#PTonICE Podcast

Alan Fredendall // #LeadershipThursday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE COO Alan Fredendall discusses average arrival rates in physical therapy, what the research says about how to improve arrival rates, leveraging technology to improve arrival rates, and creating policies & systems that ensure your clinic still gets paid for missed appointments.

Take a listen to the podcast episode or read the full transcription below.

If you're looking to learn more about courses designed to start your own practice, check out our Brick by Brick practice management course or our online physical therapy courses, check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 ALAN FREDENDALL Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the PT on ICE daily show. Happy Thursday morning. Hope your morning is off to a great start. My name is Alan. I'm happy to be your host today. Currently have the pleasure of serving as the chief operating officer here at ICE and the faculty member on our fitness athlete division. We're here on Thursdays. We talk all things leadership Thursday, small business ownership, practice management, that sort of thing. Leadership Thursday also means it is gut check Thursday. This week we have a 17 minute AMRAP, as many rounds and reps as possible in 17 minutes of the following 21 plate ground to overhead. Our Rx weight there for guys 45 for ladies 25. So grabbing a bumper plate, hinging down, tapping one side of the plate between your feet and then up and over overhead, almost like a snatch. Moving into 15 cows on the rower for guys 12 for ladies and then finishing with a small dose nine burpees to plate. So looking for somewhere between three to five rounds of that great workout for home, the garage, the basement, the clinic. Just need a rower and a bumper plate. Great to maybe take out to the park as well and sub the row for some running or something like that. So that is gut check Thursday. Course is coming your way. We have so many about to enter a very, very busy season for ICE here as we get into the fall, get away from the summer, school starts back up, that sort of thing. We have a couple hundred courses coming your way between now and the end of the year. So if you're looking for live courses, head on over to p10ice.com, click on our courses and check out our map to see what's coming to your neck of the woods. Some online courses I want to highlight. Pretty much all of our entire catalog of eight week online courses are starting back up after Labor Day. So if you don't know about our online courses, they are eight weeks online. They are synchronous, which means that you meet with us every week. They are not completely self study, a mixture of lecture, of reading, of homework and of live meetups. They're meant to simulate the feeling of a two day live course, but stretched across eight weeks to make it a little bit more accessible, save you a little bit of money on travel. So online courses, pretty much like I said, all of them are starting after Labor Day. We have ICE Pelvic Online. That's our entry level online pregnancy and postpartum course. That's going to start September 4th. We have Fitness Athlete Essential Foundations taught by yours truly Mitch Babcock, Kelly Benfee and Guillermo Contreras. That's going to start September 11th. The very next day, September 12th, Brick by Brick is going to start very relevant course to this day of the week to Thursdays. We talk all things practice, startup and ownership and management in that course. Injured Runner Online also starts September 12th and then Virtual ICE will open back up September 26th for our next quarter of enrollment. So let's get into today's topic. Let's talk about how do we handle, how do we get better at when a patient reschedules, cancels or no shows. I want to talk today about three main topics. I'm going to talk about what are the average no show cancellation rates, what we would call an arrival rate across the country, across physical therapy, what's normal, what's abnormal. I want to talk about how to improve those arrival rates. And then I want to talk about how to get paid when somebody does not show up for those appointments. 05:46 ARRIVAL RATES IN PHYSICAL THERAPY So let's start at the beginning and let's talk about what is a normal rate. If you have been practicing physical therapy for a while, if you have been practicing in a traditional clinic, you may have heard that the common recommendation for the maximum arrival rate is about 93%. That is to say that 93% of your appointments show up for their appointment that day. That there's some margin of error. We recognize that 100% of people probably won't make it, but pretty typical. 93% is the standard that's set and sometimes enforced by the clinic that you work for. Maybe if you fall below that, maybe you get a warning, maybe you get a talking to, or maybe they actually dock your pay for visits underneath that 93%. What's awesome about this topic is that we actually have a lot of research, surprisingly, supporting the numbers that I'm about to tell you. So we have a great survey back from 2015 of about 7,000 outpatient physical therapists. This is from Bo Kinski and colleagues, sorry if I mispronounced this, of 7,000 outpatient PT's looking at a couple of different things. Looking at finding the average cancellation no-show rate, but also finding what things seem to help fix that. So across the country, we see an average no-show cancellation rate of actually about 10 to 14%. So thinking you may have been told 93% is the gold standard, in reality, somewhere between 85 to 90% is actually probably more realistic. If you had 10 patients scheduled for the day, you could expect maybe eight of them to show up for the appointment. You could expect maybe one to two appointments to be unfilled. I like this survey because it goes a couple levels deeper. It asks why. Now knowing that rate, knowing that 10 to 14% rate, why do people not show up for the appointment? What is the number one cause? The number one reason why patients do not attend their appointment is not that they can't afford it, not that they don't like you, it's that they forgot and that the clinic that they went to physical therapy to had no reminder system. So that's a huge error, that's a very easy fix. When we delineate outpatient physical therapy from hospital-based outpatient physical therapy, so private practice versus hospital-based, we see that hospital-based clinics actually the no-show cancellation rate of a private practice clinic. Why is that? I would imagine it's probably due to having a modern reminder system, but again, that number of 93% isn't the gold standard that we think it is. In private practice, we can expect maybe 85 to 90% arrival rate, a little bit lower in hospital-based, maybe 75 to 80% arrival rate. Now this survey looked at the concept of a multi-method reminder system. What does that mean? That means that the patient received multiple reminders across multiple communication methods. That they usually received some sort of automated phone call reminding them of their appointment. They received probably a text message and then maybe also an email message. So they received two to three different reminders ahead of their appointment across different modalities, basically reminding the patient as much as possible of their upcoming appointment. Now they found that those clinics that used a multi-method reminder system had a significant reduction in no-show cancellation rates, about a 50% reduction. So they cut their no-show cancellation rate in half just by having a reminder system. And we're going to talk about how to set that up at your clinic here in a minute. The second reason that clinics did better with no-show cancellation rate was those clinics who had a 24-hour appointment change policy. That is inside of 24 hours, you will be penalized if you cancel or reschedule or no-show your appointment versus if you give more than a 24-hour notice that you need to reschedule your appointment or otherwise cancel it. So those clinics which had a 24-hour policy and enforced that policy on their patients also had a reduction in their no-show cancellation rate. So that brings us to the question of if 10 to 14% is the mean of the average of no-show cancellation rates across the country, then how realistic is 7%? The answer is not very, right? Even if you are treating one-on-one for an hour and you maybe only have eight patients on your caseload for the day, it's probably unrealistic to expect 100% of those people to show up every day. That we have to recognize at some level that the reason we see so much overbooking in traditional physical therapy clinics is it's just that leadership strategy to limit the impact of those inevitable no-show cancellation rates. That if you see eight patients in a day and 10 to 15% don't make it, you may see five to seven patients. So kind of the aggressive leadership solution here is just to make you see more patients. That if you see twice as many patients and you still have that 10 to 15% no-show cancellation rate, then you'll still see more patients than originally intended and scheduled to and the clinic won't lose as much profit. But that being said, that is an aggressive way. That is a way that puts all of the burden of the work on the therapist and none of it on the ownership, none of it on the leadership and none of it kind of on the backend logistical side of the clinic. Instead of making you see more patients, why don't we just have a 24-hour policy that we enforce? And if we're not using a reminder system, why don't we start using one? Why don't we do some more conservative approaches to reduce that no-show cancellation rate, especially now knowing that we have research that supports, does those actually improve our no-show cancellation rates? So let's talk about that. 08:48 IMPROVING ARRIVAL RATES Let's talk about aside from having a reminder system, aside from strategies to remind patients to get to the clinic and aside from having a policy, how can we approve improve those arrival rates? You know us here at ICE, if you've been listening to us for a while, Jeff Moore, our CEO says it best. The first thing you can do to make patients show up to physical therapy more is make sure that you're focused on getting good and not getting busy. That when people see results, when they begin to associate value with their physical therapy appointment, they come to their appointment more often. I think this is so overlooked, especially in a higher volume clinic where a therapist may be expected to see multiple patients per hour. By providing lower quality care, patients aren't able to get results or they're not able to get results as fast as maybe they want to. They don't really associate physical therapy as a valuable use of their time and it makes sense that they find better stuff to do and that you get that message at 4.55 p.m. that your 5 p.m. patient is not going to make it in today. So really focus on getting good, not getting busy. We also need to recognize that people are not stupid. When they show up to PT and they see that you are working with three other people at the same time and you have forgotten about them in the corner at the TheraBand station or on the recumbent bike or the pulleys, again, that really begins to lower the value proposition that patients have with physical therapy and it's not surprising again that they begin to find better stuff to do with that hour of their time. The counter argument here is that you can get so good as a physical therapist, I'm good enough that I can see multiple patients at once or patients aren't as fragile as we think. We don't need to give them one-on-one care, but we need to recognize that at some level, patients are paying for it, especially if they're paying cash for a one-on-one visit. They are expecting one-on-one treatment. Even if you are an insurance-based clinic and using a patient's insurance, that insurance is still paying you based on one-on-one care. And not only that, but the patient expectation is that you are going to give them the care that they need. And I often relate this to other professions of you would lose your mind if you had a therapy appointment with a psychologist, a mental therapy appointment, if you showed up and there were three other people getting mental health therapy at the same time as you. No one would put up with that, but for some reason, it's just expected and normalized that that's the kind of care that we give in physical therapy. So then it's no wonder that patients, again, find something better to do with their time for the hour. So really focus on getting good and not getting busy, of taking really quality care of that patient that you have on your schedule for that hour. And you'll be surprised how much they come back to physical therapy when they see their range of motion improving, when they see their balance improving, when they feel stronger, when their pain is getting better, whatever their goals are, as they can see progress towards their goals, it's much more likely that they're going to come back to physical therapy. And I think that is often overlooked. My second point with improving arrival rates is to leverage technology, implement that multi-method reminder system. It's 2023. There is no reason why your clinic does not have automated reminders, text, email, phone, whatever. It's all built in to a modern EMR. If your EMR does not do this, you need to get an EMR that does this. If your front desk person is still calling people by hand to remind them of their appointment, you're a little bit behind the curve, right? to do the work for you so that you can focus on treating your patients while the technology sends out those reminders for you. We need to recognize that people are busy and that the more we can be prominent in front of mind with reminders, the more likely people are to attend their appointments. We have research that supports this, right? We can cut these no-show cancellation rates in half with a multi-method reminder system, but also it gives the patient a chance to reschedule if they know they already can't make it, right? That text reminder, when they get that phone call, when they get that email, it gives them multiple chances to reschedule. And if they don't, it also kind of builds the case for you against them that you gave them plenty of chances to reschedule and they still did not. And that makes it a little bit easier to charge them money, which we'll talk about in a few seconds here. So remember, we can cut that rate in half, that no-show cancellation rate in half with a multi-method reminder system. So if you're still using Google Drive as your EMR, if you're still using paper documentation and scanning it into a computer, consider getting a modern EMR. They're not that expensive. EMRs, we're big fans of Jane here, obviously, at ICE, other EMRs, Prompt, PT Everywhere, pretty much all the modern web-based EMRs are going to offer reminders and more often than not, they're free for you to use. So why not use them, right? It's one more push of a button when you're building out that patient chart for them to get reminders. In addition to reminders, leverage technology to create an online booking and waitlist system so that when you do send that reminder, it should come with a link where it says, hey, if you can't keep this appointment, please click here, right? So that your appointment comes off my schedule and that you get a little link to rebook at a time that works better for you. So we still keep that visit on the schedule, but we also open up that visit to maybe somebody else who can use it so that we don't have a missed slot on our schedule. Pretty much just like reminders, modern EMRs are very good at having automation with waitlists of where when a patient reschedules and a slot opens up, usually automatically or with the push of a button, you can pull people in from your waitlist and make sure that that slot stays filled without having that patient get charged for cancellation or no-show because they were able to go in on their own and reschedule their own appointment. So make sure we're leveraging technology whenever possible to do this work for us. My last point here on improving arrival rates is probably something that we don't consider very often of making sure in that initial evaluation that the patient actually has the time and or money to come to their physical therapy appointments. I feel like a lot of time patients feel beholden to maybe a referral they had from a doctor or what you tell them of some sort of verbal contract of the doctor said I have to come here three times a week for six weeks or maybe that's what you wrote on your documentation is the physical therapist and they feel like they have to come no matter what, even if they know they do not have the time or money. I feel like this is something that should be discussed as we're wrapping up our initial evaluations that just doesn't get done. As we're building the bike for that patient, we're explaining our findings, we're demonstrating that we can help that person reach their goals by showing them some improvement in that first visit and as we begin to discuss what that plan of care might look like, also making sure that the patient is on board, right, including the patient that conversation of hey, Diane, this seems to be a pretty irritable tendinopathy. You know, I think I would like to see you here in the clinic twice a week, probably for at least the next four weeks. And instead of stopping there, take it one step further. How do you feel about that? Right? What do you think about my plan for your care? And we don't necessarily have to ask, hey, can you afford this? Or do you have the time for this? But that's what we're hinting at of how do you feel about coming here twice a week for four weeks? How do you feel about coming here once a week for the next four weeks and getting the patient's input because that's a great time for them to say, that's going to be tough with my schedule. You know, I have 17 kids or I work 30 jobs. I won't be able to do that, right? That's a great time to make sure that person does not get put on your schedule for a bunch of visits that they're not going to attend. And then making sure we're following the law, right? No surprises act that was passed last year that were very transparent with how long we think the plan of care is going to take and what that's going to cost that patient. Whether you're charging cash, whether you're billing insurance, you need to provide that information upfront to the patient. I would argue you should be doing it even if it's not the law, just so you don't have people on your schedule who are not going to show up. But being very forthright and how long you think it's going to take and what's that going to cost and get that patient's input on it before we talk about scheduling out for their visits.

19:05 GETTING PAID FOR MISSED APPOINTMENTS

My last point here of talking about what average arrival rates are, what improves arrival rates is how do we get paid when somebody does not show up to the clinic? This is another area where I think physical therapists are very uncomfortable with asking people for money to come to rather not come to their appointment. And it's an area where again, when we look at the research, what improves arrival rates, multi-method reminder system and having a rescheduled cancellation policy that is enforced. If you don't enforce it, you can't get paid for these missed visits. And if you try to enforce it like halfway through the plan of care, the patient is probably going to be upset versus if you're straightforward from the start in your intake paperwork and with your expectations before they begin physical therapy, it's not as jarring to that patient when you charge them for that canceled or rescheduled appointment. So remember, combination of a reminder system and a clearly stated 24-hour rescheduling policy that's enforced are the keys to reducing your no-show cancellation rate by as much as 50%. So first things first, create a policy. What do you want your policy to be? Make sure that policy is very clear, very transparent and that patients see it before they actually come to the clinic. So for us here at Health HQ, this is the first thing that patients see when they go through their intake paperwork. They see our cancellation no-show policy. They see our rates. They know what they're going to be charged. They know the maximum they can be expected to pay out of pocket if they do have insurance and they're going to see what they can be expected to be charged if they cancel or reschedule appointment within 24 hours. So ensure you have a policy, make sure it's actually written out, make sure that it gets in front of patients before they commit to a plan of care and then decide on what you want to charge that person. Decide on what your rate will be. I would argue it should be what you would want to get paid for that hour even if the patient had come. A lot of clinics will have what I would call a dinky, kind of a really lackluster enforcement policy where maybe if you don't show up to your appointment, you're charged $10 or $15. That's really not enough for people to have skin in the game. Being charged $10 or $15, especially if you don't actually enforce it, is really not going to set the expectations for your patients the way you want it. For us, we want to be sure the patient, sorry, the therapist gets paid as if they had seen that patient even if the patient no shows or cancels. So we charge $75 and we enforce it. Right? How do we enforce it? Well, you should probably start obtaining payment methods before the plan of care begins. So again, somewhere in your intake, transparent, clear, laid out should be what you charge for cancellation, a no show, a reschedule, the amount, and that you should take a payment method and have that payment method on file even before the initial evaluation happens so that even if they don't show up to the evaluation, your therapists are able to get paid for that hour. And then actually enforce it. You have to enforce it. You have to rip the bandaid off and actually do it. If you don't do it until somebody has done this to you 19 times, it's going to be difficult to actually start enforcing it because you've let them get away with it so many times. Maybe your personal policy in your mind is that everybody gets one freebie. Whatever that is, stick to that and then start actually enforcing it. What you'll find is that when you enforce it, guess what? The first time that patient gets charged that money, guess what they never miss again? Physical therapy. Or they reschedule so that they don't leave an empty spot on your calendar book. So recognize that we have to enforce this. Yes, it's uncomfortable, but the more you do it, the sooner you do it in the plan of care, the more you'll find patients will either adhere to it or they might decide therapy with you is not for them and that's okay too because the end result is we want people on our schedule who are actually going to come to physical therapy. We need to recognize that this is not unusual. Oftentimes we said, well, this isn't something physical therapists do. They don't charge people for not coming to appointments. Literally every other industry on the planet does this. When you make an appointment to get your haircut or whatever personal beauty grooming thing you do, they have a reschedule cancel no show policy where if you don't show up to your appointment for whatever reason, you're probably going to get charged a little bit of money. Massage therapists do this. Lawyers do this a lot. You have to pay money upfront to even talk to a lawyer, right? You have to have that retainer money on file. Dentists do this. Other healthcare providers do this. This is very, very common across a wide range of industries except for physical therapy. People often ask me, why do you think that is? I think it's because we spend a lot of time with our patients and we begin to almost view some of our patients maybe as friends or at least acquaintances, which makes it that much harder to begin to charge that person for missing a physical therapy appointment. So we need to recognize that yes, it is difficult, but again, every other business does this. Every other industry does this. The sooner and more comfortable you get with enforcing this, the less awkward it's going to feel. And remember, leverage technology to fill those missed appointment slots so that ideally the therapist still gets paid for that person not showing up, but maybe they can also fit another patient into that spot still. I love when I pull up our schedule and I see that somebody has canceled, they've been charged for it, and we've been able to pull another patient from the wait list to fill that same slot. That therapist went to work, came to work here that day thinking, I'm going to see seven people and they actually got paid as if they had seen nine. That's fantastic, right? That's way better than systems where you may be expected to clock out if a patient doesn't show up and not get paid at all for your time, or you may be expected to clean the toilets or something like that in that missed time versus actually getting paid for that time and either being able to use that time for whatever you want or trying to fit another patient into that slot. So remember, it's really important here. This is all an end, not or situation that there are different components to this that we need to implement. It's not just we need to charge people for not showing up. It's not just we need to have a reminder system that we need to understand that at some level, having 100% arrival rate is unlikely. People not showing up is unavoidable, whether kids, family emergencies, that sort of thing. But there are things that can be done to reduce those rates. They're not unavoidable that we can deliver great outcomes to patients so that they do not find other reasons and other things to do instead of coming to physical therapy. We absolutely have to get with the program and begin to leverage technology, begin to send these reminders out if we're not doing it already, begin to use technology to have a waitlist system so that we can fill empty slots quickly, create and actually enforce a policy, get credit cards on file, begin to actually charge people for not coming to those appointments, hold them accountable, hold their feet to the fire, but also recognize and have that conversation early on of what is realistic for that patient. Do they actually have the time and money to come to therapy two or three times a week? Or do we need to look at maybe, hey, I can see you once every other week, but you're going to have to be really judicious at home with your homework because you're not coming here as much. So having those conversations early and often in the plan of care so they don't come back to bite us later on and then utilize technology to get paid for those visits and fill those empty slots. So reschedules, cancels, no shows, not to the end of the world, things we can do better to get better at them, I should say. Leverage technology, enforce a policy. So I hope this was helpful. I hope you all have a fantastic Thursday. Have fun with Gut Check Thursday. If you're going to be on a live course this weekend, have a wonderful weekend with our faculty on the road. We'll see you all next time. Bye everybody.

24:17 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on ICE Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review and be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ICE content on a weekly basis while earning CEUs from home, check out our virtual ICE online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our Hump Day Hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

Dr. Christina Prevett // #GeriOnICE // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Modern Management of the Older Adult Division Leader Christina Prevett discusses the need for falls prevention initiatives to shift their focus towards early identification of individuals at risk for falls. By doing so, healthcare professionals can implement targeted interventions and reduce the occurrence of falls before they happen. Christina emphasizes that outcome measures should be used to guide interventions. She mentions the Mini-BEST as a specific outcome measure that assesses various aspects of balance and mobility. By administering this measure at the beginning of a session, the clinician can immediately identify areas of deficit and tailor their intervention accordingly. For example, if the person shows deficits in dynamic gait and reactive posture control, the clinician can focus on exercises and strategies to improve these specific areas.

Overall, the episode highlights the importance of outcome measures in falls prevention and emphasizes that they should not be conducted for the sake of it. Instead, outcome measures should provide meaningful and actionable information that guides clinical reasoning and informs interventions.

Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes.

If you're looking to learn more about live courses designed to better serve older adults in physical therapy or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 INTRO What's up everybody? Welcome back to the PT on ICE Daily Show. Before we jump into today's episode, let's chat about Jane, our show sponsor. Jane makes the Daily Show possible and is the practice management software that so many folks here at ICE utilize. The team at Jane knows how important it is for your patients to get the care they need. And with this in mind, they've made it really easy and convenient for patients to book online. One tip that has worked well for a lot of practices is to make the booking button on your website prominent so patients can't miss it. Once clicked, they get redirected to a beautifully branded online booking site. And from there, the entire booking process only takes around two minutes. After booking an appointment, patients get access to a secure portal where they can conveniently manage their appointments and payment details, add themselves to a waitlist, opt in to text and email reminders, and fill out their intake form. If you all are curious to learn more about online booking with Jane, head over to jane.app slash physical therapy. Book their one-on-one demo with a member of their team. And if you're ready to get started, make sure to use the code ICEPT1MO. When you sign up, that gives you a one-month grace period that gets applied to your new account. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy today's show.

01:33 CHRISTINA PREVETT Hello, everybody, and welcome to the PT on ICE Daily show. My name is Christina Prevett. I am one of the lead faculty within our modern management of the older adult division, part of our geriatrics team. Everyone, we are flying high this week because we got everybody from our MMOA division to descend on Lexington, Kentucky at Jeff and Dustin's Stronger Life facility, which was beautiful. And we got to show the world some of what we have been working on, which is some revamped material. So we got to really focus on dialing in live to be about lab. We were moving all weekend. It was so fun and so amazing. If you were thinking about joining MMOA live, we have a couple of opportunities coming up in the remainder of this month. So this weekend, Dustin and Jeff are going to be in Bedford, Texas, and Julie and Ellen are going to be in, oh my gosh, I'm blanking on where they are. They're in Minnesota. And then there I was like, I know this. And then the next weekend, Alex is going to be in California. And so if you are looking for where MMOA is going to be, we have a ton of courses into the end of 2023. We are not adding any more locations for MMOA live in 2023. So if you're kind of waiting for one to come closer to you for the end of this year, that isn't going to happen if it's not there now because we're kind of locked in. We have lots of offerings that's going to come up for 2024. So if you're looking to see that live material, that is where to go. 03:29 A FRAMEWORK FOR BALANCE INTERVENTION OK, so today I wanted to talk a little bit about a framework for balance intervention. When it comes to balance, I think it's a bit tougher for us to put this marker of effort or intensity on, maybe more so than other styles of fitness. What I mean by that is when we think about aerobic training, it's easy for us to conceptualize effort because we're seeing that perspiration, we're seeing that heart rate response. And that's correlating to our rates of perceived exertion. When it comes to resistance training, right, the amount of effort is either going to fatigue kind of in those higher rep ranges or our personal preference is getting to fatigue and effort through higher load. And again, it corresponds to changes in rates of perceived exertion. When we're trying to conceptualize intensity and then we're really trying to dial in our balance interventions, it's a bit tougher, right? We don't really have the same magnitude or the same outcome measures with respect to gauging intensity well. And so within MMOA, we really try and create this framework for individuals to help guide them through this kind of thought process and then create a kind of stepwise framework within our mind for how we implement this in clinical practice. The way that we do this is by first looking at the mechanism at which individuals are falling or where they are having near falls. This is important, right? 05:00 FALLS PREVENTION INITIATIVES Our falls prevention initiatives are only preventative if we are identifying individuals early rather than waiting for them to get hurt and then working in secondary tertiary prevention. We want to be able to identify those who are at risk for falls before that fall has happened, which unfortunately is not as common in our health care system as it stands right now. So we want to figure out the mechanism. We want to identify risk factors that are intrinsic to the individual and extrinsic around their environment. And then in order for us to put objective data on those things, we need to take that information from our subjective and use the appropriate outcome measure in order for us to have a good data point or multiple data points in order to guide our interventions. And then we want to make sure that those outcome measures that we are selecting are giving us tangible information, right? We don't want to be doing outcome measures for the sake of doing outcome measures. We want to do our outcome measures so that they can guide our clinical reasoning. And so let's kind of go through this very briefly and speak to the different aspects of this framework. So the first thing is mechanism, right? When we are asking about our person subjective, many times they're kind of cursory with their storytelling. A lot of individuals are when they're speaking about falls. Oh, well, I stubbed my toe and I fell over. What were you doing when you stepped your toe? What was your frame of mind? Were you really rushing to get from point A to point B? Were you really tired because it was late at night? Were you holding something in your hand when you tripped and that created an other barrier or other cognitive load in your mind that created more of a predisposition to not be able to keep your center of mass over your base of support and respond to that perturbation? Was it that there is a visual issue going on and you were having trouble with depth perception? We need to kind of dig really deep into some of these stories because that's really going to triage this risk factor profile in our brain. But you're probably thinking, well, Christina, a lot of my clients just can't do that or they don't remember or they are not able to give us some of that really tangible information. And I hear you. And so when we don't have that information, the next step is for us to go to the literature and look at what are common scenarios that lead to falls in different settings. Right. And how much do those mechanisms and that group of individuals that are being conceptualized in this research study relate to the people that are in front of you? An example is if you're an outpatient orthopedic therapist looking at some of the acute care mechanisms of falls may be relevant, but probably is less relevant to you. So you're going to be wanting to know, well, what is happening for our community dwelling older adults? What is their profile look like? What age group are individuals looking at in this study? And then how does this relate to my current caseload or people that I have that I am seeing right now? And so there is a recent study that came out in 2023 that was doing a prospective. So following older adults forward in Boston that was looking, for example, at mechanisms of falls in community dwelling older adults. So what they did was every month they sent older adults in this study. So they consented to this study. They were in their 70s or older. They sent a postcard to them and asked some questions. Did you have a fall in the last month? If yes, what was the mechanism? What were you doing at the time of the fall? And what was the cause of that fall with what you were doing? And I think this is interesting because they are two different things, right? 09:26 SLIP & TRIP TRAINING So the cause of the fall in our community dwelling older adults over 70, for example, more than half was a slip or a trip. The activity when they were having that slip or trip was walking forward. That gives us a lot of information in terms of where we start with our older adults. We're not going to start standing on one leg. We're going to start with slip and trip training. We're going to look at reactive stepping, volitional step training. Maybe we'll do that in standing first to see where a person's control is, but we want to see what happens when they start having perturbations. And so if that slip or trip is happening going forward, it also tells us that that perturbation is often backwards or lateral. People aren't falling forwards, right? It's that they're slipping and coming to the side or they're slipping and coming back. And that's a really important piece of information for us. And then it's going to guide where we go. So the next thing is now we're going to look at a person's risk factors, right? So extrinsic risk factors when individuals are having slips and trips was, was this in the wintertime and they're slipping on ice? Was this a step? Was this a rug that we know we're never going to get rid of, but we may ask about trying to tape down? These are things that we may be considering when we are looking at these mechanisms or are asking these questions. And so that's extrinsic. So we're taking this mechanism. We're looking at some extrinsic factors. And then the intrinsic people are going to be telling us in their narrative that they may feel like their balance isn't really great, or they're having trouble holding on to objects and navigating around their home or navigating outside. Or they recognize that the pain in their knee is making them not feel as strong or confident in their gait. And it's going to create them to have a hesitation to react when a perturbation happens because they've had times where their leg has given out. Or they they don't feel like they're strong enough to move their feet, right? They're they're telling us these things in their subjective. And so when we take that information, now it's going to guide us into our outcome measures. So if individuals are saying that they're having falls because of a strength deficit or a weakness issue in their lower extremity, we may want to make sure that we have a general mobility or a strength focused measure in our assessment to get a good idea of where our triage list is going to be. So we may use a five times it to stand or a 30 seconds to stand test, or we may go a bit more general and go to the short physical performance battery because the mechanism of their fall is showing us that potentially that being that capacity to move their feet is coming from a weakness issue. 11:54 REACTIVE POSTURAL CONTROL We are also going to want to in this example, look at their reactive postural control. We heavily leverage the mini best because there is a subsection of the mini best that looks at reactive postural control in each direction. So we're going to look at a person's capacity to react to a forward perturbation, backward perturbation and lateral perturbation. Right. If a person is having pain in the lower extremity, they're worried about it and we do a lateral perturbation, they may not move their feet out. They may want to cross because they're worried that that painful knee on that left hand side is not going to support their weight. So their reaction may be a step out to the right and a crossover to the right because of that painful knee. So now we've learned two things, right? We know that their pain is a contributing factor to their falls mechanism. It's an intrinsic risk factor that's creating troubles with clearance. It's impacting their gait, whether it's causing deviations in their gait or it's making them not lift their foot enough and now slips and trips are more common. And we recognize that their lateral posturing, the way that they are moving to the side is impaired. So now we've really dialed in our assessment, right? We've gotten a good idea about what's going on and we've picked the outcome measures that are going to give us that information. Because if we just focused, for example, on a burg. Because that is our go to balance assessment, not only are community dwelling older adults more likely to sealing that out, but it's not really getting to the two really big issues that they spoke to in their subjective assessment, right? They are probably going to be able to stand up once and do a pivot transfer. But that five time or 30 seconds to stand that's requiring a repeated chair stand is going to hit into maybe their pain thresholds that they're going to start having some compensatory mechanisms. And they're talking about having perturbations in a forward movement pattern. So the burg is in capturing backwards and lateral perturbations. So we have to be using those mechanisms and risk factors that they're discussing with us in their subjective and then leveraging the outcome measures that have strong reliability, validity, responsiveness, interpretability in order for us to have a good idea of what the next step is. But we're not going to do outcome measures for the sake of doing outcome measures. The next step is that we need to use those and leverage them in our interventions. One of the reasons why we also love the mini best is that oftentimes the way that we implement this is not day one. It's a little bit more of a longer intervention or sorry, it's a longer outcome measure. But we use it at the beginning of a session because it drives us into our intervention immediately. So if we have, for example, there's the anticipatory sub scales, sensory orientation, dynamic gate and reactive posture control. If we think that dynamic gate and reactive posture control are the two areas that based on a person's objective, they may struggle with more. We may use those, see where they're starting to have these deficits. It may be obstacle navigation, for example, with that still going with this example of having slips and trips because of a painful knee and seeing gate deviations where they're not clearing obstacles as readily as they used to when pain was a bit more managed. And they may have issues with reactive postural control backward and laterally. And we're going to see that it's coming to the left because it's their left knee that's painful. So now we have a lot of good information. We have a lot of good data. We use those outcome measures and we're directly going into intervention, right? Like I may use a clock yourself app and block out the forward stepping and I'm going to be focusing on reacting backwards. Or I may take out the right hand side of the clock and I want them to react to the left. And that is going to do at different cadences and then see, you know, what does the threshold look like? What does the step length look like? Does pain start to increase? What is that pain threshold like? How long does that pain take to come back down? And we're also intervening. We can also take, you know, some of these obstacle courses and put them into our interventions that day. Throw all of them together and put them into a round for time or an AMRAP where they're going back and forth between reactive stepping and obstacle courses. And now you're working on some strength because they're doing bigger clearances. We may put a step up in that obstacle course and then we're working on reactive control to the side that they're experiencing difficulties. So when we kind of take a step back, when we slot in what we see into this framework, it can be really helpful. So to bring this full circle, we want to think about balance intensity just like anything else. It's just like aerobic training. It's just like resistance training, but we cannot get good outcomes with bad data. So how do we do this? Our subjective, we need to dial in on mechanisms and risk factors. We need to be asking questions. If we do not have the answers to those questions, we're going to rely on the evidence of where older adults in different settings tend to fall. Then we're going to use outcome measures and we're going to select the outcome measures, if we can, based on our setting, that are going to give us the information we need to see where those thresholds are. From there, we're going to drive ourselves right into intervention based on where those deficits lie. And we're going to get to an intensity where individuals are either weary, we're pushing into potentially some low-grade pain, or they are self-reporting high amounts of fatigue or nervousness. 17:31 PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD & FEAR So we may be doing some graded exposure into fear. And that is a form of progressive overload, especially in the geriatric space where fear of falling is a big risk vector for future falls. So kind of bringing this full circle, here is the framework for you when you have a person coming in who is having falls or is worried about their balance. And it'll allow you to really dial in your interventions. Let me know if you have any other questions. What are your thoughts on this? I would love to have a dialogue. If you are interested in learning more about some of this research, we just put that 2023 paper into MMOA Digest. So every two weeks there is a research email that we send out that allows you to stay up to date with the evidence. We put all of our new courses on there, so definitely go to ptnice.com slash resources and sign up for Digest. If you are not on Hump Day Hustling, please make sure you do that too. That is all different types of research from all of our divisions. Have a wonderful Wednesday. Bye everyone.

18:34 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on ICE Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. And be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you are interested in getting plugged into more ICE content on a weekly basis while earning CU's from home, check out our virtual ICE Online Mentorship Program at ptonice.com. While you are there, sign up for our Hump Day Hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top 5 research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

Dr. Kelly Benfey // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete faculty member Kelly Benfey discusses her experience competing at the 2023 CrossFit Games, the role of rehabilitation providers in competitive sport, and the capacity of the human body for exercise as it ages.

Take a listen to the episode or read the episode transcription below.

If you're looking to learn from our Clinical Management of the Fitness Athlete division, check out our live physical therapy courses or our online physical therapy courses. Check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 INTRO What's up everybody? Before we get rolling, I'd love to share a bit about Jane, the practice management software that we love and use here at ICE who are also our show sponsor. Jane knows that collecting new patient info, their consent and signatures can be a time consuming process, but with their automated forms, it does not have to be. With Jane, you can assign intake forms to specific treatments or practitioners, and Jane takes care of sending the correct form out to your patients. Save even more time by requesting a credit card on file through your intake forms with the help of Jane Payments, their integrated PCI compliant payment solution. Conveniently, Jane will actually prompt your patients to fill out their intake form 24 hours before their appointment if they have not done so already. If you're looking to streamline your intake form collection, head over to jane.app slash physical therapy, book a one-on-one demo with a member of the Jane team. They'll be able to show you the features I just mentioned and answer any other questions you may have. Don't forget, if you do sign up, use the code ICEPT1MO for a one month grace period applied to your new account. Thanks everybody, enjoy the show.

01:33 KELLY BENFEY Good morning and welcome to the PT on ICE Daily Show. It's Fitness Athlete Friday and my name is Kelly Benfey. I just wrapped up an amazing CrossFit season where I got to compete at the CrossFit Games. And so what we're going to get to talk about this Fitness Athlete Friday is going to be a couple takeaways from the CrossFit Games that I think are relevant in the rehab space. Before we jump into that, though, within our Fitness Athlete crew, we have a couple of online courses coming up that I just want to bring to your attention. So we just wrapped up an awesome cohort with our clinical management of the Fitness Athlete Essential Foundations course online. And so our next course is going to be kicking off in a few weeks on September 11th. That course always fills up. So if you're thinking about it, please jump in with us, grab your spot right now. And then if you've already taken that and you're looking to continue developing your skill set, our Advanced Concepts course that's only offered two times a year is also starting September 17th. So rarer opportunity to hop in on that one. So if you've been looking to take this course, that's going to get started quite soon. And then we have a handful of live courses for the remainder of the year. So all of that information is going to be on PTice.com, PTonice.com. So we hope to catch you live on the road. I'd love to see you all. So we'll be getting back on the road for the remainder of this year to finish strong. So let's get into our topic. Of course, I could talk about this stuff all day if you know me. So we're talking CrossFit Games takeaways. A couple of things that I experienced and found were relevant in the rehab space. This is Fitness Athlete Friday, so we get to geek out on all things, CrossFit Games, CrossFit competition, all that good stuff. So number one, I have five different things that we'll kind of work through. 03:35 HUMAN CAPABILITY So number one, I always leave the CrossFit Games feeling absolutely motivated and inspired by what the human is actually capable of doing. So I really it was it was just such an honor to be on the same field as some of these amazing, amazing athletes, be behind the scenes and all that good stuff. So a couple highlights that I saw now just to I competed in the team division. So it actually didn't allow me to watch as much as the individual competition. I'm still working through catching up on that all the live the live coverage that they had. But I got to be within the team division. So one of the athletes in the team division, she clean and jerked 250 pounds and then a couple hours later ran a 5K, 4.5 ish K, 5K in under 20 minutes. So it just always impresses me that people can excel in things that I also excel in the strength events, yet also push their aerobic capacity and monostructural skills to an insane level as well. So it was just absolutely mind blowing to see athletes also just I know how hard we worked on my team and just having other athletes really push the boundaries. I find to be super inspiring as a competitive athlete. And then moving moving towards almost even debatably more inspiring. 04:11 OLDER ADULTS PUSHING BOUNDARIES The age group divisions are always just such a blast to watch. I wish they had a little bit more coverage because arguably that's more these are more the athletes that are relatable and even more inspiring. For example, the 60 plus division, I believe the 60 60 to 64 division, both men and women had bar muscle ups in their last event. So these are our older adults crushing it, doing high skill level at a very high competitive level. Just absolutely amazing. And like I had the opportunity, my mom came and watch. She's going to watch me and have a blast, obviously, but she's not necessarily going to see like watch me and think, oh, wow, that's something I can do. She's going to see something in her age division and then become inspired of, hey, maybe I'm going to start my barbell class in my gym, for example. So I just think the human capabilities, even in our older adult divisions, is just as important as what the individual and team athletes are doing. The professional athletes, if you will. And then we also have the adaptive visions that are starting to grow and the upper extremity adaptive athletes were performing rope climbs. Rope climbs are hard enough when you have two upper extremities to grip onto the rope with. They were doing it with one and we're also sealing our lower adaptive lower extremity adaptive divisions, doing things like box jumps and maxing out their clean and jerk and snatch and really just taking no opportunity to have an excuse to not push their fitness forward and continue to be athletic and competitive in their sport. So I absolutely love seeing those. I wish I got to see a little bit more of it. I wish we got to view a little bit more of it on the broadcast, so hopefully we'll be able to continue pushing that forward. I just saw a couple posts of highlighting those athletes, so keep keep those in the forefront of your mind. That's what's really inspiring to more people, I think, in this world, in our country. OK, so the next three points that I want to kind of work through all kind of build off of each other. 09:20 INJURY RATES & PROGRAMMING So one thing that I thought was really relevant this year at the Games was the programming. And like I said, I have paid attention a lot to a lot more detail of our team division programming, but I just wanted to bring your attention as a rehab professional, as a movement specialist that's working with athletes all the time. I think it was important to note this. So just a couple examples. So in our competition, we had four days of competition. On day one, we had overhead squats at 135 pounds and 95 pounds. Then day two, we had a one rep, one rep max snatch. And then on day three, we had more snatches at 185 pounds and 135 pounds with running. So that's back to back days that we're seeing a barbell shoulder stability type exercise that is very demanding on the shoulders. In general programming, we would probably look to spread the frequency out of when we're doing things like overhead squat and snatching. Being able to do those back to back days can challenge the shoulder and challenges your ability to recover and perform repeatedly. Another thing that I noticed as on our day two, we had a strict ring muscle up to a front support hold. So going through that pole to deep press and hold at the top of the unstable rings is really challenging for the shoulders. And then right into day three, we had 30 synchro ring muscle ups on the long straps, which are tough. And then 63 more parallet bar dips. So that's a lot of vertical pressing for the shoulder to get through back to back days. And so I've personally experienced issues with pressing with shoulder pain. I've worked with a handful of athletes that recently have been that's a common theme in our clinic that I'm working with. So that is I remember if I was in the middle of having a flare up of that shoulder pain presentation, it would be really hard to be able to do that back to back days because you can always push through one workout. Adrenaline is a really strong drug, I would say that helps you get through it. But the next day when you wake up and things are a little bit inflamed, it's really hard to be able to repeat those motions. So that was just one thing I noticed that was not necessarily what I would have expected in programming, just how frequently the same movement is tested. And it's one thing to test the fitness of it, but it's also one thing to test the tissue capacity. So those are things that the my rehab mind was kind of evaluating while I was going through it, which brings me kind of into that next point I want to bring up was injury rates this year. I'm not sure if I just noticed more injuries and pain happening. A lot of KT tape being thrown on our limbs because I was in the background. But there did seem to be a lot of withdrawals from individual and team, excuse me, team athletes this year. We know the injury rates in CrossFit, the highest injury rates that we're seeing are in the shoulder joint. And based on that programming, it kind of makes sense. It makes sense that we're seeing a lot of shoulder issues. And so just from an athlete's perspective, it's absolutely devastating. It's so upsetting to have to withdraw from an injury, whether it's yourself, whether it's a teammate. We put so much time, money, effort and dedication to an entire long season. This started in February. So working day in and day out, making decisions based on that this specific weekend. It's just an absolute shame to see an athlete have to pull out of competition because of shoulder pain or whatever issue they may have. So I know I got to talk to a couple of the teams that had to withdraw. And the common theme that they were telling me was like, oh, yeah, I had this lingering issue for a while. I just retweaked it about two weeks ago. So they weren't necessarily the Roman Krenikov situation where they just, unfortunately, came down and rolled an ankle and had a new injury. This was a couple of these things were like lingering elbow issues that are really tested in the moment of competition with all the stress on board. Exposing to really deep positions of that dip position. If we have lingering shoulder stuff going on when you're pushing to 150 percent of your capacity, it's not likely that you're going to come out OK sometimes. So as soon as some of the workouts were announced, these athletes were like, well, I'm not feeling too great about this. So I take it's just such a shame because I think as rehab professionals, we need to have the skill set to be able to address these issues that our competitive athletes are experiencing and make sure that we're not just getting them back to be able to do a ring muscle up and take an ibuprofen. That's a whole other issue. We don't want our athletes to be doing that, obviously, but we want to be able to get them back to baseline and then beyond baseline because that originally that shoulder with that skill set got injured. So it's definitely up to us to be able to have the resources and provide rehab for these athletes that they find valuable. Not every single one of these athletes has a team of physical therapists that are top notch, that are traveling with them, that are on like on them 100 percent of the time. And so it is very likely that you may come across a CrossFit Games team athlete that's going to need to go through four days of competition with repetitively dips and butterfly pull ups and pulling, pulling whatever it may be. All these really challenging things for our shoulder girl to be able to tolerate. So that just I walked away being thankful that I came out unscathed, essentially, because if you followed any of my CrossFit career, I've had issues with my shoulder before. And strength always is super protective against injury. And I feel really lucky, essentially, to have all the knowledge that I have to put myself in the best scenario. Even within my teammates, we had a shoulder issue that we had to train around a little bit where we couldn't our best choice wasn't to continuing to do 30 muscle ups the week before, for example. But we rehab the crap out of it and put ourselves in the best situation possible to be able to come away without withdrawing by any means and putting up a pretty good performance over the course of the weekend. So that just brings me to want to plug our courses just one more time. So I mentioned the beginning, we have a couple of online courses coming up. I would say 75% of the clinical decision, clinical decisions I'm making on a daily basis are all things that I learned from these courses. The other 25% is probably all the other stuff I learned from my ice courses. So I know I'm biased, but I promise I'm not lying. If you at any point would feel nervous, nervous if I came into your clinic saying I can't do ring muscle ups, help. Please hop in one of our courses. It's really a fun, fun way to spend your eight weeks online. And so the last point I wanted to make kind of along the same theme was the importance of stress and recovery. So if you are an ice in the ice world, I'm sure you have heard us talk about the importance of stress and stress that the body takes on and how it helps us or doesn't help us recover well. 11:04 COMPETITIVE ATHLETES & REHAB And competing in the CrossFit Games this past weekend really made this become like full picture for me. I prioritize sleep, I prioritize what I'm putting in my body, and I prioritize managing stress as well as I can with all of the training that we were doing. But at the CrossFit Games, I will say I was probably at a peak stress level in my life. I don't live there on a daily basis, but the couple of weeks leading up to it, highly stressed and enduring also highly stressed. For example, day one, the volume wasn't really high. We were coming off of two sessions a day, up to two hours per session. So training heaps, I would say. And day one, all I did was three leg assault climbs, 30 overhead squats and then four laps on the bike track, which was aerobically really challenging, but not high impact. And the next day when I woke up, my fitness tracker is showing me my heart, HRV is plummeting. I felt like I did probably triple that amount of volume at minimum. And I was really surprised because volume wise wasn't crazy, wasn't out of my realm. But I felt the I think what I was feeling was the high level of stress that competition brought on. So and just to circle back a little bit, if you're having lingering shoulder pain, it's probably not going to get better with how much we're ramping up as far as volume in the eight weeks leading up to the CrossFit Games.

15:10 HIGH STRESS IN COMPETITION

And then in the high, high stress environment, it's also going to be asking a lot to be able to recover and repeat these highly demanding movements like snatching, overhead squatting into ring muscle ups, to fatigue into dips where we're highly fatigued and moving at 150 percent of our capacity, essentially. So it just really is that's another way that I think bringing like stress and managing our recovery is just too important to ignore as the physical therapist, because we all know that person that's chronically stressed, chronically in that sympathetic state that maybe they are going into the gym and adding more weight. More stress onto their body. It's I absolutely can understand how they probably don't feel well at the end of the day, day in and day out. And so you have the ability as their rehab pro to help change their foundation of what they feel on a daily basis, too. So don't forget those things when you're dealing with any type of person that comes into your clinic. Stress management can really hit hard on so many levels and prevent maybe just set them up to rehab even better with all the good rehab skills you're doing with them in the clinic. And then lastly, I just wanted to share a couple of highlights because I feel like I had so many so much amazing support from our ice community. So just a quick couple personal highlights. Having been a spectator of the CrossFit Games for the five or six years or so has been in Madison. It was just such a cool opportunity to be able to push the Bob to do ring muscle ups with the long, long straps on the Zeus rig to use that four person axle bar for the deadlift. Those are things that you just never would see in a norm or any other CrossFit competition that's really only going to be at the CrossFit Games. So I remember pushing the Bob to the finish line and just reflecting on North Park, like, how cool is this? I've always wondered how it felt. So that was a really cool personal highlight that was really motivating throughout the weekend. Another personal highlight was our one rep max snatch. I have had some issues with shoulder pain and snatching and tweaked my elbow before from kind of poor movement patterns. So all season I was in a bit of a snatch funk. I'm sure you can relate if you are an athlete that tries to snatch frequently. It's sometimes good, it's sometimes not good. And so just about two or three weeks before the CrossFit Games, everything kind of clicked and I was able to hit a PR and perform really well on stage. So as an athlete, it just felt really special to be able to showcase the hard work that I put into that movement all season. And then lastly, I just had the best time with so many friends and family that were there to support at the CrossFit Games. I had my gym community from Milwaukee, my gym community from Chicago when I lived there, my ice community was there, our onward community. We had such a large cheering section, essentially. And trust me, that helped us get through that whole weekend. So thank you so much for everybody that was there, that sent messages, that supported us. It was such an honor to be able to represent this crew and we had a blast doing it. So thank you, thank you, thank you. So those are my takeaways from the CrossFit Games. I would like, like I said, this is stuff I can talk about all day, every day. So if you have any thoughts on programming, injury rates, anything you noticed from your spectating view, I would love to chat about it. So feel free to comment and tag me on this post, send me a message. Other than that, have a wonderful weekend and we will see you next or on Monday with our PT on Ice Daily Show. Have a great weekend.

19:06 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on Ice Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review and be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ice content on a weekly basis while earning CU's from home, check out our virtual ice online mentorship program at PT on Ice.com. While you're there, sign up for our hump day hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to PT on Ice dot com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

Dr. Jeff Moore // #LeadershipThursday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE CEO Jeff Moore challenges the common belief that vacations and time off are necessary to decrease stress levels. He argues that the expectations around time off may not align with reality, often leading to discontentment. Jeff suggests reconceptualizing the idea of time off and vacations to have better trajectories and lower stress levels.

Jeff then discusses what creates low stress levels and a healthy ecosystem. He addresses the issue of returning from vacations to a chronically disorganized routine. Jeff explains that when our day-to-day lives lack discipline and organization, we often find ourselves in a cycle of feeling like we need a vacation, being disappointed by its inability to meet our expectations, and feeling worse off as a result. Jeff emphasizes the importance of taking ownership of our day-to-day routines and reorganizing them to break free from this cycle.

Take a listen to the podcast episode or read the full transcription below.

If you're looking to learn more about courses designed to start your own practice, check out our Brick by Brick practice management course or our online physical therapy courses, check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 JEFF MOORE

Alright team, what is up? Welcome to the PT on ICE Daily Show. Welcome to Leadership Thursday. I am Dr. Jeff Moore, currently serving as the CEO of Ice. Thrilled to have you here live via Instagram or YouTube. Thrilled to have you on the recording if that's the way you're taking in the show. It is Gut Check Thursday. Let's get right down to business. What is the workout that all of the Ice Train folks are going to be taking on this week? It is as follows. 35, 25, 15, 5. So we have 4 rounds descending in volume. They are going to be double dumbbell push press but not real heavy, 35 and 20. And then ab mat sit ups are going to be paired with that. Okay, so you've got your 35 dumbbell push press drop down. You get your 35 ab mat sit ups. In between each round, you're going to run 200 meters and the rounds are going to be 35, 25, 15, 5. Okay so you should be able to keep a pretty high intensity up because the volume on those rounds are dropping. Make sure you get a snippet of that. Put it on Instagram. Let us know what's up. Hashtag Ice Train. We love seeing everybody throwing down on those Gut Check Thursday workouts. Real quick, courses coming up. I want to highlight cervical spine. If you want to be out there solving neck pain, radiculopathy, headaches, all the things that come with that upper quarter region, get to this class. We've got 3 options coming up. August 26, 7. It's going to be at Onward Charlotte. September 9, 10. It's going to be at Onward Atlanta. In October 14, 15. Going to be at Onward Greenville. So going to be in North Carolina, going to be in Georgia, going to be in South Carolina. So belt there and hit that course. Learn those skills. Serve those patients well. Okay, welcome back to Leadership Thursday.

02:01 VACATON & WORK-LIFE BALANCE

We are going to have a conversation about why I think we've gotten vacations wrong. And I want to talk a little bit about the origin of this episode. So the other day I posted on Instagram some of the best advice I've ever received. It was from a friend. It was many, many years ago. And he said to me, if you play between the ages of 25 and 35, you will work hard for the rest of your life. If you work hard between the ages of 25 and 35, you will play for the rest of your life. And as I've watched now coming up on wrapping up the second decade of my career, I've seen a lot of people finish off their careers, seen a lot of people start them, myself going through my own. A lot of observation and the amount of truth embedded in that quote has been nothing short of shocking. When you get in the right lane early, and you get to you get with the right people early, you wind up doing what you love and excelling at it. And of course, just like investing, the earlier you do that, the more it compounds. And it really creates a scenario where the back two thirds of your career not only are more of what you love, but really decompress the stress. On the other hand, if you kind of get yourself into a financial hole and you're not in the right lane, and you're nearing the halfway point of your career, it really becomes a tough thing to dig out of. And it just sets you up for a bit more of a grind on the back end. Now we could have a whole episode about that quote alone, but that quote got a lot of feedback. And anytime you talk about working hard, you tend to get a lot of DMs and messages about the need for people to avoid burnout. And specifically that people need vacations and time off to decrease their stress levels.

03:46 EXPECTATIONS AROUND TIME OFF

That's what I want to zone in on because I think that our expectations around time off are really, really aired, if you will. And the problem with your expectations not being aligned with reality is that discontent is the inevitable result of that. So let's see if we can't reconceptualize this a bit and wind up with better trajectories. So think about what creates low stress levels. So if we're going to talk about stress levels, what creates low stress levels? What creates a healthy ecosystem? The answer is the following. Now we could put nine bullets here, but let's go with the really, really big rocks. That when you have them dialed in, your stress levels tend to be low, your nervous system tends to be really under wraps, you tend to feel really dialed. Probably the biggest one we'd all agree on is sleep quality. The consistency of it we know is the primary driver. But the other small things, having it cold in the room, having it dark when you're eating food, not having those late meals, sleep consistency is probably, or sleep quality, driven primarily by consistency, is one of the biggest drivers to day to day having low stress, having more energy. Number two is a regular fitness routine. You're getting to the gym at the same time that you're engaging in quality fitness. Number three is nutrition, that you're eating a quality, clean, well-balanced diet. Sufficient in protein, void, hopefully, of a lot of nonsense and processed foods, that you're eating quality nutrition. When you're doing these things that we preach about all the time, your ecosystem tends to be optimal, your stress levels tend to be low, you tend to feel your best when those variables are dialed in. Now think about how those variables fare when you're on vacation. And I think we would all agree the answer is poorly. You're sleeping in a totally foreign environment, your consistency of your sleep is all over the map, you're trying to get some fitness in but it's random, it's not nearly as structured as usual, and your nutrition, let's be honest, leaves a lot to be desired. It's usually very fun food, you're usually trying a lot of new things, but you tend to be eating late at night, it affects your sleep quality, all of the primary metrics that create that really well-defined healthy, low-stress human are significantly disrupted, specifically when you're on vacation. Now does this mean, right, and I think it's worth saying that if that's not the case, if those things, if your sleep quality, your gym routine, your nutrition, if those things are better when you're on vacation, your day-to-day routine needs a serious second look. So if you don't have those things dialed in better on your day-to-day and your usual environment compared to when you are out in some random state or country where you've got no control of the other variables, if you do better on those things out there, you need a serious look at your level of discipline and organization on your day-to-day life. But I think for the vast majority, as we would agree, those things are pretty dialed when we're at home and they are very erratic when we're on vacation. Now does this mean that we shouldn't take vacations? And the answer to that is of course not, right? A lot of the coolest memories in your life, right? The things that you're going to do that you're going to look back on and say, gosh, that was crazy or do you remember that? And the stories that fill your life, a lot of those things are going to be formed when you're on vacation. Your perspective will expand, right? You're going to be in new environments. You're going to be seeing new people. You're going to be looking at things differently because you're outside of your usual routine. Your relationships with those that you go on will often deepen, whether it's your partner or your family or your friends, right? You rarely spend that kind of concentrated time and it creates incredible opportunity for those relationships to deepen. All of these incredible things are going to happen when you're on vacation. What will not happen though is usually that your stress level will drop because the things that drive that are generally disrupted. So then what's the secret sauce?

08:18 DEVELOPING A ROUTINE FOR VACATION

The secret sauce is developing a routine that allows you to look forward to, but never need a vacation. That's the most important thing, right? You can't wait to do it. It's going to be a blast. You know those memories are going to be formed, but you don't need it because your routine day to day is so dialed that you feel outstanding, even under the presence of high workload because you've dialed in those metrics. So developing a routine that allows you to look forward to it, but not be desperate for it, not require it. And number two enables you to bounce back upon your return because if you do vacations right, a lot of that stuff is probably disrupted and you're probably coming home, hopefully thinking the classic quote, I can't wait to get back into my routine. That is a very healthy thing to be thinking, right? Like, hey, we went out there, we collected incredible memories, we got new perspective, we deepened relationships, we did all of the enriching things that vacation can bring. But now I'm pumped to get back into my dialed in routine because that's what's going to drop back down my stress level. That's what's going to allow me to perform optimally. So hopefully you're coming back to a routine that's dialed that not only did you not even need the vacation in the first place, you're bouncing back in two to three days, as opposed to having that post vacation hangover for weeks on end where you can't get your act together, which only increases your stress, which makes you need to step away again. And now you're in this vicious cycle of trying to survive when you're there and always wanting to be gone. The exact opposite should be true. You should love when you're gone and be taking a ton from that, but you should be strengthening while you're home to be able to enable that. Not weakening while you're home, hoping that it can do something that it can't when you step away. That's the challenge. The bottom line is people need more disciplined lives to decrease their stress levels. And people need vacations to enrich their existence. Unfortunately, a lack of discipline in our day to day lives requires a need and a desire for vacations chronically and a hope that they can do something that they usually won't. Simply because the organization of them doesn't tend to organize our nervous system. It tends to disrupt it, which in the right amount, when you've already got it balanced, is an amazing stimulus to get you to think differently, to get you to freshen up, if you will.

11:14 TAKING OWNERSHIP OF ROUTINE

But if you are coming back to a routine that's chronically disorganized, you're going to be in that vicious cycle of, I feel like I need a vacation. The vacation didn't do what I wanted it to do. Now I'm a little bit worse off. And we go back and forth and back and forth. And there's really no getting out of that wheel until we reorganize and take ownership of what we're doing on the day to day. Then we can enjoy the vacations and be strengthened by our routine. So just want to put that out there because so often people are saying that people need vacations to decrease stress. I think we can live in a way that we don't need that at all. And yet we do get great things from those breaks and can certainly take them as opportunity allows. Hope that makes some sense. Had some great conversations this week. Feel free to continue those in the comments. Everybody have a wonderful Thursday. Thanks for being here on Leadership Thursday.

Dr. Jeff Musgrave // #GeriOnICE // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Modern Management of the Older Adult faculty member Jeff Musgrave discusses a randomized control trial that investigates the impact of inflammation and different intensities of strength training on global inflammatory load and immune response. The study involved 81 participants, aged 65 to 75, who underwent a 12-week strength training program at varying intensities. Thigh muscle volume was measured using computed tomography, and blood tests were conducted to assess inflammation markers.

The results of the study revealed that moderate and high intensity strength training yielded superior improvements compared to moderate and low intensity training. Participants in the moderate and high intensity group experienced a 15% increase in thigh muscle volume, while those in the moderate and low intensity group only saw a 9% increase. Furthermore, the moderate and high intensity group exhibited reduced thigh fat volume, decreased pro-inflammatory cytokines, increased anti-inflammatory cytokines, and elevated free floating leukocytes.

Jeff underscores the significance of incorporating moderate to high intensity strength training for older adults, particularly those in the 65 to 75 age range. He highlights the sedentary and overweight state of many older adults in the US, emphasizing the need to address frailty in this population. Jeff also discusses the risks associated with not implementing moderate to high intensity strength training, including increased inflammation, decreased muscle volume, and heightened body fat.

Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes.

If you're looking to learn more about live courses designed to better serve older adults in physical therapy or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 INTRO What's up everybody? Welcome back to the PT on ICE Daily Show. Before we jump into today's episode, let's chat about Jane, our show sponsor. Jane makes the Daily Show possible and is the practice management software that so many folks here at ICE utilize. The team at Jane knows how important it is for your patients to get the care they need. And with this in mind, they've made it really easy and convenient for patients to book online. One tip that has worked well for a lot of practices is to make the booking button on your website prominent so patients can't miss it. Once clicked, they get redirected to a beautifully branded online booking site. And from there, the entire booking process only takes around two minutes. After booking an appointment, patients get access to a secure portal where they can conveniently manage their appointments and payment details, add themselves to a waitlist, opt in to text and email reminders, and fill out their intake form. If you all are curious to learn more about online booking with Jane, head over to jane.app slash physical therapy. Book their one-on-one demo with a member of their team. And if you're ready to get started, make sure to use the code ICEPT1MO. When you sign up, that gives you a one-month grace period that gets applied to your new account. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy today's show.

01:43 JEFF MUSGRAVE Welcome to the PT on ICE Daily Show. It is Wednesday, so that means it is all things geriatrics. We like to call this Geri on ICE. So can't wait to get into a deep dive of this randomized control trial that just dropped last month in July, talking about inflammation, various intensities of strength training, how that impacts our global inflammatory load, as well as things like our immune response. And then we're going to deep dive after the article into what happens if you don't follow the results of this study and if you do, what the opportunity is for your patients. But before we get into that, we've got lots of opportunities. If you want to continue the learning process, if you want to sharpen the sword when it comes to working with older adults, we have got just a handful of seats left in Essential Foundation. So if you want to jump in, you need to do that quick. There are only a few seats left. We can still get you on boarded. You're not going to miss a thing. If you want to hop in for advanced concepts, you've already had Essential Foundations. The next cohort is going to be October 10th. And then if you want to see us live on the road, the revamp is releasing this weekend. I cannot wait. All of the faculty of the older adult division are descending on Lexington, Kentucky. We're coming to the bluegrass to show show out with this new content. It's going to be super fun. If you miss getting your seat for that this weekend, next weekend, we're going to be both in Bedford, Texas, as well as in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 06:20 IMPACT= OF MODERATE AND HIGH INTENSITY STRENGTH TRAINING FOR OLDER ADULTS So as promised, the study, Intensity Effects of Strengthening Exercise on Thigh Muscle Volume, Pro and Anti-Inflammatory Cytokines, Immunocytes in the Elderly, a randomized control trial. So this trial had 81 participants. We've got adults 65 to 75 years old. 39 of those were male. 41 of those were female. And they were taken through a 12 week strength training program at various intensities. Baseline measures were thigh muscle volume via a computed tomography and blood test. They also did their due diligence. We know how important nutrition is to get an idea, at least of their caloric intake. Now, did not go into detail of how much protein, how much fat, how many carbs. Didn't look at macros, but they did identify that all the adults in the study were consuming about the same calories on average. So the control group spent 10 to 15 minutes doing meditation and stretching. Not things that are awful, but definitely the control group when we're talking about effects of strength training. The experimental group did 50 minutes of exercise three days a week. They had squatting, they did pressing movements, spine flexion and extension on Mondays and Fridays. On Wednesdays, they hit those knee flexors, extensors. They did ankle planar flexion, chest flies and rows. All of this was primarily done on machines, machine based exercises. And then when they broke down the different intensities, what they did is they recalculated each month and they worked them off different repetition maxes. So the low intensity strength training group worked off of a 10 rep max, a 9 rep max and then an 8 rep max. If you're looking consecutively across those three months as it was a 12 week study. The moderate intensity group hit 10 rep max, 9 and 8 rep maxes and recalculated their strength each month. And then the high intensity group worked off an 8 rep max, a 7 rep max and a 6 rep max. So I thought that was pretty cool that they recalculated their strength and then they used the same measure there of course to calculate their intensity for their strength training. So, after 12 weeks of strength training, the moderate and high intensity strength training group had superior improvements in their thigh muscle volume. Their thigh muscles got larger at a percentage of about 15% versus 9% on the moderate and low side of things. They showed reduced thigh fat volume, reduced pro-inflammatory cytokines, increased anti-inflammatory cytokines as well as increased their free floating leukocytes. Lots of $10 terms in there, but the reality is when we're looking at the impact of moderate or low intensity versus moderate and high intensity. It was statistically significant that moderate and high intensity strength training for older adults superior. Whether you're talking about adding muscle, reducing fat, reducing inflammation and even bolstering the immune system, which really I thought was super cool. So that's the basics of the study. If you've been hanging around the Institute of Clinical Excellence in this community, you're not going to be surprised to hear the results of the study. But what I want you to do is I want us to go a level deeper. 09:30 AGING & STRENGTH TRAINING INTERVENTIONS I want you to think about your patients on your caseload that are 65 to 75 years old. The state of the union on older adults, especially in the US more so than other places in the world, is we are inactive. We are overweight. We are not hitting ACSM guidelines. Most older adults in that 65 plus category are on somewhere on the continuum of frailty. They have low physical reserve. They have low physical resiliency. They are vulnerable to injury and decline, losing their independence. So most of our clients are on this very rapid downward trajectory. And we have got at our hands the tools, rehab clinicians. We are able to intervene with strength training intervention. If we will go moderate to high intensity, we know we can increase their muscle mass. We can reduce reduce their body fat. We can reduce inflammation. And let's think about some of the conditions that are on board outside of low reserve, low resiliency. We like to think about a thing called one repetition max living. They are very near their 100 percent capacity to get out of a chair. Think about your client who cannot stand from their normal chair without using their arms. Their one repetition max squat is less than body weight. And think about how many times they have to stand up and sit down throughout the day, giving a near one repetition max effort. Crazy! How exhausting is life for those people that are barely able to do their activities of daily living? I want you to also think about some of these global inflammatory conditions. These inflammatory markers increase the risk of progressions in arthritis, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndromes like diabetes. Think about how many of our patients are sitting in this very vulnerable situation. So we've got this picture of our older adults on the decline, probably on the frailty spectrum. If they're on our caseload, probably have arthritis, probably have inflammatory conditions. Then we think about the opportunity that we have if we just add high intensity strength training intervention. Think about the change that you can make for them. How you can bolster their strength, their function. Get them away from that line of independence where they can just not barely get through their activities, but start building some sizeable reserve. Think about how much we can do if we hit moderate to high intensity. If they don't have inflammatory conditions yet, think about isolating them from that risk. And then not even covered in the study because these were not primary measures they were tracking, but just knowing the literature for older adults. 12:06 FRAILITY & AGING INTERVENTIONS Think about the benefit of heavier loads that's not even discussed in this study. Think about their bone density. Think about their confidence. If they know they can lift way more than they have to in daily life, is that going to impact their confidence? Is having more confidence going to help them lift with better mechanics more confidently? Is it going to help them balance in unusual scenarios more confidently? Absolutely. Confidence in that psychological impact. Don't count that out. So just think about all the opportunities with heavier load. And then what I want you to think about is maybe you're still on the fence with this stuff and you're like, I don't know if that's safe. I'm a little concerned. Maybe you don't feel quite equipped or you've not seen that modeled before and you're a little bit nervous. But I want you to think about this. I want you to think about the risk and what happens to these older adults in a very vulnerable situation if you don't. If you don't hit them with moderate to high intensity, I want to outline some of the results of the control group. During just that 12 week period where they did not perform moderate to high intensity or any strength training whatsoever, their resting inflammation went up. Their muscle volume went down. Their body fat went up. Their leukocytes went down. They became way more vulnerable in a 12 week period, just 12 weeks of not doing what they should be on the strength training train. Think about what happened to markers that were not tested. Think about their bone density. Think about their ability to get through their day with enough reserve and enough strength to really make it through the day. Just think about all the missed opportunities. I'm going to recap real quick. I know I'm super pumped about this. This is what it's all about, team. But I want you to think about the opportunity with moderate to high strength training interventions. Based on this randomized control trial, we can feel confident that we're going to increase their muscle thigh volume. Thinking about things like sarcopenia, frailty, all those categories. We can reduce their body fat. We can reduce pro-inflammatory markers. We can increase anti-inflammatory markers. We can bolster the immune system. Just based on this study, forget about bone density. Forget about one rep max living. Forget about confidence. We know those things just from this study. Then I want you to think about what you can do for your patients if you start these interventions. Think about how powerful of a tool you have. You have the keys to the castle in your pocket. If we can just go a little bit heavier. Remember, it's relative. It is relative. Yes, I will be sharing the link to this study in the caption. What happens if you don't? If you don't, we know this steady decline of frailty, deconditioning is going to continue. We know based on this study that if we don't intervene here, our older adults are going to become more frail. They're going to lose reserve. They're going to lose more muscle mass, be at higher risk of sarcopenia. We know that they're going to have higher inflammatory markers. They're going to be more at risk for progression in arthritis, metabolic conditions, cardiovascular disease. Just think about what processes you're allowing to hasten on. What's going to happen to your client if you don't get on board? Team, super spicy, super pumped about this. Got a little impassioned about this. I'll be sharing the link to this study in the caption. Super cool. Lots to think about here. Would love to hear your thoughts. Would love to hear if you have any success stories of clients that you've been using, moderate to high intensity strength training, and what the results have been. Otherwise, team, I hope you have a wonderful Wednesday and we will see you soon.

14:10 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on Ice Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. Be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ice content on a weekly basis while earning CUs from home, check out our virtual ICE online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our hump day hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

Dr. Mark Gallant // #ClinicalTuesday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Extremity Division Leader Mark Gallant discusses recent research evaluating the effects of training programs that prioritize the back squat vs. the barbell hip thrust.

Take a listen or check out the episode transcription below.

If you're looking to learn more about our Extremity Management course or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 INTRO What is up PT on Ice Crew, Dr. Mark Gallant here having some trouble with YouTube webcams this morning so we're going to be solely on Instagram and we'll get it downloaded for you on the on the back end for the YouTube. Again, I'm Dr. Mark Gallant, lead faculty with the Ice Extremity Management Division alongside Lindsey Huey, Eric Chaconis. We're going to get into some hip thrusts versus back squats today. Before we do that, if you've been looking to sign up for an ice physio course, the courses that are on the website now are the only courses that are going to be there for the remainder of 2023. So if you've been on the fence thinking about jumping in, those fall courses are the fall courses. So go ahead and get that dialed up and come join us on the road. If you've been looking to join the extremity management faculty on the road, Lindsey is going to be in Rochester Hills, Michigan this weekend. So if you want to it's a beautiful time of year in Michigan. If you want to jump up there, grab a seat. The course with Lindsey that's still available. And then I'll be in Amarillo, Texas September 9th and 10th. So I'd definitely love to see you all out on the road. One of the things that Lindsey and I and Cody and Kristen and all the staff for extremity management, one thing we're always trying to help do is to simplify our exercise selection and dosage so that for any n equals one patient that comes into the clinic, it's a bit easier for us as clinicians to go like, based on these parameters, this will likely be the best choice exercise and the best choice dosage for this individual. 02:39 HIP THRUSTS VS. BACK SQUATS And we had an article released last month. It's not even published in a journal yet. It came out of Auburn University. That's going to help us do just that. So the lead author on the paper is Daniel Plotkin with Brett Contreras, aka the glute guy, also being an author on the paper. And what they did in this paper is they wanted to compare. If we gave a group of people hip thrusts for nine weeks, and we gave another group of people back squats for nine weeks, of those folks getting those individual programs, who would have the greatest strength gains and who would have the greatest hypertrophy gains to the glute max specifically. So that's what they looked at. They took a group of individuals, about 34 individuals, who were 18 to 30, who had not done any significant training in over five years and were relatively healthy. So BMI under 30. So relatively young, relatively healthy and under trained. At baseline, what they assessed was they assessed three rep max for their back squat. They assessed three rep max for their barbell hip thruster, three rep max for a deadlift, and hip extension against a force plate to see how much output that glute max was doing. They also, which is kind of cool, they threw them through an MRI tube. And that's how they got a measure of how dense and how robust their glute max tissue was. So they threw everyone, day one, through that MRI, got an assessment of how thick their glute max was, how thick that booty was, and then they reassessed that after nine weeks. The final piece they assessed was they took EMG output for both the back squat and the hip thrust. So what did they do for an intervention? So over the course of nine weeks, one group got hip thrusts and one group got barbell back squat. Each group did nine weeks. Week one, they did three sets of eight to 12 reps. Week two, they did four sets of eight to 12 reps. Weeks three through six, they did five sets of eight to 12 reps. And then week seven through nine, they did six sets of eight to 12 reps. So over the course of the program, they were getting a lot more volume as time went on. The way they controlled for the intensity, if a person was able to do more than 12 repetitions at any given set, they bumped the weight up. If they were unable to get to eight reps, they lowered the weight down. So they always wanted to keep it between those eight to 12 reps while making it approaching failure. So getting close to failure for each of those individuals to really challenge those tissues overall. So each group did twice a week, only back squat for the back squat group, two days a week with those loading parameters. Hip thrust, twice a week, only hip thrust for that nine weeks with those loading parameters. 05:12 THE LAW OF SPECIFICITY What shook out at the end of the nine weeks was pretty cool. We're starting to see some strength and conditioning principles that are becoming clearer for us as better studies come along, as time goes on. The number one thing that we continue to see is the law of specificity. If you want your client to get better at back squats, have them do back squats. If you want your client to get better at hip thrusts, have them do hip thrusts. If you want your client to get better at deadlifts, have them deadlift. You want them to get better at step ups, have them step up, so on and so on. And that's exactly what we saw in this study. The group that did barbell back squat got significantly stronger at their three rep max back squat at the end of that nine weeks with only minimal gains in their barbell hip thrust, in their deadlift, in their force plate. They made gains in those other things. They were not nearly as significant as the gains as they made on the specific exercise they were doing. Same for the barbell hip thrust. The group that did the barbell hip thrust made significant gains in their three rep max on the barbell hip thrust. We did not see the same significance in their back squat, in their deadlift, and in their isometric hip extension against the force plate. Again, they made some gains, not as significant as the specific exercise. So again, we're seeing this article reinforce. If you want to get better at a specific thing, that person will need to do that thing as soon as their tissues can tolerate it, as soon as they're ready. Get them doing the thing that they desire to get better at. The other cool thing about this paper was hypertrophy. What we saw with hypertrophy with this study is both groups hypertrophied their glute max equally. So it didn't matter whether you were in the back squat group, whether you were in the hip thrust group, both groups showed glute gains. 09:58 HYPERTROPHY AND EXERCISE SELECTION And what we're seeing in a lot of the hypertrophy research is exactly this, where as long as the tissue is being stimulated at a challenging level and enough volume, that's good enough for the tissue to grow. So this study met those two criteria. It had an extreme amount of volume. So getting up to six sets of eight to 12 reps is a ton of time under tension for a tissue. And by controlling that they always wanted those folks to be approaching failure at a challenging range between eight to 12 reps, we got both high volume and high intensity. If those two parameters are on board and the tissue is getting some stimulus, almost always we're going to see some local tissue change or some growth. So again, law of specificity, do the thing that the person wants to do. And if you're looking for local tissue changes, hypertrophy, it seems to not matter as much which specific exercise. As long as the tissue is being challenged at an appropriate volume and at an appropriate intensity. The other interesting thing about this study was the EMG output did not seem to matter. So the barbell hip thrust had a higher EMG output for the glutes and that did not correlate to either strength gains or to more hypertrophy. Again, the strength games came from specificity. The hypertrophy gains came on board because the intensity was appropriated up. Now, looking at any study, we always want to be aware that there's problems with every study or challenges to any study that comes across the board. There are no perfect studies out there. The challenges with this study were it was a relatively low population. So there were 34 individuals, 18 in the hip thrust group, 16 in the squat group. So a fairly small population. They were all young and relatively healthy, which is going to be different than our general physical therapy population. And they were all significantly undertrained. So no one that was accepted in the study had more than one day a week for over five years of weightlifting experience. So appreciate that likely these gains that we saw in strength and these gains that we saw in hypertrophy are somewhat attributed to that. These folks were so significantly undertrained. And we've all seen that the more undertrained the person is, the easier it is for them to adapt early on. Also, with this, nine weeks is a fairly short amount of time to have a strength and conditioning or a hypertrophy program show results. It's likely that because they were undertrained is why we saw results in nine weeks. With our general physical therapy clients, some of whom may have been weightlifting for 15, 20, 30 years, we would expect a bit longer time to get true tissue adaptations and to get true strength adaptations. So again, to recap, study showed hip thrust versus barbell back squat. If you want to get better at the hip thrust, do the hip thrust. If you want to get better at the barbell back squat, you want to get stronger at that, do the barbell back squat. If you want to hypertrophy, whichever exercise you want to choose is great as long as you've got the intensity and the volume. The final cool thing that this study showed was that when someone did the barbell back squat, they had a ton of adductor activation and ton of quad activation and a ton of glute activation versus the hip thrust, which had primarily glute activation with far less hip adductor or quad activation. So if you've got a patient who comes in and they're in a lot of pain and you say, man, they've got some knee pain on board, their adductors seem a bit irritable, those quads are all gummed up. And we want to make sure that that athlete or that client is maintaining powerful hip extension, which is one of the most important movements for all humans. Then let's bias early on to the barbell hip thrust because it's not going to challenge those adductors and those quads. When that patient starts to get better and their adductors and their quads are not as irritable and they're not as gummed up, then let's go straight after that squat. Or on the flip side, you have no tissue irritability on board and that person's daily life requires a lot of squatting. It's going to behoove you to go right after that squat instead of spending time on the hip thrust early on. In reality, we've beaten a dead horse with this saying over the years and not more. For most of our folks, you're going to want to program hip thrust. You're going to want to program some squats. You're going to throw your deadlifts in there to have a nice well-rounded program. Law of specificity. Make sure the intensity is good. Make sure the volume is good. Have a great Tuesday treating clients. Can't wait to see you all on the road. Have a great rest of your day. Always grateful to be speaking on this podcast and hope to see you all soon.

11:37 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on Ice Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. And be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ICE content on a weekly basis while earning CU's from home, check out our virtual ICE online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our Hump Day Hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

Dr. Jess Gingerich // #ICEPelvic // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, #ICEPelvic faculty member Jess Gingerich discusses considerations for postpartum exercise include the type of birth, birth trauma, sleep deprivation, and nutrition. It is important to take into account the impact of the birth on the postpartum exercise plan, especially if it was traumatic physically or emotionally. Respecting the individual's experience is crucial. Additionally, sleep deprivation and nutrition should be considered. If a mother is struggling to get proper nutrition due to the demands of caring for a newborn, adjustments may need to be made to the exercise plan. It is also important to consider specific goals when designing a postpartum exercise plan.

The episode highlights three recommended exercises to initiate postpartum impact: heel drops, alternating hops, and jump rope exercises. Heel drops involve going up onto your toes and dropping your heels down. Alternating hops are done by moving side to side and can be performed with or without a jump rope. Using a jump rope adds an extra challenge and requires coordination. The third exercise is small hops with both feet. These exercises are ideal for postpartum women who want to regain strength and fitness after giving birth. However, it is crucial to consider the type of birth, any birth trauma, sleep deprivation, and nutrition when starting these exercises. Monitoring for symptoms such as leakage, pressure, pain, and bleeding is also important during the progression into impact exercises. Breastfeeding moms should be advised to wear a supportive bra during exercise for added comfort.

Jess emphasizes the importance of utilizing progressive overload principles when starting with small impact movements and gradually increasing intensity. She stresses the significance of meeting the individual where they are and understanding that progressive overload is a natural part of the process. This means that as the individual progresses and adapts to the small impact movements, they should gradually increase the intensity of their exercises to continue challenging their pelvic floor muscles and promoting strength and function. Jess also highlights the importance of speaking positively about exercise and the pelvic floor, as it encourages individuals to stay active and avoid deconditioning. By incorporating progressive overload principles, individuals can safely and effectively strengthen their pelvic floor muscles while minimizing the risk of injury or negative symptoms.

Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes.

If you're looking to learn more about our live pregnancy and postpartum physical therapy courses or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 INTRO What's up everybody? We are back with another episode of the PT on Ice Daily Show. Before we jump in, let's chat about Jane for a moment as they are our sure sponsor and they make this thing possible. The team at Jane understands that payment processing can be complex, so they built in an integrated payment solution called Jane Payments to help make things as simple as possible so you can get paid. If you're looking for an easy way to navigate payments, here's what we recommend. Head over to jane.app slash payments, book a one-on-one demo with a member of Jane's support team. This can give you a better sense of how Jane Payments can integrate with your practice and you can browse through several other popular features that Jane Payments supports, like memberships with the option to automatically invoice and process your membership payments online. If you know you're ready to get started, you can sign up for Jane and make sure when you do, you use the code ICEPT1MO as that gives you a one-month grace period while you settle in. Once you're in your new Jane account, you can flip the switch for Jane Payments at any time. Let the Jane team know if you need a hand with anything. They offer unlimited support and are always happy to jump in. Thanks everybody. Enjoy today's PT on Ice Daily Show.

01:25 JESSICA GINGERICH Good morning PT on Ice podcast. My name is Dr. Jessica Gingrich and I am on faculty with the pelvic division here at ICE. So we just finished up a wonderful weekend of the CrossFit Games. We have a huge congratulations to extend to Dr. Kelly Benfey. She is on faculty with the CMFA division. Her team took 16th place this weekend and boy was that fun to watch her compete. So I was on virtual ice last Tuesday and what I want to do today is talk a little bit about that virtual ice. So I've been on here the last couple times talking about the benefits of certain things early in the early postpartum period. So within that first 12 weeks postpartum. So I wanted to continue that and just what a wonderful time to do it as we did have a mom on the podium this year. So Ariel Loewen took third place. She has a child as she's a mom and she's just out here crushing the fitness space. So before we dive into that we're going to talk about early impact which is going to be really fun. We're going to start to reframe that a little bit but we do have courses coming your way. So hop on the website PT on Ice dot com to check that out. We have two courses here with the pelvic division. We have an eight week online course that bridges everything from gymnastics and barbell lifting to handstand push-ups to everything with the pelvic space with using the internal exam to help get people back to where they need to go. And then we have a two day live course and that one is just really fun. We get moving a lot. So if that is something that's on your list go ahead and head over there to secure your spot. 03:45 THE FOURTH TRIMESTER So we are going to talk about that early impact in the fourth trimester. So the fourth trimester is the first 12 weeks postpartum. There's a lot of things that matter here but I want to start to reconceptualize the phrase of this or certain things put a lot of pressure on your pelvic floor. So we know that growing a fetus is going to put more demand on the anterior abdominal wall as well as the pelvic floor as well as a lot of other systems in the body. So does a sneeze. Like when we sneeze it puts a lot of pressure on the pelvic floor. When we lift weights it puts a lot of pressure on the pelvic floor. When we lift our child that then wiggles around it's going to put a lot of pressure on the pelvic floor. The phrase this puts a lot of pressure on your pelvic floor we want to maybe refrain from doing that can be a very fearful message. And also one that's just incorrect at this point. We want to do it in a way that is going to allow the pelvic floor to succeed. We don't want to blast through symptoms of leakage or heaviness or pain but we need to start reconceptualizing this especially speaking to our clients. So now before we jump in, no pun intended there, impact, we want to understand the demands placed on the pelvic floor in the day to day. So number one when you have a baby whether it's a c-section or a vaginal delivery we do have a healing process. So with a vaginal birth if there is no tissue trauma, so this is a vaginal birth with no tearing, no episiotomy and episiotomy is where they would cut to allow more room. We know that the tissues stretch approximately three times, 300 times their original length. So right then and there we can put that as tissue trauma, right? That is tissue trauma without any disruption to the sarcomeres or the skin or the connective tissue. Patients will need about four to six weeks for healing but this doesn't mean that we can't do nothing for four to six weeks. Now there's going to be probably a lot of questions that come with this because everyone is different, right? So we need to understand that and set the expectation early can be super helpful. So in educating our patients I love to give a timeline. So I usually say between six and twelve weeks, sometimes six and eight weeks depending on where that person is. And that's kind of nice because then when they get back to doing impact things that's now something where they're like oh I was kind of anticipating twelve weeks instead of now, right? And so that gap is pretty big but at least it allows them to be like okay I have this set date or timeframe if you will where we're going to start working back to that. 04:16 PRESSURE ON THE PELVIC FLOOR Number two, we need to start talking about toileting. We need to teach people how to poop. We need to teach people how to pee. If we are not asking that question, are you burying down when you go to the bathroom? Are you pushing your pee out? You're going to be missing a big mark here. Your pelvic floor is reflexive. So as pressure gets put down on it, it should be turning on. So if you're going to the bathroom and you're burying down, we're putting a lot of pressure on the organs if you will. However, we're also putting pressure on the pelvic floor that's likely kicking it on and if it's not, it's just pushing it downward. So we need to be asking about that. We need to be encouraging a squatty potty. We need to be encouraging fluid, water intake, fiber intake and really the time spent on the toilet and this goes for males too. So spending a lot of time on the toilet just isn't what you want to do. If they are the person that takes their phone in with them, you could even tell them hey let's try not taking your phone in to see if you get off the toilet sooner. 08:12 BLADDER IRRITANTS So number three, we do have oral intake. So we talked about water intake just a second ago, but just recognizing that beverages like carbonation, alcohol, artificial sweeteners, they could be bladder irritants. And so I went to the gym this morning and I did one of the CrossFit Games workouts today called Halina, which is a three rounds of 400 meter run, 12 bar muscle ups and then 21 dumbbell snatches. I went at 7.15 so I had coffee and I had to go to the bathroom probably three times before I went and did the workout because that is a bladder irritant for me. So when we talk about bladder irritants, we are not saying stop having these things. It's just saying hey this may be a trigger and so if this is happening to you, that's okay. Just recognize that if you have double unders or running or something, box jumps, that may be we try to have the coffee after the workout or maybe you have one cup instead of two or can we sandwich that coffee with some water to dilute the urine a bit. That's one of the big things is not necessarily taking those things away but just telling them hey this could just be a bladder irritant for you. It looks different for everyone. Number four and probably one of the biggest ones is the symptom threshold. Helping your client find their symptom threshold is going to mean that they're going to be reaching their symptoms. They are going to likely be leaking. They're going to likely be maybe feeling like they're going to leak and that can be a very daunting thing but it's going to give us a lot of feedback, a lot of them feedback and it's going to give them a lot of freedom when they're in the gym. If you reach this threshold, take a second, pause, take a breath. Maybe we do a little bit of jumping and then we back off and we do the bike and get a sprint in. Or we do another option for jumping. I'm going to talk about some options here in a second. Speaking positively about exercise and their pelvic floor is huge. They are not going to ruin their pelvic floor. I would rather, we would rather have someone stay active in the gym or whatever that looks like for them rather than telling them they're going to ruin something so they stop and then fast forward 30 years later and now they're in a skilled nursing home sooner because they're massively deconditioned or they have a massive injury because of being deconditioned. Now that we have some guidance on the return factors that we want to manipulate and play around with, let's start using pressure rather than, or rather forces if you will, to strengthen the pelvic floor. Now there are considerations we need to keep in mind, like the type of birth, we talked about that earlier. Birth trauma, so this could actually be physical as well as emotional. So if you have someone who is identifying that their birth is pretty traumatic, we're going to respect that. Sleep deprivation, nutrition, if your mom is having a hard time getting protein in and carbs in and good fats in because every time she goes to eat her baby starts to cry, that's something to just talk about and maybe we push that back a little bit and that's okay. And then of course specific goals. So our top three exercises to initiate post-part or impact in that time is going to be heel drops. So that's where you'll go up onto your toes and drop your heels down. Alternating hops is just going to be alternating side to side. You can do that without a jump rope or with a jump rope. Doing it with a jump rope is actually very difficult. It takes a lot of coordination. And then small hops. And that is going to just be small hops with two feet. Something to keep in mind in here are breastfeeding moms that can be very uncomfortable. So just talking to them about wearing a very supportive bra when they come to that visit. As always, we are going to ask about symptoms during your progressions into impact. So the symptoms are going to be leakage, pressure, pain, and then also bleeding. So in that early trimester we want to just keep an eye on bleeding. It is normal to have an uptick in bleeding, but we want it to not be like that they're passing clots after they start upping their intensity. Keeping the conversation positive even if they're hitting symptoms early and we're regressing. All we're doing is we're meeting them where they are and understanding that progressive overload is going to happen. And even talking to them about that is a really fun thing. So to recap, pressure doesn't have to be a bad word when talking about the pelvic floor. Understand other factors that may be influencing the pelvic floor, such as toileting, nutrition, type of birth. And essentially linking that to their symptom threshold. Utilizing small impact movements at first and start to initiate those progressive overload principles. So I'll leave you with that. Have a great Monday and we'll see you next time.

13:40 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT On Ice Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. And be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ICE content on a weekly basis while earning CU's from home, check out our virtual ICE online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our Hump Day Hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

Alan Fredendall // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete division leader Alan Fredendall discusses the efficacy of mobility programs to produce meaningful, function change in range of motion for patients & athletes.

Take a listen to the episode or read the episode transcription below. Article referenced

If you're looking to learn from our Clinical Management of the Fitness Athlete division, check out our live physical therapy courses or our online physical therapy courses. Check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 INTRO

What's up everybody? Before we get rolling, I'd love to share a bit about Jane, the practice management software that we love and use here at ICE who are also our show sponsor. Jane knows that collecting new patient info, their consent and signatures can be a time consuming process, but with their automated forms, it does not have to be. With Jane, you can assign intake forms to specific treatments or practitioners, and Jane takes care of sending the correct form out to your patients. Save even more time by requesting a credit card on file through your intake forms with the help of Jane Payments, their integrated PCI compliant payment solution. Conveniently, Jane will actually prompt your patients to fill out their intake form 24 hours before their appointment if they have not done so already. If you're looking to streamline your intake form collection, head over to jane.app slash physical therapy, book a one-on-one demo with a member of the Jane team. They'll be able to show you the features I just mentioned and answer any other questions you may have. Don't forget, if you do sign up, use the code ICEPT1MO for a one month grace period applied to your new account. Thanks everybody, enjoy the show.

01:32 ALAN FREDENDALL

Good morning everybody, welcome to the PT on ICE Daily Show. Happy Friday morning, I hope your day is off to a great start. My name is Alan, happy to be your host today. Currently have the pleasure of serving as the Chief Operating Officer here at ICE and lead faculty here in our fitness athlete division. It is Fitness Athlete Friday, we would argue it's the best start day of the week. We talk all things CrossFit, functional fitness, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, endurance athletes, runners, bikers, swimmers, everything related to the person who's regulationally active here on Fridays. Before we get started with today's topic, we're going to be tackling mobility. We're going to define mobility versus flexibility. We're going to discuss a recently published paper showing the effects of long term stretching on mobility changes and address concerns related to that paper. Before we get started, let's talk about a couple of announcements. It is the CrossFit Games individual and team competitions began yesterday. Age group and adaptive athletes began Tuesday. We have a day competition all week long. You can catch it on ESPN. You can catch it on YouTube. Our very own Kelly Benfee here from the fitness athlete division will be competing with her team. Plus 64 CrossFit Army end game in the team division. So you can check her out. She had a couple of events yesterday and she's got events every day the rest of the weekend. Speaking of fitness festivals, the I Got Your Six Fitness Festival will be June 21st and 23rd down in Charleston, South Carolina with our friends at Warrior WOD. We had the virtual competition this year, but next year it's going to be in person. So it's a ways away, but look forward to that calendar if you want to come down to Charleston and join us for a weekend of approachable fitness courses coming away from us here in the fitness athlete division. Your next chance to catch our live course will be September 9th and 10th. That will be in Bismarck, North Dakota with Mitch Babcock or the end of September, September 30th and October 1st. You can catch Zach Long out on the West Coast. He'll be in Newark, California. That's in the Bay Area. Our online courses, Clinical Management Fitness Athlete Essential Foundations, our eight week entry level online course begins again September 11th and Fitness Athlete Advanced Concepts, our level two online course begins September 17th. So mobility, let's talk about it. How much can we really move the needle? My goal today is to define mobility as it's often talked about in kind of common terms with athletes in the gym, patients in the clinic when they talk about mobility, defining mobility versus defining flexibility. Talking about a paper that was published a couple of weeks ago, looking at the effects of long term stretching specifically at ankle mobility, which is a joint we're always after to improve the range of motion within and then really how to approach mobility from a practical clinical standpoint.

2:01 EFINING MOBILITY VS. FLEXIBILITY So let's start first with defining mobility versus flexibility because they're often used interchangeably and that's not the correct way to use them. Then when we talk about flexibility, we're talking about the capacity of soft tissues of muscles, tendons, ligaments to be passively stretched, whether me as the therapist stretches you the patient or whether you stretch yourself using your own body, using stretch straps, things like that. The ability to passively stretch muscle tissue at a specific joint. Now mobility is different. Mobility is the ability of a joint to actively move through a range of motion. And of course, we're always chasing a full range of motion. So the ability, for example, of the need to advance across the toes in active closed chain dorsiflexion, the ability of the hip to externally rotate or flex sitting down into a squat, that would be an assessment of mobility, actively moving the joint through the range of motion. And you, the patient or athlete moving yourself through the range of motion, aka how much motion can you actually access? Because we see some folks have a big difference between their flexibility and their mobility. We may be able to passively move their ankle, passively move their leg into a normal or above average range of motion. But when that person stands up, they re-encounter gravity and they try to actively move that joint. We can sometimes see a big difference between mobility and flexibility. And that brings us to a really important point that a lot of what we see in marketing, in programs, in our own home programs for athletes and patients is that we say we're prescribing mobility. But really, what we are giving for the most part is flexibility, that a lot of passive stretching is what is given out, which can improve flexibility. Yes, but may not always result in any sort of functional change in mobility. We see a ton of programs all over social media, especially in the fitness athlete space, that are marketed at improving mobility. But when we actually look at the content of those programs, things like ROMWOD, things like GOWOD, things like whatever WOD, that we actually see a lot of passive stretching, a lot of flexibility. And so it's no wonder that folks come in and have been doing one of these programs for weeks, months, years, and have not seen any sort of beneficial improvements. In their mobility, their ability to actively move joints through a range of motion, because they have not been doing any sort of mobility work, they have been doing a lot of flexibility work. And we know those two things don't always translate. We don't always see a bunch of flexibility work translate into any sort of improvements in actual meaningful functional mobility.

7:32 THE RESEARCH ON STRETCHING So what does the research say? There's a bunch of research on passive stretching. There's a bunch of research on the benefits specifically of eccentric loading to improve range of motion, to improve active mobility. And we've always kind of wondered the question of what is the dose response relationship with flexibility training, with stretching? We have a great paper that came out last month in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research by Wernicke and colleagues. I'll post the link on Instagram and in the show notes on the podcast that sought to answer that question. So this was a study that sought to look at the effects on maximal voluntary muscular contraction, flexibility and muscle thickness of the ankle plantar flexors. Now, the experimental group had a lot of stretching prescribed. Specifically, they stretched six times a day for 10 minutes each session for six weeks. So about 42 total hours of stretching through the calf complex, an hour per day for 42 days. They perform the stretching with a night splint type orthotic of a boot that prepositions the foot into ankle dorsiflexion with the addition of a strap assist to pull their ankle into additional dorsiflexion if able. So essentially stretching the gastric complex 10 minutes, six times a day for six weeks. Now, what did the results show? The results did show an improvement in range of motion of when they remeasured ankle dorsiflexion. There were improvements that reached statistical significance. But really, when we look at the results, when we look at the actual data itself and not the summary of data in the discussion, we look at the raw data. What do we think about the results? We think that the functional improvement here is probably questionable. Then we actually look at the ranges of motion increases experienced by these subjects that most folks experience the change of about 0.25 to 0.5 centimeters or about one tenth to two tenths of an inch of an improvement in ankle dorsiflexion. Now, when we measure functional ankle dorsiflexion in the clinic, we use the closed chain half kneeling knee to wall task to measure the ability of the knee to advance over the toes with a planted heel. We show this assessment in our online essential foundations course, and we show this in our live seminar as well. And what we'd like to see there is that an athlete with the heel flat can advance their knee over their toes about four inches. That ideally they would contact the wall. We know if they can contact the wall, they have about four inches of motion there or possibly more. But that is enough motion, for example, to be able to advance the knees over the toes and sit down into a nice full depth squat. And so when we look at changes of 0.1 inches in a test where we're looking to see four full inches of range of motion, we realize that's not really that much of a functional improvement of yes, the results did reach statistical significance. But the practical application here is very, very, very minimal of that person. If we improve their ankle dorsiflexion and it was, for example, zero inches, somebody like me, somebody with a very stiff ankle, particularly my right ankle that has about zero inches of closed chain dorsiflexion. What good really is 0.1 to 0.2 inches of closed chain dorsiflexion improvement? The answer is not. It's not right. It's not a functional improvement. It's not a meaningful improvement. Yes, it was a statistically significant improvement, but in real life, it would not help that person move any better. It would not improve that person's mobility, even though their flexibility, yes, has technically changed. So we need to be mindful of how to actually interpret results of studies like this. We also need to now talk about what is the practical application of a study like this to practice, because this study came out and a lot of social media posts were made, a lot of podcasts were made that said, look, you're just not stretching enough. If you stretch an hour a day for six weeks, you can see an improvement in joint range of motion. And yes, again, while true, not functional.

10:14 APPLYING RESEARCH TO PRACTICE We also have to step back and really analyze the methodology of this paper and also analyze things like the inclusion and exclusion criteria of this paper. We're probably unlikely to find an actual real person, a patient or athlete who's going to do six hours a week, an hour per day, seven days a week for many, many weeks of flexibility training, essentially, right? We hear time is the biggest barrier to exercise. We hear time is the biggest barrier to home exercise program compliance. So it doesn't really make sense that if we can't get somebody to perform a 12 minute remom for the home exercise program, what's the likelihood that they're going to do an hour a day of home exercise program on top of maybe also trying to exercise an hour or more per day? The answer is unlikely. Right. We know that if we if we dose that out to somebody, there are very few patients who are going to come back and say, yep, I did. I did six sessions a day, 10 minutes per session, and I did it every day, seven days a week, just like you prescribed, doctor. That's a very unlikely result. So we need to be mindful of that when we're talking about applying this to real actual people. We also really need to dig into the inclusion criteria and look at the baseline assessments in a study like this, because this study would portray that some of these folks were stiff and saw improvements. Some of these folks had OK mobility and saw improvements. But really, when we look at the baseline assessments, the quote unquote stiffest person in the study still had three point four inches of closed chain dorsal flexion, right? More than enough ankle mobility to be able to squat to depth, assuming nothing was wrong mobility wise in that person's hip or knee. That person would have all the dorsal flexion needed to be able to, for example, functionally squat to depth. So we have to ask ourselves, is this actually representative of the populations that we treat? Is it representative of somebody who might come to us and say they need help with their mobility? What's the likelihood that they're actually going to do an hour a day of this type of training? And also, this is not the person that's going to present in our clinic, right? Of the person who can close chain dorsal flex at least three point four inches. You're not even going to consider that their ankle is stiff and maybe even prescribe some mobility stuff for their ankle to them, because they already possess all the range of motion needed to squat. On the high end in these subjects, they were beyond three point four inches, right? There were people with four, five, six, some folks close to seven inches of closed chain dorsal flexion. Way above average mobility. And so we need to recognize and ask the question of why are we studying the effects of flexibility and mobility on people who already have adequate, above average, perfect or excellent mobility, right? We see this a lot in medical research of we study the effects of, for example, resistance training on bone loading in older adults, and we exclude people with osteoporosis and osteopenia and folks who have any sort of issue that might throw an extra variable into the study. And what we find ourselves is studying interventions on people who don't need the intervention, right? And this study is exactly that case of we are studying the effects of flexibility training on the mobility of people who don't need any help with their flexibility or mobility. So again, can we generalize studies like this to the general population? Probably not. And for a lot of reasons, the ones we've already discussed here. And what we need to realize when we look at this data and look at a big picture is when we look at the results of studies like this, when we look at all the data aggregated, yes, but also unaggregated on those data tables, what are we looking at? That we tend to find that folks fall into buckets, that we can classify them. We know that, for example, with low back pain, we can find people who are flexion intolerant, extension intolerant, shear intolerant. We know they may or may not respond to directional preference type exercises, but people tend to fall in classification buckets based on what's going on. And we need to recognize that mobility is no different. Even looking at this study, looking at the baseline measurements of folks, we have folks who appear to have great mobility, who improved with intervention. We have folks who have great mobility, who did not improve with interventions. We had folks with poor mobility, who improved with intervention. And then we had the most unfortunate group of all, folks with poor mobility, who did not seem to improve with intervention. So we need to recognize that the person we're working with in the clinic, in the gym, probably fits into one of those buckets. If they are somebody who is interested in working on the mobility, even if we may not need it, right? We have that person who can hinge all the way to the floor with a perfectly flat back and locked out knees and touch their palms to the floor. A very bendy, flexible individual who is asking you for help on their mobility, right? That person does not need mobility help. They do not need flexibility help. But yet they are maybe seeking some extra mobility programming. We have folks with poor mobility, who need mobility training, who we know will not work on it anyways, especially an hour a day. So we see that our patients and athletes fall into these buckets, and we need to recognize which bucket they may fall into. We may not know early on how they're going to respond to interventions, especially if they haven't tried anything previously, but we'll know very quickly across the plan of care of their physical therapy if they're going to be somebody who responds to interventions like these. So what do we actually do with that person in front of us? Well, I think what we don't do enough is ask people a few simple questions of I see that you have some mobility things you could work on. How much time do you actually have for this? I don't think we ask that question enough. I think we give people what we want to see them do, what we hope they will do, and then we're often disappointed when they don't do it because we haven't asked first of all how much time they're willing to dedicate to it. I appreciate over the years how I've started to ask this question, and people have been very honest of I'm never going to do this at home. I'm only going to do this when I come here to physical therapy. Well, I appreciate that honesty, right? Because I'm not going to waste my time writing out a really detailed program that you're not going to do. So I think starting with that, excuse me, that question is very, very important. And then also recognizing and being really, really thorough and methodical in your reassessments along the way so you know if this person appears to be somebody who's going to respond to mobility type interventions. This study in particular has a lot of issues with the methodology, only including people who already possess a lot of nice functional mobility. It did a lot of long-term passive stretching, and we also need to recognize that primarily due to the way the intervention was done in this study, they primarily stretched the gastroc but assessed mobility and range of motion by the closed chain dorsiflexion test, which really looks at soleus muscle flexibility more so than gastroc. So we're stretching the gastroc, but assessing the ability of the knee to advance over the toes in a kneeling position, which is really looking at the soleus muscle complex. So we need to recognize the limitations of this study, and in our own practice of actually making sure we're giving the right mobility to the right person based on the deficits that we're finding in their assessment. We hear often, what are some great shoulder stretches? Well, it depends on what is limiting your shoulder mobility. If I give you a bunch of lat stretches and you seem to be really limited in external rotation because of maybe something going on in your subscap or your internal rotators not related to your lat, if you pass all of the screens we see for the lat, then giving you a bunch of lat stretching, a bunch of shoulder stretching, it's really not going to benefit and improve the mobility we need to work on. So we need to be sure we're working in the right area and addressing the right area with our exercises as well. So mobility, how much can we move the needle? Well, it really depends. It seems to be maybe a genetic component. It seems to be a combination of how well people respond to this type of training, and we also need to recognize that it appears to take a lot of time, possibly more time than the patient or athlete in front of us actually has. So understand the difference between flexibility and mobility. Flexibility, the ability for us to stretch muscles passively or a patient or athlete to stretch themselves passively versus mobility, the ability of the person to actively move their joints through a range of motion under gravity, functional movements, things like a squat, a lot of close chain type movements. We have research that looks at long-term stretching, but we know the quality of the research is not that great and the practical application of the research itself is not that great. Yes, we can reference the study and say if you're willing to stretch six hours a week, you might see changes in your ankle mobility, but again, we don't know that for sure. In practice, we know that our athletes and patients tend to fall in buckets. We need to be able to recognize those folks where they lie in our assessment. And again, always ask the question of how much do you really want to work on this? How much time do you really have to work on this? Somebody who says I have an extra hour a day before bed at night. Okay, that's a person who maybe could try out an hour of flexibility training before bed. Whether you give them a program, whether they sign up for something like ROM WOD, GO WOD, Mobility WOD, whatever WOD, Stretch WOD, the millions of programs out there. Or somebody who goes I'm not going to do this at all. I know myself, I'm not going to do this at night before bed. I'm not going to do it in the morning. I'm not going to do it before I work out and I'm not going to do it after I work out. Okay, that is a person that we probably should not spend our time on trying to give a bunch of mobility homework already knowing that they're pretty intentional and honest that they're not going to do it. So mobility, can we move the needle? Maybe. Jury's still out. We still need to see more research, of course, more impactful research, more functional research, and more practical research. Research that actually looks at what sort of changes can we expect to make in maybe 12 to 15 minutes a day? The range of time that we're probably prescribing to most of our patients and athletes. So I hope this was helpful. I hope you have a fantastic Friday. Hope you have a great weekend. If you're going to be at a live course, enjoy yourself. Enjoy the CrossFit Games. Watch Kelly Benfee and Ruth Huron. Have a great Friday. Have a great weekend. Bye everybody.

20:32 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on Ice Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review and be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ICE content on a weekly basis while earning CU's from home, check out our virtual ICE online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our hump day hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up. You

Dr. Jeff Moore // #LeadershipThursday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE CEO Jeff Moore emphasizes the importance of considering individual circumstances and not allowing blanket statements to hinder progress. While the general principle of "do less better" is often advocated for efficiency and clarity, Jeff acknowledges that there are exceptions to this approach.

Jeff encourages listeners to think about situations where a person may come into the clinic with psychological barriers or feeling overwhelmed. In these cases, Jeffg suggests that overwhelming the individual with multiple interventions or exercises may actually be beneficial. By providing a variety of options and allowing the person to choose one or two to focus on, it can help shift their psychology and get them on board with the treatment plan.

Jeff also mentions that this concept applies not only to exercise but also to other aspects of healthcare, such as sleep hygiene and diet. Instead of overwhelming individuals with a long list of changes to make, it is more effective to start with one or two manageable changes. This approach makes it more approachable and minimizes barriers to compliance.

Overall, the episode highlights the importance of considering individual circumstances and being flexible in treatment approaches. While the general principle of "do less better" is valuable, it is essential to recognize that there are times when overwhelming individuals with options or interventions can be beneficial in getting them on board and moving in the right direction.

Take a listen to the podcast episode or read the full transcription below.

If you're looking to learn more about courses designed to start your own practice, check out our Brick by Brick practice management course or our online physical therapy courses, check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 JEFF MOORE Alright team, what's up? Welcome to the PT on Ice Daily show. I am Dr. Jeff Moore, currently serving as the CEO of Ice and thrilled to be here on a Leadership Thursday. Always wonderful to have you on Instagram, on YouTube if you're live streaming or over on the podcast. Thank you so much for carving out a few minutes for us today. It is Thursday, it means it's Gut Check Thursday, and it is a doozy. So many of you are at the CrossFit Games, you're probably going to be throwing this workout down together. I know it comes from our friends at Mayhem, they're probably going to be doing it as well. But the workout is, and it would be simple if it was just the first part, it is a hundred for time at a relatively manageable weight. Okay, so we've got 75-55 on the bar. Many of you probably remember the 100 clean and jerks for time that we've done I think twice now. The problem is you also have an EMOM of 15 air squats, and that's going to make it a different kind of stimulus, and that includes starting at zero. The first thing you're going to do when the timer goes off or Gut Check Thursday is you're going to bang out 15 air squats, then you're going to grab your bar and start rocking your power snatches. You're going to keep doing this every minute, 15 air squats, as many power snatches as you can until you've accumulated 100 power snatches at 75 or 55 pounds. Can't wait to see some of the post commit, I already saw one this morning, somebody said their low back was on fire, I'm sure that's the case, I can't wait to try it. Probably going to knock that out here on Saturday afternoon. Alright, as far as upcoming courses go, I want to highlight, speaking of power snatches, I want to highlight our Fitness Athlete Live courses because the ones that are coming up, I see those courses swelling. So Mitch is going to be in Bismarck, and that is going to be on 9-9. So that's in four weeks, a little over four weeks. That class is already pushing 30 people, we're about at capacity, so if you want to jump into Bismarck, you're going to need to probably do that in the next week or so. Similar story for Newark, California, Zach is going to be down there on October 7th, and again, I'm seeing that course edge towards capacity, so if you want to jump in Fitness Athlete Live, you're going to want to make that move pretty quick. We do have Linwood, Virginia following that, so it goes Bismarck, 9-9, it goes Newark, 9-30, it goes Linwood, Virginia, 10-7. If you want to jump into one of those courses, try to make it happen in the next week or so to make sure you get your seat. Alright, it is Leadership Thursday, but this one's a little bit more clinical, but I do think that it really revolves around leading people, so I think it's appropriate for this day of the week.

02:56 "DO MORE, BETTER"

I want to talk about doing it more, better sometimes. Now the obvious caveat we have to open with is the fact that we have preached do less better on this show, in this company, for the better part of a decade almost constantly, and there are good reasons for that because the majority of times, doing less better is what makes it work, is what makes for an efficient avail, is what allows you to know which intervention you did actually have the effect. If you're doing a million things with a small dosage, you have no clue what moved the needle. More importantly, your patient doesn't know, so they don't know what to focus on, they don't know what to attach their outcome to. If you're doing a ton of things, it gets messy, it lacks clarity, and it's very hard to get treatment effect. Additionally, it's very hard to give sufficient dose of anything if you're doing everything. Do less better is a hallmark statement and should generally be observed. The challenge I want to make for all of us, including myself this morning, is it always the case though? Is there sometimes, and there should be exceptions to all of this stuff, are there sometimes where overwhelm is exactly what the doctor ordered? Are there times we have to go big? Right now, what's very in vogue, and I generally like this, is things like don't do more than three exercises. There's actually a bit of research showing from a compliance perspective that statement makes sense. If you give somebody a whole laundry list of things to do, they're not going to do any of them. But it's not just exercise. We're hearing these comments around things like sleep hygiene. Don't try to make a bunch of changes, just make one. We hear it around diet. Don't change a ton of things, just start with one or two. I myself preach this all the time. Make it approachable, try to minimize barriers, just choose one or two. But I want us to pause for a second to make sure we don't just make this our default And think about when the opposite might make more sense.

06:30 MANAGING RELUCTANT PATIENTS

I want us to think about that reluctant encounter. What I mean is that person who comes into your clinic and you can tell they are really suspect, they're suspicious about whether or not this is really going to work. And you know this person. This is not the person who gets rehab consistently. It's not the person who's already bought into this being the primary treatment choice. It's the person who's like, I don't know about this. My doctor said come so I'm here, but I just don't know about this. Think about that person who's really reluctant. For some people, for that person in particular, this might be the only time that they're going to be in this stage where they're even considering this route. It's not the route they've used in the past. They're really unsure about it, but they've heard some good things. They were told to be here. It's a small window of opportunity. You might only get one at bat with this patient. You can all picture this person. You've got him on your caseload right now. You can just feel what their energy is. I don't know about this. I don't think this is going to get the job done. You might only get one shot at this person. And I want to make a two-part argument about how we manage this individual, especially at that first encounter, which might be the only encounter if things go wrong. The absolute worst outcome with that person is nothing. The absolute worst outcome is no change because it's kind of what they think is going to happen. This is a waste of my time. This isn't going to work. Getting no change is the worst possible outcome. The second argument I'll make is that while I totally agree, especially this person, won't do a bunch of things for a long period of time, they will not do the long litany of exercises, they won't make a million changes, they won't do those things for a long time, but I think they will do it for four or five days. I think they will make a really aggressive change because they're wondering if their time is being well spent. They almost want to prove it wrong sometimes. Like, see, it didn't work. While I don't think a long list of massive lifestyle or exercise changes is sustainable for that person long term, I do think they'll do it for a few days, especially if we tell them, hey, listen, this is not sustainable for a long period of time. What we're trying to see is if we can move this needle. So let's figure it out once and for all and right out of the gates. What if we go this route where we tell them, you don't have to do this for a long time, we're going to put all the guns on early, we're going to see if anything changes. If nothing changes with a high dose, we can both agree that this isn't going to work. But if something does change, what we can then do is begin to look at what you've got on the board and we can tease that down to the things that were the most manageable for you to alter. And that's the stuff that we can ride out into the sunset. Right. Then we can pare down the program. What I'm saying is, should we be asking a ton upfront, prove that change will happen with the highest dose that they can tolerate and then refine and make it sustainable? Should we be telling them, I'm going to ask you never to continue this, but I want to know if we can make a difference and then we'll choose the things that were the easiest for you to stay with. And that's going to be our long term program. It's not for everyone. It's not even for most.

08:38 SWING FOR THE FENCES

But on those people who are particularly doubtful that PT will work, I think we need to swing for the fences. And I'm bringing this episode to you because I've had numerous conversations recently with people who did the less better thing, right? Small changes that were easy for the patient that didn't do anything. Where the patient was like, I don't really think I felt a difference. That's fine. In someone who's committed to rehab being the solution, that is not fine. In someone who's testing you out to see whether or not they're wasting their time. On that second person, we need to identify them and say, look, they're only going to give us one chance. We don't need to make it sustainable. We need to make it noticeable. I want to say that one more time. In the highly speculative person, we don't need to make it sustainable. We can worry about sustainability later. We need to make it noticeable. We need to tell them what I'm about to ask is you're going to eliminate a bunch of stuff from your diet. You're going to change a bunch of things about your sleep environment. You are not going to have to maintain these long term. This is going to tell both of us if you're in the right spot. Once that person comes back and you've all had the person who's made really drastic diet changes, think about fasting or total sugar elimination. What do they come back and say? They say really drastic things like, my gosh, I feel less swollen all over my body. I had carpal tunnel as well and that feels better. I used to have headaches and now I don't. They tend to see things happen because they made such a drastic change to the ecosystem. In the unsure speculative patient, that is exactly what the doctor ordered because the number one goal with them is psychological. We've got to get them to believe, oh my gosh, this stuff can actually have an effect on my condition. Now the moment they realize that these are the things that I should be tweaking to make a change, now we alter that program to make it sustainable and do less better.

11:29 OVERCOMING PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS

But I am making a call to action on this episode that for the reluctant individual, for the person with the psychological barrier, doing more in the very short term to show them that what won't happen is nothing is the most important thing to get that initial piece of traction that allows you to then refine, pare down and make sustainable a program they now believe in. Give it some thought. Is there a place to go with overdoses, overwhelm, to shift psychology, to get that goal in mind and get that patient on board? I hope it makes sense. In general, I'm always going to believe in do less better but there are always exceptions and let's make sure that we're not letting a blanket statement prevent those people from moving in the right direction. Cheers everybody, PT on ICE.com, you know where the goods live. All of you at the CrossFit Games, good luck. Kelly Benfey, especially good luck. I hope the 64 Army crushes it this weekend. I will certainly be watching from right here. Cheers everybody, take care.

12:20 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on ICE Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review and be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ICE content on a weekly basis while earning Check out our virtual ICE online mentorship program at PT on ICE.com. While you're there, sign up for our Hump Day Hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to PT on ICE.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

Dr. Julie Brauer // #GeriOnICE // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Modern Management of the Older Adult lead faculty Julie Brauer discusses the idea that passion alone is not sufficient for thriving in a career. She mentions that while it is possible to sustain a career solely based on passion, it is not sustainable in the long run. Julie shares personal experiences and acknowledges that many colleagues and friends have also encountered this issue. She emphasizes the importance of considering the entire ecosystem, including supportive management, colleagues with similar philosophies, and a network of supportive friends, family, and partners. Without this support system, Julie warns that burnout is likely to occur and that the initial passion will start to diminish. The episode emphasizes the need for a supportive ecosystem, where managers value and understand the contributions individuals bring to their work. Julie also mentions the importance of growth and opportunities for advancement, as well as being surrounded by like-minded individuals who share a fitness-forward approach.

Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes.

If you're looking to learn more about live courses designed to better serve older adults in physical therapy or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 INTRO What's up everybody? Welcome back to the PT on ICE Daily Show. Before we jump into today's episode, let's chat about Jane, our show sponsor. Jane makes the Daily Show possible and is the practice management software that so many folks here at ICE utilize. The team at Jane knows how important it is for your patients to get the care they need. And with this in mind, they've made it really easy and convenient for patients to book online. One tip that has worked well for a lot of practices is to make the booking button on your website prominent so patients can't miss it. Once clicked, they get redirected to a beautifully branded online booking site. And from there, the entire booking process only takes around two minutes. After booking an appointment, patients get access to a secure portal where they can conveniently manage their appointments and payment details, add themselves to a waitlist, opt in to text and email reminders, and fill out their intake form. If you all are curious to learn more about online booking with Jane, head over to jane.app slash physical therapy. Book their one-on-one demo with a member of their team. And if you're ready to get started, make sure to use the code ICEPT1MO. When you sign up, that gives you a one-month grace period that gets applied to your new account. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy today's show.

01:43 JULIE BRAUER Good morning, crew. Welcome to the Geri on ICE segment of the PT on ICE Daily Show. I'm brought to you by the Institute of Clinical Excellence. My name is Julie. I am a member of the older adult division. Excited to talk to you all this morning about five things I've changed my mind about in Jerry PT over the past, I think it's like eight-ish years now of my career. So I actually have a list of like eight or nine. It keeps growing as I keep thinking about things, but I'm going to try and keep it to around five. And so my hope is that over the past eight years of all the mistakes I've made and the paths I went down and the things I've learned, I'm hoping that someone out there listening today, if I can inspire and encourage you to think a little bit differently, to do a little bit differently, if I can save you a little bit of heartache that I've experienced, then I will call this a 100% success. Okay, so these aren't necessarily in order of importance except this first one. So number one of five things that changed my mind about in Jerry rehab, changing settings will fix your burnout. Changing settings will fix your burnout. It will not. If you are in a situation where you feel really unhappy, you feel burnt out with the job that you currently have and the setting that you currently are in, please know that the grass is not always green around the other side. I promise it's not.

03:08 "CHANGING SETTINGS WON'T FIX BURNOUT"

It's not necessarily that changing settings is going to fix your burnout. Identifying why you are burned out and doing something about the root of the problem is going to fix your burnout. So I'm not going to get into this too, too deeply because I've done an entire podcast specifically talking about burnout and those of you who are thinking home health will fix that. So if you are interested in that specific podcast, send me a message and I will send you the link. But as an overview, I just want you all to know that you have to identify why first before you jump ship. So the why could be a multitude of different things. Is it truly that you are not passionate about an athletic population and you actually are passionate about a more acute, medically complex population of older adults? Is it that you really want flexibility in your schedule and you can't stand the back to back, the back to back schedule of inpatient rehab? You have to be able to verbalize and write these things down about why you are so burned out in your job.

04:51 BURNOUT IN DIFFERENT THERAPY SETTINGS

I spent many years starting out in acute care, getting burned out, thinking that I was going to love inpatient rehab. I was convinced I'm going to have more time with my patients. I'm going to be able to follow them. I'm going to be able to do higher level therapy with them. It's going to be so much better. I went into inpatient rehab. I absolutely hated it. And then I was like, all right, home health, total flexibility. I'm going to be able to see less patients a day. That's definitely going to be the setting for me. Nope, that wasn't it either. What I was doing is thinking that changing up setting was just what I needed to do. And in reality, for me, I came to the conclusion that full time clinical care is what was burning me out. It did not matter what the setting was. And I wish that I would have realized that very, very early on in this process. Now, I learned a lot and I'm really happy that I have experience in all of these settings. However, I could have been much further along in really dialing in what I want to spend my time and effort towards. If I would have thought of that earlier. So those of you that are really burned out, you're thinking about jumping ship. Don't do it. Start to really evaluate those things. Okay, next, you can give a really high quality session and a really efficient session without timing yourself. This is simple. No, you can't know. You absolutely cannot give a really high quality session that is also efficient unless you have yourself on a clock. For the entire session and truly throughout your entire day of doing your job. I think it's really hard because we go from PT school where all we have to do in a day is study, right? Like if our eyes are open, we are like, well, I have to learn the brachial plexus today. And that's all I have to do. So all I'm going to do is sit here for hours upon hours upon hours and study and memorize things from a book. And then we get into clinical and then we get into the real world where we have this thing called productivity. We have to meet while we are also trying to maintain our sanity. And all of a sudden, it is very overwhelming to try and bring quality at the same time as being efficient. So my call to action to you all is put a clock on yourself for your entire day. When you are with your patients, when you are not with your patients, it will change your life. I promise you when I started doing this in home health and you start this just like you start anything, like if you are starting to train for a race, for example, and you know you have to hit certain macros, you need to just start by tracking. What do you normally eat? How many calories are you actually bringing in? So you don't change anything at first. You just track. So you time yourself all of your breaks, your bathroom breaks, your snack breaks, your chatting with colleague breaks, the amount of time it takes you if you are in home health to drive to patient to patient, the amount of time that you are sitting in acute care at the desk and documenting. You time everything. In addition to how long you are actually spending with your patient and how long you are actually doing those subtitles of your session like education or neuromuscular read or gate training, whatever it is, you time everything. You will realize all of your inefficiencies. You will realize, wow, my hourly rate is actually crap. So when I timed myself when I was in home health, I timed everything. And I realized that if I was spending 60 minutes with the patient and I was actually hustling to get everything else done, calling doctors, etc, etc. I was making $40 an hour. Not ideal. Once I started timing myself and figuring out where I could cut, I went from $40 an hour to over $60 an hour. I have an entire podcast just on how to improve efficiency in home health. Again, if you were interested in that, message me and I'll send you the link. So again, my call to action for you all is use your phone. Your lap timer on your stopwatch is really helpful. Wear your Apple watch time every single thing. Start there, track it for a week, and then start chipping away at where you can cut places where you're really inefficient. Not only will you be able to give time back to yourself, which is what we want at the end of the day because taking care of humans all day is exhausting, but your patient sessions, you will get them so much more fit in so much less time. That's a win-win. So start timing yourself.

10:53 PT's DON'T NEED TO TAKE PATIENTS TO THE BATHROOM

All right, next. PTs don't need to take patients to the bathroom. PTs don't need to take patients to the bathroom. That is an OT's job. That is a nurse's job. That is a tech's job. Man, this is one thing that I may be like the most sorry about. What I feel so guilty about for years in my career is that I'm with the patients and I'm wrapping things up, right? I know that I want to get out that door so I can get to my next patient. I'm done. I've done my PT thing and they ask me to take them to the bathroom. It's that moment you're like, I really need to get out this door. And what would I say many times? You know what? OT is coming to see you later this afternoon. They will take you to the bathroom and work on toileting. Then for right now, I'm going to press that button and your nurse is going to come and take you to the bathroom. So many of you have been there. I know you are. I know you've done this. But guys, what do we know happens or not happens? We press that button. Nobody comes. Our patient is sitting there uncomfortable. They may not actually get to the bathroom for a very, very long time. What we know from the literature why we have to change our mind about this and start doing this differently is that many falls in acute care. A very high percentage of them happen in the bathroom. This is avoidable because what is happening? Our patients ring the bell. Nobody comes. And then they have the choice of urinating on themselves or continuing to, and sitting there and waiting or breaking the rules and trying to rush to the bathroom where maybe they're on pain meds, their balance is off, they slip, et cetera, et cetera. We need to realize that is our job. We are not above any freaking job when we are with those patients in acute care. They need their butt wiped. We wipe their freaking butt. That is our job. It is patient care. We are all in this together to get that patient out of this DM hospital and back to their life wiping their butt, taking it in the bathroom. That's included. The very basics of giving this dignity back to this human. It is not a particular person's job. And think about it, even from a self-serving perspective, how much information you learn from taking a patient to the bathroom. You are watching them transfer. It gives them motivation to get out of bed versus like, let's get out of bed and go on a walk and lift these weights, right? You get to see how their ambulatory capacity, right? You get to see their balance. You get to see their problem solving, their stand pivot, how they have e-central control getting down to that toilet. Are they able to problem solve how to sequence those steps? Can they grab the toilet paper? Do they know how to use it? You get so much valuable information. And maybe watching someone toilet and saying, I know that looks off. It seems like they don't know how to sequence this, but I don't know the language to put to it. And I don't, this isn't really something that I understand how to treat, right? Yes, your OT partners are going to be able to take that baton that you hand them after you give them an information. And they're going to be able to do a much better job in that specific task, right? It's collaboration. We need to be setting our patients up for success. Never, ever, ever, ever from today forward, please PTAs ever tell your patient, that is someone else's job, someone else's job. I'll go tell the nurse when I leave. It is your job. You should start planning for this in your sessions. Just give some time before you absolutely have to get out that door. Give five, six minutes to a lot for this patient needing to use the bathroom. It is your job. We are part of a team and you can prevent something drastic happening like falls or someone losing their dignity by literally having to urinate on themselves.

18:21 ALTERNATIVE HOME EXERCISE OPTIONS

Next, weights are the best pieces of equipment to initiate loading with older adults. Weights are the best pieces of equipment to initiate loading with older adults. Look, I love being able to get my older adults, especially those who are pretty medically complex and deconditioned, lifting weights, right? All of you all, this ice crew, your fitness forward, you are incredibly enthusiastic about this. However, if we focus too much on that, I think we can be actually increasing the barrier to loading versus decreasing it, which is our job. We need to realize that the best equipment older adults are using to introduce loading are not necessarily weights. The best equipment are the objects, the animals, the people, the boxes, whatever the odd things are that are in someone's life, an older adult's life, that they will lift, push, carry, pull, hinge. Those are the best pieces of equipment to introduce loading for an older adult. That may not be a weight ever, ever. If it is, amazing. I love it. Bonus points. The best equipment is the one that our patient is actually going to use. I love how enthusiastic we are. And if we can get our older adults lifting weights, wonderful. But ask yourself, like, is this sustainable? Is this only going to be something that they do with me? What am I doing to allow sustainability and longevity of loading with this older adult that they will continue to do after I am no longer caring for them? When our plan of care is over, have I decreased the entry point to loading so much that they have a technique that they can use on their own? Are they going to buy those weights off of Amazon that you've told them? Are they going to have a family member go and buy the dumbbells from Walmart? If they're not, then you better have another option. You better have something that they can use around their home that's less intimidating, that's cheaper, whatever it is. And not over here. Try to introduce the weights, but also give them something that's incredibly, incredibly convenient, right? Where you're decreasing the barrier of making the right choice, which is introducing loading, and we need to make it convenient. So I would argue that while I would bring weights in my backpack, walking around the hospital, I will bring weights in my trunk when I go to see my patients in home health. A resistance band, not a TheraBand, a rogue resistance band, many times was the best piece of equipment to introduce loading to an older adult. It's not intimidating. It's versatile. Not only can you use it to introduce loading and resistance, but I love to use those resistance bands for balance reactions. You can do a lot of perturbations with them. You can put them on the floor and use them as like an agility ladder. They are incredibly versatile. They're light. They're easy to carry around with you. Many older adults are not intimidated by them. Many times, a resistance band is the way to go. Many patients, I am not getting weights into their homes for these really sick folks in home health. It's just not going to happen. They're not going to make it there. So you need to make sure that you have something that is going to be practical for them and it's going to be sustainable. For me, it has been a resistance band. Give that some thought. Maybe go onto Amazon today when you're ordering your other stuff and getting your cart ready for Prime. Add a rogue or some other brand. It doesn't have to be rogue, but a actual resistance band to your cart. Okay. Last one here before we go.

23:53 SUPPORTIVE ECOSYSTEMS IN YOUR CAREER

Last one, most unpopular opinion. You can thrive in your career on passion alone. You can thrive in your career on passion alone. I don't think this is true. I have experienced, and I know many of you have experienced this, many of my dear friends and colleagues have experienced this, that you can survive in your career on passion alone, but it's not sustainable. You have to think of your entire ecosystem. If the only thing that is able to get you up and get you out of bed and get you going to your clinic, your hospital, your patient's home is that you love treating older adults. You love the relationships you build. You were so called to better serve this population. If that's it, if you do not have supportive management, if you do not have colleagues that think in the same way that you do and share your same philosophy, if you don't have supportive friends, family, partners, you are going to really start to burn out. That passion is going, that fire is going to start to diminish. It may not go out completely, but damn, it's going to be a lot harder to keep that going. It is absolutely critical that you are in a supportive ecosystem, that your managers value you. They understand the value that you're bringing. They offer you opportunities to grow and advance and to really stretch your skills that you are surrounded by other people who feel the same way, who want to charge forward with a fitness forward approach. You need to have friends and family and people that you're maintaining your relationships with, and they need to be supportive of what you're going after. You need to create that ecosystem. When you don't have that, I think so many, and I believe this for a long time, as much as I care about this mission, this thing, this job, older adults, as much as I care about it, it will be tempered. That fire will not burn as bright if we do not have the support from all those different parts of our ecosystem. It just gets to a point where maybe you're just running on fumes. Start to think about who your ecosystem is within your job, your managers, your colleagues. Do you have growth? Are you challenged? Are you very passionately connected to your team, to the mission, and about your personal relationships? How are they supporting you? How many individuals have you built up around you that are there to support you? Really start thinking about that. Okay, that's it. I think that was five. Just to review, five things I've changed, or maybe six, five things I've changed my mind about in Jerry Rehab. Changing settings will fix your burnout. You can be efficient and give a high quality session without timing yourself. PTs don't need to take patients to the bathroom. Weights are the best pieces of equipment to use to introduce loading to older adults. You can thrive in your career on passion alone. Five things I've had a massive, massive thought switch as I've gone through my career. Hopefully you all found some of those things to be really helpful. It gave you some things to think about. Please, if any of that spoke to you, do one thing today to change how you think or change what you do. To close this out, I will let you guys know what we have coming up in the older adult division. We have tons of courses. We are going to be in Lexington next weekend. That's our MMOA summit. The entire crew is going to be there. We get to check out Stronger Life with Jeff and Dustin. They're spot there. We absolutely can't wait. We are in Texas, Minnesota, and California for the rest of August. Then MMOA Central Foundations starts next Wednesday. One week from today, our online cohort starts. That cohort is filling up rather quickly. We took a little bit of a break in June and July. If you're interested in that course, I would not wait. I would get your ticket ASAP. All right, guys. Have a wonderful rest of your Wednesday.

25:49 OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on Ice Daily Show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. Be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ice content on a weekly basis while earning CUs from home, check out our virtual ice online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our hump day hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.