Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group, LLC Blog

Kate Moss made this saying famous and unfortunately many of our student-athletes have taken this saying quite literally.  If you are struggling with a student-athlete who continues to obsess about the way they look pass on this link from Dove, it might just give them the nudge they need and provides a nice “ah-ha” moment.

For more information on eating disorders, visit the National Eating Disorders Association.

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.

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.

In basketball we call it false hustle.

You run towards a shooter and instead of closing out under control with a high hand toward their strong hand you jump aimlessly by their fake shot attempt landing in the first row of fans effectively taking you out of that play, and also the two to three rebounding opportunities that followed because you didn’t have the discipline to sit down and approach the shooter under control.

Ya, it looked good as you showed off your 34 inch vertical, and the freshmen fans in the first row will be talking about how you landed in their popcorn for the rest of the net, and perhaps the school’s photographer will even take a picture of you because it makes for a good story, but the score at the end of the game will essentially show your lack of commitment to the little things.

In business, it’s called Core Values. It’s what you stand for and it’s also what you should never stray from. Yes, it may be tempting to add some new equipment to your weight room or sports medicine area after attending a trade show or because you saw major university “X” has it, but unless it falls within your core values it’s better left on the trade show floor instead of becoming an overpriced and oversized coat rack in your working area.  Of course the way in which you do things, will often change (due to new research and evidence) but that’s clearly different from your core values which should never change.

Sitting down and guarding, like great patient care should never change.

My father would always say take care of the little things and the big things will always take care of themselves. This is true in basketball, patient care and performance training – taking care of your core values and paying attention to the little things will often lead you to much much bigger things without much effort at all.


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 college professor and mentor of mine once told me that during an injury evaluation if you listen just long enough your patient will tell you exactly what is wrong with them; and, if you listen just a little bit longer they’ll also tell you exactly what makes them better. 

No need for special tests off the start, just listen and let them talk.

It’s become too easy to interrupt our patients during an injury history, because, well, we know exactly what’s wrong with them. No need to listen to their sob story – just order the MRI, X-ray or other diagnostic test and let’s keep moving.

“A well-known study of medical education found that medical students' interpersonal skills with patients declined as their medical education progressed (Helfer, 1970).  This was particularly true for the student’s ability to take a good social history.  It seems that as students learned more about the science of medicine they found it harder simply to talk with patients, and came to devalue this kind of activity.  What were easy exchanges during the first years became an awkward and unproductive series of closed-ended, usually yes-no, questions later on.  No doubt related to this narrowing of focus, Martin et al. (1976) found that as training progressed, physicians seemed increasingly to lose their grasp on the patient's total health picture and to focus more and more on biomedical issues. 

Although the improvement of physicians' skills in interviewing is valuable, skill does not go to the heart of the matter.  Medical school needs to do a better job of inculcating different attitudes in young doctors - in defining for them what is truly important about being a doctor and what are effective, and humane, doctor-patient roles.  Our society must figure out how to influence their attitudes so that they come to value certain aspects of patient care differently.  Then, of course, when these doctors become mentors themselves, they will provide a different kind of example to their students.  If physicians saw themselves more as patient educators, medical education would be different, and the profession would engage in a different kind of self-scrutiny.  More attention would be paid to the education of patients, which would translate into more sensitive involvement of doctors in the process of healing.” (p.18-19)

- Doctors Talking With Patients/Patients Talking With Doctors: Improving Communication In Medical Visits by Debra L. Roter and Judith A. Hall

The challenge then for us as health care providers is to put away the blackberry for a moment and get back to the lost art of patient talk.

Get back to real patient interaction and patient centered care – which places the patient as the center of focus and not our schedule or outside responsibilities.

Of course, ordering an x-ray just to be sure and sending the patient on their way is a lot easier then sitting down and talking with 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.

Martin, D.P., Glison, B.S., Bergner, M., Bobbitt, R.A., Pollard, W.E., Conn, J.R., & Cole, W.A. (1976).  The Sickness Impact Profile: Potential use of a health status instrument for physician training. Journal of Medical Education, 51, 942-947.
 
Helfer, R.E. (1970).  An objective comparison of the pediatric interviewing skills of freshman and senior medical students.  Pediatrics, 45, 623-627.

In athletic development or fundraising this question should be easy to answer.

Your salary is 100K and you fundraised 500k for your organization in the first quarter. Net profit of 400K for your organization right?

Nice job.

But what if you work in sports medicine or strength and conditioning?

I often hear professionals groan about needing to get paid more, (and just for the record I agree with you) but what did you do this past year to deserve more pay? What makes you believe this?

Was it a salary survey that clearly shows you at the low end of the pole within your athletic conference?  Maybe it was that nifty online salary conversion tool that shows how much you would make if you worked in Alabama rather than Boston?

How about looking at this instead - What interesting problem did you solve this year?  Show your boss that.

Did you save your department 10K in tape and bracing because you researched and found a better way to do business? Did you move your summer strength manuals to an online Iphone application making them accessible to athletes at home saving your department 4K in annual printing costs?  How about starting an injury prevention plan lowering your school’s athletic injury insurance premium?

Before you begin to start looking for a new place to work because you aren’t getting paid enough at your current job, ask yourself what interesting problem needs solving and show your current employer  that you are worth your salary first.

** thanks to Seth Godin who opened my eyes to solving interesting problems rather than working the “ordinary” job where waiting to be told what to do gets you paid ordinary amounts of money.

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 friend of mine and I were discussing the roles and responsibilities of athletic trainers the other day when he brought up a story about his time in graduate school.  He recounted the days where a fellow staff member’s (a full-time Certified Athletic Trainer with a Master’s Degree no less) only job during the fall semester was to drive from practice to practice filling up water coolers and bottles.

No patient care. No injury evaluation. No Assessment. No Prevention Strategies.

Just Water.

I shared a very different story with him about water service.

I remember a few summers ago when I traveled with our Men’s Basketball Team to Canada to play the defending Canadian national champions (six National Championships in the last seven years) - University of Carleton.   It was our first day on campus and we were preparing to practice when I noticed our hosts didn’t put out any water on the sideline for our team (Carleton was practicing down court and finishing up their practice time).  I approached their athletic therapist asking if I could obtain a cooler of water and some cups for practice – a standard practice I would assume across both Canadian and American Colleges.
Just as the words dripped from my mouth I looked a bit closer at the Carleton area and saw about 20 various bottles ranging from gallon sized water containers to reused Gatorade bottles lining their bench.  Each and every player had brought their own water to practice.  From that moment forward my view on water changed forever.

That was the day I stopped catering.

I’m not saying water isn’t important.  On the contrary.  In fact, I think it’s so important that I encourage each and every student-athlete to carry a water bottle with them at all times.  You can’t expect to just hydrate during practice can you? And if you can carry a water bottle with you all day – because that’s how important it is, then you can also bring it to practice can’t you?

I was actually scolded by a fellow athletic trainer when I brought up the idea of athletes bringing their own water to practice.

“What if they forgot their bottle one day? What would they do then?”

My response was simple.

What extraordinary patient care are you not delivering because you are so busy delivering and catering water?

If the defending national champions in Canada can bring their own water to practice I think our student-athletes can fill up a bottle and bring some H2O to practice too.

It only takes one time that you forget and you’ll never leave that bottle at home 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.

BSMPG is proud to announce that Jonas Sahratian, Strength and Conditioning for University of North Carolina Men's Basketball will join Brandon Ziegler, Oregon State and Brian McCormick at the BSMPG Basketball Specific Conference featuring Dr. Shirley Sahrmann as a keynote speaker next June 3rd and 4th, 2011.

Among the top strength & conditioning coordinators in the college game, Jonas Sahratian enters his sixth season with the Tar Heel men's basketball program after serving in the same capacity at the University of Kansas for five seasons.

Sahratian coordinates strength and conditioning for men's basketball and also works with the diving team. He has been a part of three Final Fours and NCAA championships in 2005 and 2009.

He worked with Carolina head coach Roy Williams in Lawrence from January 1999 to April 2003. He also coordinated strength and conditioning for the volleyball, swimming and diving teams at Kansas.

A native of Detroit, Mich., Sahratian graduated from Western Michigan University in 1997 with a bachelor of science degree in exercise science. In 2000 he received his master's in exercise physiology from Kansas.

In addition to working with Kansas athletics, Sahratian interned for two years at the Chicago Bulls/Vermeil's Sports and Fitness in Deerfield, Ill. He worked in Chicago during the Bulls' NBA championship seasons in 1996-97 and 1997-98.

He is a certified strength and conditioning specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association and a certified club coach through USA Weightlifting. Sahratian (pronounced suh-RAY-shun) and his wife, Grechen, reside in Durham.

Speed Drills by Sahratian featured in Stack

Conditioning Drills by Sahratian featured in Stack

BSMPG along with Children's Hosptial Boston, Division of Sports Medicine and New England Sports Partners are pround to present the 2010 Baseball Pitching Health and Performance Seminar December 5th at Children's Hosptial, Boston MA.

This conference features "the father of pitching mechanics" Dr. Tom House and New England's own, Mike Boyle along with Dan India from Qualisys North Amercia and Health Care providers from Children's Hospital Boston.  This event is an absolute must for coaches, parents, athletic trainers, physical therapists and aspiring baseball athletes looking to get the most out of their training while maintaining a healthy throwing shoulder and elbow.

Please join us on December 5th at Children's Hospital Boston for this unique event.

I’ve asked a number of friends why they don’t include assessments as part of their screening process.  More often than not the answer is because they are “too busy.”

What takes more time? An initial assessment of your athletes on intake followed by some simple corrective strategies or a 6-month post-surgical ACL rehab?

If you are too busy to change today, how will you have time to fix it later?

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.