Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group, LLC Blog

Some people don’t do what they’re told, and others only do what they are told.

Both are problems.

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?

Purchase the 2010 Basketball and Hockey Specific Training DVD's before the new year and save.  These DVD sets will only be on sale for one more week until they return to their original price.

Watch the country's best strength and conditioning coaches and therapists discuss how to take your team's training to the next level.

Click HERE to purchase one or both of these DVD sets.

This conference was held in Boston, MA on May 22nd and 23rd, 2010 

Included: 4 DVDs with almost 6 total hours of Hockey Training information

Presentations by: Sean Skahan - Anaheim Ducks, In-season Training in the NHL, Jack Blatherwick - Washington Capitals, Sources of Information: Separating Fact from Fiction, Frank Burgraff - Burgraff Skaing, Protecting the Stride, Larry Cahalin - Northeastern University, Inspiratory Muscle Training: Improving Lung Function and Recovery, Alan Degennaro - formally of the Cleveland Browns, Injury Prevention and Sport, and Keynote Presentation by Bill Hartman, Corrective Exercise Techniques.

Cost: $89.00  NOW ON SALE!  $75

This conference was held in Boston, MA on May 22nd and 23rd, 2010

 Included: 5 DVDs with over 7.5 hours of Basketball Information

Presentations by: Keith D'Amelio - Stanford University, Assessing the Basketball Athlete, Charlie Weingroff - formally of the Philadelphia 76ers, Lower Extremity Performance and WBV Training Methods, Mike Curtis - University of Virginia, A Systematic Approach to Movement Training for Basketball, Tim Beltz - University of Pittsburgh, Establishing a Training Base for the Basketball Athlete, Amanda Kimball - University of Connecticut, Building a National Champion, Alan DeGennaro - formally of the Cleveland Browns, Injury Prevention and Sport and Keynote Presentation by Bill Hartman, Corrective Exercise Techniques.

Cost: $119.00 NOW ON SALE! $99

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

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.

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.

I was driving to work the other day when the engine heat indicator alarm went off on my dash board.  Not being a car genius, but knowing enough to know I should see an expert that deals with engine problems I promptly pulled over and into the nearest auto garage.  I explained to the mechanic that the engine heat alarm went off and he asked me to pop the hood so he could take a look.

“Wow, this engine is burning up” he explained to me as he held his hand over the engine block.  “Thank goodness you pulled in here. You got here just in time – I can help you.”

He took out his tape measure, and extended it across and over the engine then quickly disappeared into his garage.

A few moments later he returned to my car carrying a huge piece of foam which he placed over the engine block.  He then carefully pushed the edges down so the foam fit snuggly over the entire engine.

Slamming the hood down over the foam he instructed me to start the car up again and give er a try.

I started the car and walked back out to join him at the front of the car.

“See, no more heat” pointing me to place my hand next to his as he held it over the hood.

Sure enough – I didn’t feel any heat. Wow, this guy was good.

I completed my drive to work (for some reason the engine heat indicator was still going off, but I’m sure it will be fine, I mean I saw an expert who took care of the heat) where I told a co-worker of my pit stop at the garage.  He quickly told me that I was an idiot and got ripped off by the mechanic as he never took care of the problem but instead, simply just covered it up.

“What do you mean?”  I asked somewhat angered.

“Hold on one second – let me take care of this athlete and we’ll talk,” he explained pointing to an athlete on a treatment table.

He turned to the athlete and as he began discussing the athlete’s course of treatment I suddenly felt as though I was back at the mechanics…..

“Ok Johnny, so you’ve been really running up the miles and now your knee is hurting, you can tell it’s not doing well by the swelling around your knee cap and how warm it is. Let’s get some ice and e-stim on that right away, thank goodness you came in to see me, any later you could have really been in some trouble. A couple of treatments of ice and e-stim and you’ll be good to go”
____________________________________________________________________________________

I joke about this story with friends now because I was once the car mechanic. Not in a malicious cheating way – I just didn’t know how to solve the PROBLEM so I did my very best to help alleviate the symptoms – NSAIDS, ice, massage – kids felt better and I felt good about helping them. That is until they returned with the same problem again and again. 

Solving problems is tough.  It requires an investment of time and a little bit of extra effort.  The plus side however is that once you’ve solved the problem, you’ll end up actually having more time on your hands because you won’t have patients returning with engine failure time and time again.

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.