Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group, LLC Blog

Feeling good about getting some "work" done this holiday season - making some phone calls, checking off the to-do list and of course checking my emails, I realized I simply invested my time in keeping busy, and not producing anything of worth.

Was your weekend spent checking emails or was it spent producing something remarkable?

Read what Seth Godin has to say about "busy-ness"

Measuring busy-ness...

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

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.

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

BSMPG is announcing a limited time sale of our 2010 Basketball and Hockey Training DVD’s!

You can get all of the presentations delivered to your doorstep just in time for Christmas or give these DVD’s as a stocking stuffer to an aspiring coach looking to take their team training to the next level.  Watch a clip of Matt Nichol, former Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Toronto Maple Leafs present “Training Energy Systems for Hockey” by clicking HERE.

From November 23-December 1st, the 5-DVD Basketball set will be on sale for $99.00 and the 4-DVD Hockey set will be on sale for only $75.00!

Basketball - DVD includes presentations from strength coaches from University of Stanford, University of Virginia, University of Pittsburgh and many more!

Hockey - DVD includes presentations from Anaheim Ducks Strength Coach, legendary USA Gold Medal strength coach Jack Blatherwick, corrective exercise specialist Bill Hartman and many more!
Don’t miss this one time sale!

** orders placed after December 10th cannot be guaranteed to arrive prior to Christmas. 

What do omelets have to do with rehab?

Everything.

Every omelets is made with eggs.

You can add your own mushrooms, peppers and even some cheese on top - but it all starts with the eggs. 

Yes, even all white omelets are made with eggs.

When approaching rehab protocols, say for example, treating an athlete with knee pain, every protocol should include hip strengthening exercises. Yes, every single one.  Hip/Glute med strengthening is an egg in your knee pain omelet.  You may choose to add massage or even Russian e-stim to strengthen the vmo if you’d like, but without exercises that target the hips you simply don’t have an omelet.

I’m still amazed at the number of Sports Medicine departments that have staff members that approach common injuries differently.

“That’s just the way I do it” each one will respond, or “there’s more than one way to skin a cat you know.”

True, there is more than one way to skin a cat, but we’re making omelets.

Rehab eggs don’t have individual preferences or bias. Save that for the type of cheese you want. Eggs are evidence based. Eggs are a must in every omelet – and without them you simply have a pan full of veggies and cheese – and well, that’s stir fry – and nobody wants to eat stir fry for breakfast.

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.

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.