In 1999, the Canadian athlete Jonathon Power became the first North American to be ranked the world’s number one squash player, an accomplishment he achieved several more times throughout his career. But even for the most focused, dedicated, and gifted athlete, being at the top of a competitive sport is a constant mental and physical challenge. When I first met Jonathon in 2000, he had a troubling array of physical problems. He had even considered leaving the pro circuit.
Jonathon was a child when he started playing squash and was soon putting in hours of daily practice and winning national junior titles. He dropped out of high school to work on his game, turning pro at age sixteen.
A fast, aerobically intense, physically grueling game of infinite combinations and angles, squash is demanding on the joints, which are subject to relentless compression and pounding; it is particularly punishing on the knees, lower vertebrae, and hips. Injuries are common among squash players, and pain is a constant companion, on court and off, for top competitive players.
When I met Jonathon his goal wasn’t to eliminate the pain; he’d lived with pain all his life. Instead, he wanted to eliminate the problem that was shutting down his body. His mind could tolerate the pain, but his body, refusing to accept any more abuse, had forced him to stop with full-blown back and groin spasms. “By the time I got to the round that I really needed to win, my body was so beat up I couldn’t continue,” he said.
Before working with me, Jonathon had worked with a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, and a soft-tissue therapist. And, of course, he had regular message therapy and was proficient at standard athletic stretches as well as the art of icing. But when Jonathon moved back to his native Montreal from Toronto, he left that team of healers behind him. Once he started working with me, he felt no need to have such a team on hand. “The only time I ever saw those guys after that was if I was out with a tear or with injuries that needed to be dealt with by physiotherapy,” he said.
Jonathon explained that his trouble originated in his hips: “The hips are where all your speed is. And when they got bound up, that gave me back spasms and a whole bunch of other problems.” However, I got to the root of Jonathon’s back spasms by working on his feet first, before starting on his hips and the rest of his body.
Most people, including athletes, are unaware of the major role that their feet (including their toes) and ankles play in their overall full-body mobility. In my experience working with high-performance athletes, I have found that little to no training is done to keep their feet mobile and strong. Most athletes wear running shoes, boots, or skates all day, every day, never taking them off to train the hundreds of muscles of their feet. This results in “locked,” prematurely atrophied ankles and feet. Many high-performance athletes, and weekend warriors, too, end up with weak feet, calves, and shins. This leads to shin splints, inflammation of the groin and hip muscles, and back spasms. I can almost always trace the source of shoulder, back, and hip pain to immobilized feet and ankles. Many times, when we fix the feet, the other problems go away.
If your toes are immobile, you are almost guaranteed to suffer from a chain reaction of contracted muscles from your feet to your fingers. Where the chain reaction lodges and creates inflammation depends on the individual, but back spasms and hip pain are often directly related to immobile ankles and feet. This was Jonathon’s case.
When I began working with him, the first thing I noticed was that his toes and ankles were almost 100 percent immobile. On a day-to-day basis, he lived with a level of pain that would have incapacitated most people. Once he understood that he could conquer this pain with correct exercise, his devotion to reversing it showed me that his status as the longest-reigning world squash champion in history was no coincidence. He put in the time necessary to fix his body, and that was a lot!
During our first few days of training, we spent hours working almost exclusively on regaining the full strength and mobility of his bare feet, using many of the exercises offered in this chapter. As the muscles in his feet relaxed and lengthened, so did the chains of muscles throughout his body.
For six weeks, we continued working daily on deep, full-body Essentrics stretches with an emphasis on hips and feet. Jonathon generally did 90 minutes a day with me, after a full day of his regular squash training. “The reason I did it was because I was seeing results so soon; I would say after a week or two into it,” he said. “And then I was hooked because of the freedom in my body—I was finally able to move the way I used to.”
I traveled with Jonathon to some key squash matches. His hips regularly got jammed up and locked during the preliminary rounds, so I used Essentrics movement to eliminate his locked hips. “I had other people doing my strength fitness and conditioning, but I had Miranda really keeping my body loose and strong and my reactions fast,” he said.
No matter where he was in the world, Jonathon found himself naturally incorporating the Essentrics training into his daily routine. At that point in his life, thanks to Essentrics, Jonathon said, “I was so in tune with my body by then that whenever I felt I needed it, I would just do it.”
In 2006, at the age of thirty-one, Jonathan announced his retirement from professional sports. It was one day after he had regained the number one world ranking—to this day, he holds the record as the oldest squash player ever to attain that title.
Pain in your feet and ankles can create problems throughout your body. These exercises can help your foundation, your feet, become strong, flexible, and pain-free.