Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group, LLC Blog

An Update on Boston Promise

by Steve Cassidy 

Boston Promise experienced a remarkable first year on the court. Basketball (and academic) skill sessions were held at Basketball City twice a week from April through November. Through grueling sessions focused on fundamentals, players showed marked improvement in their games. On the weekends the program competed in tournaments both locally and regionally. The schedule included such challenging events as the Hoop Mountain Classic and the Gym Rat Challenge which brought in teams from all over the northeast. All the hard work paid off when Boston Promise earned its first tournament championship by capturing the Middlesex Magic Classic in October.

Learn more about the Boston Promise approach and values by visiting their website.

Boston Promise:

Our mission is to assist Boston's youth basketball players in fulfilling their promise as scholars, athletes and leaders in their communities. We aim to increase these young players' opportunities for higher education by providing them with the knowledge and experiences that will prepare them for college-level academics and basketball.

Learn how you can get involved by clicking HERE.

In discussing a case of stress fractures with some friends recently, the concept of Load vs. Mechanics was discussed.

“It’s all load. Too much running, too much conditioning heading into the season,” suggested the athletic trainer in the room.

“No, no, no – that kid was set up to fail from the start. She’s got funny feet and that’s the reason. Everyone else ran the same distance and didn’t have a problem.”

The conversation ultimately boiled down to this:

Are you applying an unreasonable amount of load to normal mechanics or are you applying a reasonable amount of load to unusual mechanics?

Yes, too much load too fast will always get you there, but having “abnormal” mechanics will certainly ensure that you get there a whole lot faster.

My father would always tell me that every time you point your finger there are three others pointing right back at you.

So the next time your athlete walks in reporting a stress fracture don’t be so quick to point the finger at the group down the hall, and instead ask yourself if that athlete suffered their injury from load or mechanics and what you did to screen, monitor and address the problem BEFORE it sidelined them.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Too good not to share....

This article originally appeared on ESPN.com - TrueHoop by Henry Abbott on 1/3/11

So, it's a new year, and thanks to the power of resolutions, the gym is crowded again.

All these people who have not worked out in a long time are back at it, for now.

Doesn't that picture worry you just a little? All that sedentary living, followed by a frenzy of playing hoops again, or running, or spinning or whatever ... that's like an injury waiting to happen. Muscles and tendons and joints that have been aging without conditioning, now tested once more.

It's no wonder that every advertisement pushing workouts includes the line about consulting a physician before beginning an exercise regimen.

But this is what strikes me: Really? You need a doctor's note to exercise?

Isn't that entirely backwards? Shouldn't you need a doctor's note to sit on the couch instead?

In other words, if you don't exercise for six months, then sprain your ankle playing hoops one time, it's the sitting that needs to stop, not the hooping. Right?

These days, we spend the vast majority of our lives sitting still in the dim light, or lying down, watching screens. And you can make a pretty strong case it's killing us.

We're descended from people who moved their bodies just about all day every day to stay alive. They got tons of sunlight. If you believe Christopher McDougall's thesis in "Born to Run," at a key stage in human evolution, our ancestors literally chased animals all day -- until the deer dropped from exhaustion. Imagine whole families together, including the children and the old people -- running one ultramarathon after another, for survival.

Now imagine getting those people, or their descendants, to sit in the car, at the desk, or on the couch all day. They'd go nuts! They'd have obesity, heart disease, diabetes, depression, and all the other leading killers in modern society.

So hell yeah, let's get out there. Let's honor those New Year's resolutions. Let's move these bodies that were meant to move. And when you find yourself slipping, a month or two from now, and thinking about spending less time in the gym and more time on the couch ... cal

As 2010 comes to an end, I thought I'd use this last week to direct you to 5 of the most popular blog articles from this past year.

Happy New Year and all the best this coming year!

Enjoy

Seeing The World Through The Hole In A 45 Pound Plate

I'm Not A Businessman, I'm A BUSINESS Man

SHIPPERS WANTED

Barbershop Talk

Are You Filling The Right Gaps?

BSMPG wishes all of our friends and family the very best this Holiday Season.

I've never once heard after a lost basketball game an athlete use the word "I".

"I" is just too tough to swallow.

It's always the ref's blown call, the coach's bad substitution or a teammates ill advised shot, but never "I".

It's not because the actual word is difficult to say, it's just that it's much easier to look outward, look at other people's mistakes and other peoples shortcomings.

"U" is just a lot easier to say than "I".

Yes, maybe it was someone elses mistake, and yes maybe the ref should have given you that call, or maybe, just maybe, you're just making excuses.

"I" is tough to swallow. But continuing to lose by making the same mistakes tastes a whole lot worse - on the basketball court and in life.  Confronting the brutal facts, no matter what situation you may be in is always the first step to creating a better "U".

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Training = Rehab - Rehab = Training DVD set now available by Charlie Weingroff.

Training=Rehab, Rehab=Training is a 12+ hour, 6-disc set shot on-location over a weekend at an Equinox Fitness Club in New York City.  It documents Dr. Weingroff’s continuing efforts to reinvent and redefine the language between the rehabilitation and performance enhancement training landscapes.  And while there are plenty of examples for those who just want the exercises, these DVDs are more about designing your own blueprints based on common rules that medical professionals and personal trainers should honor.

If you weren’t there, this puts you in the room for the entirety of an extraordinary voyage with one of the most influential and outspoken voices in the industry.  Training=Rehab, Rehab=Training will surely be an educational milestone and a must-have in the collection for every physical therapist, strength coach and personal trainer.

Catch Charlie in Boston this coming June 3rd/4th at the BSMPG Basketball Specific Training Symposium along with Shirley Sahrmann, Tom Myers and Clare Frank.

Some things are just worth the little bit of extra effort.

Yes, squeezing takes a little more planning, a little more time, and a little more work.  But like freshly squeezed OJ, your extra effort certainly tastes better than the frozen from concentrate your competitors are serving.

Yes, the juice is certainly worth the squeeze.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Talk about effort is worth the result….

99.9 percent of French adults are organ donors, compared to only 28 percent of Americans. It’s because in France, everyone is a donor by default. In most of the United States, it’s the opposite.

The expectation in France is that you’d be willing to donate an organ to someone in need. In the United States, the expectation is that if you want to donate an organ to someone in need you’ll take the effort to check that little box on your driver’s license.

A small difference in wording with a major difference in results.

Each fall, in college sports medicine rooms across the United States, we screen for height and weight, yet the majority of each day in the majority of Sports Medicine clinics across the country no one is having a height problem.

What if the NCAA instead put assessment of Movement Patterns as a default for pre-participation physicals alongside height, weight, BP and Pulse?

Shouldn’t a procedure that addresses and screens for the majority of problems our patients encounter worth considering?

Organ donation isn’t for everyone and should ultimately be decided on an individual basis, but like organ donation, movement screening may just save some of your student-athlete’s heartache down the road.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

A physician friend of mine challenged me the other day about a recent post regarding omelet’s and rehab.  He thought it was a nice piece but mentioned that it may not apply to all aspects of medicine – “there are just too many variables that have to be considered” he said.

Like what? I asked him

“Take for example the common ACL reconstruction – allograft, autograft, hamstring, patellar tendon, etc.  Each graft is the central part of that surgery and thus an egg, yet each one is different” he explained.

Wrong

“Those are peppers and mushrooms,” I told him.

The key to each and every ACL surgery is the tunnel angle and placement, not the graft choice.

You may choose a bone-tendon-bone graft for example after a previously failed surgery or for those athletes that play a contact sport – but you certainly wouldn’t for someone that performed physical labor like installing carpet where they spent the majority of each day on their knees would you? Graft choice is the pepper in your omelet – mind you a very big piece of this omelet, but a pepper none the less.  Perfect tunnel placement and angle on the other hand, is a must in any successful ACL reconstruction – it’s the egg in the omelet. Get it wrong and you’ll be cleaning up that sticky yellow yolk for years to come.

There are a few things that must take place in every surgery, just like in any rehabilitation and performance programming that make it a successful operation; without that key ingredient your patient will always walk, or well limp, back through your door sometime down the road.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.