Leigh Halfteck

Leigh Halfteck

Leigh Halfteck

LEAD PHYSIOTHERAPIST

BRIEF INFO

Leigh always knew what he wanted to do but didn’t know how to go about doing it. His goal was to work in sport full time so he studied a degree in Sports rehabilitation at Salford University firstly, graduating in 2003. He then worked for a number of Rugby and Athletics teams, but he always felt that he couldn’t quite get the jobs he wanted, he wasn’t part of the inner circle. To do that he had to be a physio, so he went back to University ad studied Physiotherapy at Huddersfield University. Immediately after graduating the door opened and Leigh began working at the English Institute of Sport in Manchester as the Lead Physiotherapist for GB Taekwondo. For four years Leigh travelled the globe with the team, often finding himself in the back and beyond of China and Korea. But the experience culminated in what Leigh describes as one of the best moments of his career at the London Olympic Games.

Soon after the Games, Leigh moved on to his Long term goal of working full-time with British Athletics in Loughborough. He worked with some of the best coaches in the country. He developed a skill for observing someone run and ascertaining where their weakness/restrictions were and from that, use his hands to promote mobility to areas restricted and prescribe exercises to prevent reoccurrence.

For Leigh, this was a career goal and like any goals that have been achieved it is time to re-evaluate and establish new ones. Leigh aims to bring what was learnt in elite sport to the clinic. He works very closely with a number of strength and conditioning coaches in the area to help you return to your previous ability and more so.

When travelling you are blessed with a lot of down time, during this time Leigh developed an interest in the Nervous system and wanted to better understand how the nerves ae involved with a persons pain. He began by mapping the path of every nerve, trying to understand why a person with back pain could gain symptom relief by being treated around the ankle (he now knows that the sciatic nerve branches into the tibial nerve and then the plantar nerves around the foot, if the nerves of the foot are tight they can then irritate the nerves of the back causing pain)