Strength In Knowledge

Nobody walks into their first clinical knowing everything. The students who grow fastest are the ones who stop acting like they should.

Dr. Sydney Williams joins us to break down the 10 tips she wishes she’d heard as a student. A sports certified, residency trained PT, Sydney started at Rehab 2 Perform as a tech and now leads student education across the company as Director of Student Experience.

What we cover:

• You’re allowed to be a student. Knowledge gaps aren’t the problem. Hiding them is. How CIs build psychological safety so students keep asking questions.
• Clinicals don't always have to be an audition. Confidence is built through reps and feedback, not brought in on day one. Your CI evaluates professional behavior, not personality.
• Knowing the what vs. knowing the why. Two post-op ACL patients, same quad weakness, different plans. How to ask questions that show your reasoning instead of asking for the answer.
• You don’t need your career figured out. Why exploring settings beats locking in early, and why your behind-the-scenes uncertainty shouldn’t be measured against someone else’s highlight reel.
• Where to start. Self-reflect, pick one tip, and work on it today.

The goal of PT school isn’t to graduate as the perfect physical therapist. It’s to graduate ready to keep becoming one.

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Sydney Williams

ACL rehab doesn’t end when your quad strength hits a number. That’s where it starts getting real.

Dr. Kevin McNamara joins us to break down why basic testing criteria are not enough to send an athlete back into a sport that demands braking, cutting, and reacting. 

What we cover:

• Rethinking ACL rehab. A recent article on curve decelerations and knee kinetics shows that changing movement strategy changes knee loading. Range of motion and quad strength alone won’t prepare an athlete for sport-representative environments.
• What late-stage rehab actually needs. Braking capacity, rate of force development, eccentric strength, and exposure to reactive, unpredictable movement.
• His late-stage testing battery. Isometric dynamometry for peak torque and rate of torque development, plus isokinetic testing. Drop jumps and countermovement jumps unloaded and loaded at 30% and 60% body mass to catch eccentric deficits. The 505 test to evaluate high-speed braking.
• The limits of LSI. It got us away from time-based clearance, but it measures symmetry, not preparedness. Build the full physical profile instead.
• Psychological readiness. Trust and confidence are built across the entire rehab process, not screened for at the end. Return to sport means high-risk environments, so the day-to-day process is what prepares them.

If you rehab athletes, this is the standard to build toward.

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Dr. Kevin McNamara

Article Referenced

Galmiche L, Kersting UG, Bill K. Curved decelerations result in greater frontal-plane knee loading than straight-line tasks. Knee. 2026;62:104534. doi:10.1016/j.knee.2026.104534

Travel PT is the fastest way to find out what kind of clinician you are. Most new grads jump in blind.

Dr. Payne Harrison explains how to do it right. In this episode, we break down what a travel PT career actually looks like, from contract math to holding your clinical standards in clinics that don't share them. 

What we cover:

• Staff first or travel first. A year as a staff PT buys you mentorship and a slower caseload ramp. New grads can still make travel work if finances or goals demand it, but the lack of onboarding hits hard.
• How to evaluate a contract. Target $2,000+ per week, then factor in housing costs, state income tax, and reimbursements for licensure and moving.
• What to ask before you sign. Patient volume, onboarding, documentation systems, and protected documentation time. Compare 401(k) match timelines too, since some agencies match 4% immediately and others make you wait 6 to 12 months.
• You are never locked in. Switch agencies between 13-week contracts.
• Keeping your standards on the road. Active care, strength and conditioning, and education over modalities and passive treatment. Plus how to adapt from young athletes to older post-op patients, and how to track progress with baseline tests like the 30-second sit-to-stand and plank holds when the clinic has no high-tech equipment.

If you're weighing travel PT or already on the road, this is the playbook.

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Dr. Payne Harrison

Isokinetics isn't the dusty lab equipment you remember from school. It's a clinical weapon most PTs never learn to use.

In this episode, John Allan Furgeson, DPT sits down with Dr. Daniel Bodkin to break down why isokinetic testing and treatment deserve a real spot in your return-to-sport protocol, not a footnote.

What we cover:

• Why functional tests alone miss what isokinetics catches. Hop tests and force plates can't isolate a muscle group or expose a concentric-eccentric deficit. Isokinetics can.
• How a full testing battery, not a single test, cuts re-tear rates in returning athletes.
• If you don't have this equipment in-house, build a relationship with a clinic that has it and get access to data your competitors can't offer.
• Treatment applications beyond testing. Multi-angle isometrics, slow eccentrics, high-speed training, and the crossover effect for training the uninvolved limb.
• The business case. Advanced equipment isn't just clinical capability, it's a referral magnet. Free tests for local physicians and teams build trust and convert to patients, including the hard cases other facilities gave up on.

If you're serious about return-to-sport outcomes and building a practice that stands out, this is required listening.

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Dr. Daniel Bodkin

Most clinicians wait too long to introduce sprinting mechanics in rehab, then wonder why the jump to full speed feels like zero to a hundred.

John Allan Furgeson, DPT, sits down with Dr. Azita Nejaddehghan to break down how to scale acceleration and deceleration work down to technical, low-load pieces early in the rehab process instead of saving them for the final phase. Sprinting phases can be trained at submax-effort while isolating movement patterns and muscles before getting back to max-effort sprints. 

What they cover:

• Why deceleration training and eccentric strength work are not the same thing, and how to train deceleration early using yielding and overcoming isometrics
• How to isolate sprint phases like late swing to prove to an athlete their body can tolerate the pattern before testing max effort
• Matching objective testing with visual observation to find the real rate-limiting deficit, strength, confidence, or something else entirely
• Why an experienced athlete's subjective feedback on compensation is an underused diagnostic tool
• The control-to-chaos continuum: moving return-to-sport from anticipatory to reactive, individual to team, closed to open
• Why every clinician should get on the field and sprint and cut themselves before programming it for someone else

Rehab doesn't fail at max effort. It fails months earlier, when nobody trained the pattern at all.

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Dr. Azita Nejaddehghan

Rigid periodization plans die the moment a season starts. This coach provides us his tips and tricks for building this into his athlete's program. 

John Allan Furgeson, DPT sits down with Coach Matt Schuler, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at McDaniel College, to break down what a provider-led, athlete-first training model actually looks like in practice. Not a philosophy. An operational framework: a long conjugate sequential model that develops multiple qualities at once, shifting focus week to week based on what the team needs, not what a template says.

What's cover:

• Why rigid long-term plans fail athletes in-season
• The long conjugate sequential model behind his offseason programming
• How Reps in Reserve lets a freshman and a senior train the same program at different intensities
• Why he trains entire teams together instead of individualizing everything
• Olympic lifts vs. loaded jumps, and how training age decides the answer
• His advice for young coaches who want to actually last in this field

Great programming isn't a plan you protect. It's a system flexible enough to survive the season when things start to stray from the norm.

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Coach Matt Schuler

Private equity doesn't have to be the villain of healthcare, but it changes the math. When non-providers start running provider spaces, the metrics shift from patient outcomes to productivity targets, and staff feel that pressure first.

In this episode, John Allan, DPT sits down with Dr. Josh Funk, CEO of Rehab 2 Perform, to break down what a provider-led alternative actually looks like in practice. Not a mission statement. An operational framework: an 80/20 rule where 80% of capacity goes to production and 20% is protected on purpose for staff wellness, collaboration, and continuing education.

What they cover:

• Why private equity ownership shifts incentives away from patient care
• The 80/20 rule behind a provider-led business model
• The metrics that matter more than revenue: net promoter score, staff retention, patient outcomes
• Balancing consumer and clinician branding during expansion
• Why every clinician needs basic business literacy, and what it unlocks
• The importance of asking questions

Growth means nothing if it costs the people delivering the care. This episode highlights how to build it differently.

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Dr. Josh Funk

Most clinicians think about return to sport as the finish line. What gets missed is everything that happens before that — the off-season decisions, the testing philosophy, and the role clarity that actually determines whether an athlete comes back stronger. In this episode, John Allan, DPT sits down with Dr. Alex Hubelbank, DPT, ATC, CSCS, to break down what elite-level rehab and performance really looks like inside professional sports.

What they cover:

• How the line between PT, athletic training, and strength & conditioning is based on role, not skill — and where that breaks down
• Why staying off the court matters: using GPP and unrelated movement skills, like hand-fighting or dance, to build capacity without repetitive load
• How to structure a 4-5 month off-season into phases, from lowest-hanging fruit to sport-specific prep
• Why testing every 4-6 weeks beats chasing constant data, and the question to ask before every test: am I testing for me, or for their care plan?
• Reading context — sleep, nutrition, life stress — before deciding whether a testing day is even worth running
• Building trust and credibility with professional athletes when the stakes, and the scrutiny, are highest

If you've ever wondered what separates a good off-season from a great one, this episode reframes how elite performance is actually built, one deliberate decision at a time.

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Dr. Alex Hubelbank

Most clinicians focus on what they do to a patient. What they miss is everything happening before that ever starts. In this episode, John Allan, DPT sits down with Dr. Katie Dabrowski, co-owner of Old Bull Athletics and neuroscience faculty at Nova Southeastern University, to break down the controllable factors that shape a patient's nervous system, and why performance-focused rehab beats the standard model. What they cover:

• How the clinical environment itself raises or lowers threat before a single exercise happens
• Why "convincing" a patient they're wrong about their pain backfires, and what to do instead
• The two-question filter for every intervention: is it changing physiology, and is it changing psychology?
• Why ice and prolonged passive treatment fail to prepare athletes for the demands of return to sport
• How to choose objective tests that actually mean something instead of chasing data for its own sake
• Reading a patient's confidence and fear without asking them to spell it out for you
• How to shape a patient's perception of rehab before they ever walk through the door

If you've ever wondered why two patients with the same injury heal at completely different rates, this episode reframes what actually drives outcomes, and why it starts long before the first rep.

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Dr. Katie Dabrowski

Most clinicians treat a concussion and move on. What they miss is what happens next. In this episode, John Allan, DPT sits down with Dr. Olivia Abdoo, DPT, SCS, CPSS, CSCS to break down one of the most underrecognized findings in sports medicine: athletes who sustain a concussion are 58% more likely to suffer a lower extremity injury. That number demands a framework shift.

What they cover:

• Why neurological healing extends well beyond the standard 7-day return to sport protocol
• How concussion disrupts muscle activation, force output, movement patterns, and dual task performance
• The integrated systems framework and what it means for lower body injury risk
• Why sport-specific activity is the best neurocognitive rehabilitation available
• How to match rehab to the athlete's energy system profile rather than generic aerobic protocols
• Interval training as the most effective tool for assessing and rehabilitating the autonomic nervous system
• The 10 to 14 day window of vulnerability and how to navigate return to play within it
• Domains of concussion presentation: vestibular, ocular, autonomic, cervical, cognitive, and affective

If you work with athletes in any capacity, this episode reframes what concussion recovery actually requires and why the lower body is part of the conversation from day one.

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Dr. Olivia Abdoo