Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group, LLC Blog

I asked a friend at work the other day to help me solve a problem that has been affecting our department.

"Sorry" he said, "that's above my pay grade."

If you continue to refuse to take on responsibilities that are above your pay grade, when do you ever get the chance to ever move into that pay grade?

Wouldn't it make more sense to work more now than you get paid, so you can eventually get paid more than you work?

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.

BSMPG is proud to announce that Pete Viteritti will join Dr. Shirley Sahrmann, Tom Myers, and Clare Frank as featured speakers in Boston June 3rd and 4th, 2011.

Peter Viteritti is a Diplomate of the American Chiropractic Board of Sports Physicians who maintains private practices in two multidisciplinary centers. As a sports chiropractic consultant to several collegiate athletic programs, he integrates patient centered, functional examinations and advanced manual procedures with traditional medical care. 

He has been privileged to serve on the sports medicine staff at various national and international sporting events.  In addition, he instructed on the post-graduate faculty of five chiropractic colleges throughout the country and has been a featured speaker at both national and international sports medicine symposiums.
www.chirosportsmed.net

They don't teach you how to solve interesting problems in school.

Memorize the information and take the test.

Repeat with new information.

Receive diploma - congrats - you are very good at memorizing information.

Is it any wonder so many young professionals lack the skills or courage to make decisions or champion a project that will change how you do business for the better?

Next time you have an opening on your staff hire an architect, or at least someone excited to solve interesting problems.

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.

Hire an architect by Seth Godin

Architects don't manufacture nails, assemble windows or chop down trees. Instead, they take existing components and assemble them in interesting and important ways.

It used to be that if you wanted to build an organization, you had to be prepared to do a lot of manufacturing and assembly--of something. My first internet company had 60 or 70 people at its peak... and today, you could run the same organization with six people. The rest? They were busy building an infrastructure that now exists. Restaurants used to be built by chefs. Now, more than ever, they're built by impresarios who know how to tie together real estate, promotion, service and chefs into a package that consumers want to buy. The difficult part isn't installing the stove, the difficult (and scarce) part is telling a story.

I'm talking about intentionally building a structure and a strategy and a position, not focusing your energy on the mechanics, because mechanics alone are insufficient. Just as you can't build a class A office building with nothing but a skilled carpenter, you can't build a business for the ages that merely puts widgets into boxes.

My friend Jerry calls these people corporate chiropractors. They don't do surgery, they realign and recognize what's out of place.
Organizational architects know how to find suppliers, use the cloud (of people, of data, of resources), identify freelancers, tie together disparate resources and weave them into a business that scales. You either need to become one or hire one.
The organizations that matter are busy being run by people who figure out what to do next.

My dad used to say this all the time and is probably the one to blame for why I’m so crazy about the things we can do better.

When it comes to Sports Medicine however, this concept of prevention seems to be somewhat fuzzy.

Most athletic trainers do an unbelievable job at promoting the prevention of dehydration, cramping, heat exhaustion and ultimately death during the hot fall pre-season, yet when it comes to prevention in the winter or spring seasons the concept is almost completely forgotten about.  Sure we continue to do a great job at preventing the spread of skin infections, the flu and blood borne pathogens, but how many hours of your day are spent addressing these concerns after they’ve happened?

How come we are never as passionate about preventing ACL tears, ankle sprains, low back pain or stress fractures as we are dehydration?  Isn’t the majority of our day spent dealing with these musculoskeletal injuries?

Even the BOC website places PREVENTION as the first of the five practice domains of Athletic Training and describes Athletic Training as encompassing the PREVENTION, diagnosis and intervention of emergency, acute and chronic medical conditions involving impairment, functional limitations and disabilities.
Yet how many Sports Medicine programs actually have a system in place to evaluate and address for these injuries and illnesses that take up so much of our time? How many programs place athletes with a previous injury on a “pre-hab” program to address this concern? Doesn’t pain alter mechanics?

Isn’t time that Sports Medicine embrace prevention and intervention of musculoskeletal injuries with the same zealous of other prevention strategies?

My dad also used to tell me to measure twice and cut once.

Sorry dad, but in the case of sports medicine and prevention, I’d rather measure three, four or five times if it means our athletes never have to get cut once.

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.

Congrats to the University of Pittsburgh and Strength and Conditioning Coach Tim Beltz for winning the 2010 2K Sports Classic this past weekend at Madison Square Garden over the University of Texas 68-66.

Watch Tim discuss how he assesses and prepares his basketball team each year for the rigors of Big East play and how his strength programming has this team in the national spot light again.

Watch Tim's full presentation along with presentations from basketball's best strength coaches including Keith D'Amelio from the University of Stanford, Mike Curtis from the University of Virginia, Amanda Kimball from the University of Connecticut and many more by purchasing the 2010 BSMPG Basketball Conference Video.

BSMPG is proud to announce that Dr. Clare Frank will join Dr. Shirley Sahrmann and Tom Myers as featured speakers in Boston June 3rd and 4th, 2011.

Dr Frank was born and raised in Malaysia where she found her passion in sports. She started competing at the age of 10 and went on to win several state and national competitions in badminton.  Shortly after representing Malaysia in the International Women’s Uber Cup Championships, she left for the United States to pursue her education as a physiotherapist. While at Northern Illinois University, she earned All American honors and the distinguished Broderick Award in Badminton.  Her experience in competitive, elite sports and training has set the backdrop for her keen interest in the neuromuscular system and its relationship with musculoskeletal pain syndromes and dysfunction.

Dr. Frank received her physical therapy degree from Northern Illinois University. She completed the Kaiser Permanente Orthopedic Residency program in 1993 while working on her Master of Science degree in Physical Therapy  & Biokinesiology at University of Southern California. She then went on to receive her post-professional doctorate degree from Western University of Health Sciences, Pomona, California in 2003.  She is a board certified specialist in Orthopedic Physical Therapy (OCS) and a fellow in the American Academy of Orthopedic Manual Physical Therapy (FAAOMPT).
 
Her clinical career has been greatly influenced by Shirley Sahrmann PT, PhD, and the Prague School of Manual Medicine faculty, namely, the late Vladimir Janda MD, Karel Lewit MD, and Pavel Kolar PT, PhD. Dr. Frank practices at a private clinic in Los Angeles, California. She has been instrumental in setting up the Movement Science Fellowship at Kaiser Permanente, Los Angeles and is one of the primary clinical instructors for the program. She is also a certified instructor for Bands, Balls & Balance, Janda's Approach to Musculoskeletal Pain Syndromes and Kolar's Approach to Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization.  Dr Frank also serves as an adjunct lecturer at Western University of Health Sciences and Azusa Pacific University. She has presented at both state and national conferences and has recently published a book on "Assessment and Treatment of Muscle Imbalancels:  The Janda Approach" .  She currently teaches in the U.S. and internationally.

Laziness has changed.

It used to be about avoiding physical labor. The lazy person could nap or have a cup of tea while others got hot and sweaty and exhausted. Part of the reason society frowns on the lazy is that this behavior means more work for the rest of us.

When it came time to carry the canoe over the portage, I was always hard to find. The effort and the pain gave me two good reasons to be lazy.

But the new laziness has nothing to do with physical labor and everything to do with fear. If you're not going to make those sales calls or invent that innovation or push that insight, you're not avoiding it because you need physical rest. You're hiding out because you're afraid of expending emotional labor.

This is great news, because it's much easier to become brave about extending yourself than it is to become strong enough to haul an eighty pound canoe.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, describes the Hedgehog concept as “an operating model that reflects understanding of three intersecting circles: what you can be the best in the world at, what you are deeply passionate about, and what best drives your economic or resource engine.”

“But Art, Jim Collin’s research and the businesses described in Good to Great include the likes of Wells Fargo and Walgreens, his theory and concepts have nothing to do with patient care or performance training.”

I’ve heard this more than once and each time I attempt to get a friend to read this book it’s usually handed back either partially read or not read at all.   At first look, to compare these operating systems to Sports Medicine or Sports Performance may be a stretch, but the three questions that Collins’ research asks can certainly be asked when examining your own operating system and how you handle your business each day.

What can you be the best in the world at?

- Is it patient education, practicing and applying evidence based medicine or simply a seamless referral system for student-athlete mental health issues?
- By asking and challenging your staff what you can be the best in the world at automatically sets the bar much higher than before and thus only those actions in line with this new standard should be accepted and rewarded.

What are you deeply passionate about?

- I found this to be the easiest question to ask and answer. Each one of your staff members is particularly interested and passionate about a segment of your operating system. Once you have identified which one, allow them to develop this area to its fullest.
- If your strength staff is deeply passionate about squatting and teaching the squat (I image they are or they wouldn’t be in the field) allow them to create an in-service and teach the sports medicine staff the finer points of the squat. Your athletes will thank you for the consistency of teaching cues and progression from rehab to high end performance.

What best drives your economic or resource engine?

- If you’re at most schools, athletic departments are actually a huge drain on the finances of the university.  Does your department spend frivolously on specialty items that have little impact on your athletes or only impacts a small sector of your athlete population?
- In the Sports Performance area, what exercises produce the greatest impact on your athlete’s performance profile (VJ, sprint times, etc)? Should you spend your valuable time perfecting and encouraging the squat or are you spending time having your athletes lay on their back performing hollowing exercises to train the TA?

The challenge now is to examine your operating system with honest eyes. This is often the most difficult part of the process since most believe they are already doing their very best – if resistance is met, ask dumb questions or invite an alien to your next staff meeting, that usually does the trick.

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.

My friend at a PT clinic told me a story of her co-worker who brings in cookies for the staff and patients every Monday morning – she’s the most popular person in the clinic each Monday,  even though she also has the lowest number of patients and the greatest number of requests for referrals to other PT’s within the clinic.  Her customer service just doesn’t match her ability to make cookies and when you’re dealing with patients who have a frozen shoulder or debilitating back pain, well, customer service and patient care just means a little bit more than cookies.

So before you decide between making a batch of cookies or researching the best way to approach chronic tendonopathy, remember this:

Making cookies always goes over well at work and may even score you a few points with co-workers and your boss. But unless your customer service matches your Betty Crocker apron you’ll soon be in need of more than just cookies to win over your customers.  Because your customers, even though your cookies tasted good, know your service is salty.

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.