovolt can help you out with a hands-free, physio on-the-go tool. Focal vibration therapy could be the key to getting rid of aches and pains as they occur.
Myovolt. Good vibrations. Great recovery.
Featured in this story
Myovolt Shoulder fits comfortably around the left or right shoulder and upper arm area to deliver a 10-minute focal vibration treatment. The neoprene shoulder brace has an adjustable fit for most body sizes.
Ease tension and relieve overuse strain in the lower back, hips and side.
Myovolt Leg fits comfortably around the left or right knee, quad, hamstring or calf.
Featured in story
Myovolt Shoulder fits comfortably around the left or right shoulder and upper arm area to deliver a 10-minute focal vibration treatment. The Neoprene strap has adjustable fit for most body sizes.
Ease tension and relieve overuse strain in the lower back, hips and side.
Myovolt Leg fits comfortably around the left or right knee, quad, hamstring or calf.