It can be very overwhelming. As a parent. There’s so many things pulling us in different directions, especially this time of year around the holidays. And so as I reflect on this topic, I think one of the things that really comes to mind first is that as parents, we just need to be present and available to check in with our athletes to just see how they’re feeling, to see how things are going, their recovery process is going, if they have any aches and pains, and just start the dialogue and start the communication with them. So they feel comfortable talking with you to tell you if anything’s going on before it becomes a major issue.

Welcome to the PT Rebels Podcast.

This is the place to learn how you can become a PT rebel and take charge of your own health and wellness. We will help you find answers to your questions about pain, injury, and the path towards healing in the most efficient and effective way possible.

I’m your host, Dr. Gina Fick.

On today’s episode, I wanted to talk with you all about how we can best support parents of junior high and high school athletes who are involved in you, the competitive sports, and how we can create a partnership and alliance with the athlete parents and coaches to optimize injury management. Sports recovery and wellness. The goal of this podcast today is that we want to help parents better understand the process of physical therapy and how they can best support their athletes. As a physical therapist, for almost 25 years now, I’ve had a lot of clinical experience and also as a parent, I’m an athlete who has undergone physical therapy, and so I feel like I have a lot of insight. A lot of wisdom to share in this area about how parents can best partner with my physical therapist to really get optimal results. One of the first things I wanted to talk about is how you can be present and available to communicate with your athlete. In today’s busy world, I know myself, it becomes very difficult for me to communicate with teachers, coaches, different healthcare providers, everything. There’s so much going on. It can be very overwhelming as a parent to try to. Be present. Sometimes there’s so many things pulling us in different directions, especially this time of year around the holidays. And so as I reflect on this topic, I think one of the things that really comes to mind first is that as parents, we just need to be present and available to check in with our athletes. Just, just see how they’re feeling, to see how things are going not only in their sport, but how they feel like their recovery process is going. If they have any aches and pains and just start the dialogue and start the communication with them. So if they feel comfortable talking with you to tell you if anything’s going on before it becomes a really major issue. I know myself, I’ve had these conversations with our son who’s a competitive track and field athlete. I always say, please tell me if there’s anything going on. You’re not complaining. I just need to know. If you feel something, then we can go ahead and work on it and get that out of the way so that it doesn’t become a bigger problem. Then in that communication you can also talk with them about how they can relay the messages to their coaches or athletic trainers at their schools so that they can get those little aches and pains or nagging injuries taken care of Initially. It’s very helpful to be able to talk with parents over the phone before their athletes come in. If you do feel like your athlete is experiencing an issue, please just call us, text us. We’re the subject matter experts in this area. We can take that worry off your plate and just help you navigate this process. So please communicate with us before your athlete comes in. If it’s an initial evaluation, we want to talk with you about what your athlete has reported to you, what they seem to be struggling with. We wanna have that detailed communication with with you before the athlete comes in. Sometimes we have athletes who just schedule online themselves. We really like that they have that independence, but we also want to hear from the parent because you guys are the ones that are there with them on at home. We wanna get your perspective before they come in for that inertial visit. We also want you to talk with your athlete before you come in about the first appointment. We want you guys to prepare some questions to ask us before that visit so that it becomes a very valuable experience, uh, at that first visit and very valuable communication process between. Of us, between you as a parent, the athlete, and us as physical therapist. The next thing I would recommend is that you show up to the first appointment. Again, we have athletes who are very independent, which we like, but we want the parent to be a partner in this, and we would love for you to show up at the first visit. There’s things that can get miscommunicated, misunderstood, and as you’re there at the first visit, it becomes. Much easier for us to create a nice therapeutic alliance with everyone involved, and it allows your athlete to communicate his or her thoughts so that everyone is on the same page when you go home. What tends to happen is if you’re not present at that first evaluation, that athlete goes home and tries to communicate that to their parent or to the coaches, and a lot can just get misconstrued or misunderstood in that process. If you can please show up to the first visit. So that we can start that dialogue and get an understanding of your story from the beginning. I think one of the things that can be most valuable is at that initial evaluation when you’re there with your athlete. I would recommend that you allow your athlete to communicate his or her thoughts without interruption, even if you disagree, try to save the comments or questions to the end. And allow your athlete to feel free to communicate his or her thoughts or feelings and to describe their pain or issues without your interruption. I know it can be very frustrating as parents when you sit there and you hear a completely different story than what your athlete’s been telling you at home, and so it’s easy to. To throw your hands up in the air, shake your head, or to make some sounds of frustration. I completely understand. I’m a mom of four children, three of which are teenage boys. So trust me when I say I understand. But I would recommend that you let them learn how to communicate and express their feelings. So the healthcare providers, because this becomes a very valuable skill as they move from. Use sports to high school sports, to collegiate sports, and maybe even professional sports. It allows them to really understand what it is to feel empowered with their healthcare provider and to encourage them to communicate well and effectively with them. Another thing that I would recommend is you give the physical therapist the opportunity to ask questions to your athlete without an interruption. This helps the physical therapist initiate the start of this healthy relationship with your athlete and lets the athlete or your child describe in his or her her own words what is bothering them and how they feel like this is affecting them. We do recommend that you listen to your child and try to get a sense of how this is really affecting them. I’ve noticed when we get parents and children into a treatment room. We noticed that we learned a lot during that session. Really listen to what your child is trying to communicate to the physical therapist, how the injury is affecting them, maybe frustrations that they’re having with their coaches, with their team, with their athletic trainers, possibly at school. Listen to how this could be affecting them psychologically, not only physically, and sometimes you’ll really learn a lot of things that they didn’t tell you. I think that’s more often true than not about how this is really affecting them. We also want you to ask questions after your athlete is finished talking to the physical therapist. We really do want to hear from you. We want you to ask questions. We want you to be involved. The physical therapist will go through an interview process initially and they’ll, they’ll move into a and objective evaluation where they look at range of motion and physical strength, any asymmetries that your athlete may have. They’ll watch them run on a treadmill. They’ll watch them jump watch, do various types of assessments to have a better idea of their overall function. And during the hands-on process portion of the evaluation, try not to hover over the physical therapist and just let the mechanic diagnose the issue. So when you take your car in, usually you drop your car off. You let the mechanic look your car over in great detail. Then giving assessment of what’s wrong. What I’ve noticed to be most effective is when you give the physical therapist and athlete time this time to objectively assess what’s going on in terms of their mobility, their function, how that affects them pain wise. And we have a much better assessment of what’s going on as we move from the objective portion of the evaluation into the assessment phase where we’re telling you what we think. As the pain generator, what we think the overall recovery time will be, what recommended exercises we have, what recommendations we have for training what, uh, and for the coaches, we want you to be very involved in this process. Please ask questions, be involved during this time, and if you don’t understand something, let us go over it again and let us help you clearly understand the best path for your athlete moving forward in terms of. Injury management or recovery. I think it becomes effective when you can discuss with your child how you plan to partner with them in this recovery process as well. So I love when parents take it all in and listen and ask questions, and then have a dialogue with their athlete about how they’re gonna move forward and how they will help them in the recovery process. We also find it very helpful when you help to bridge the gap of communication with the coaches and athletic trainers. So. We love to have their contact information when you share that with us so that we can also reach out to them to create a strong and solid therapeutic alliance with the coaches and athletic trainers. We don’t want there to be gaps in communication, so we want to make sure that everyone is on board with the play and everyone understands what the issues are, and everyone understands how we can best move forward. In terms of follow-up treatment, one thing that we found most effective. Is that when the parent steps back and observes the treatment session from afar and lets the athlete and physical therapist communicate and work together during that hour long session or 30 minute session, it becomes more effective than if the parent is going from exercise to exercise with the physical therapist and with the athlete. That can be distracting. And so we usually ask that parents just take a step back. We want you to watch, we want you to feel like you’re welcome, but we also wanna make sure that the. Athlete and the physical therapist have time to communicate. The therapist has the space and time to assess what’s going on during each exercise that the athlete is doing so that we can get proper feedback during that time. And then at the end of the session, we will let you know how we feel like the session with upcoming goals, new exercises that we’ve given the athlete moving forward, and if there’s any information that they need to communicate to coaches or athletic trainers that week. We also communicate that to the parent, so we absolutely like for you to be involved after the treatment session, either in the car, on the way home or maybe at home. We encourage you to offer listening ear to your athlete and encourage them to be open and honest with you about how they feel like their physical therapy session is going, where they feel like their deficits lie, or where their frustrations are. We want you to encourage them to speak up. If there’s certain treatment or strategy that we’re using in the clinic that they’re not happy about. We really want you to encourage them, and we really want you to encourage the athlete to have that talk with us so that we can offer alternatives, treatments. There’s so many different things that we can do, the strategies that we can offer in recovery, but if we don’t know that there’s an issue, it’s hard for us to change that or to go a different path. So. Please encourage them to talk to us and let us know those things. Another thing I’d like to mention is do encourage wellness, treatment and services, even if they don’t have an active injury. And what that means is encourage them to participate in active recovery sessions. We have a active recovery class or runners, for instance, once a week. They’re very low cost. They’re in a group setting with people who do the same activities as they do. It’s fun for them. And then they also get ideas for recovery that will help keep them healthy. So if they can be proactive, it’s really helpful and helps prevent future frustrations and injuries down the road. Other wellness services could include strength therapy or massage Could be one-on-one or group training. If they feel like they’re lacking in strength in certain areas or skills, we can work with them to help. Give them more confidence in strength and help their overall sports performance, not only so they can prevent injury, but they can feel healthy and confident on the field or on the track or on the court. Those are important and key things that you can discuss with them to see how their sports recovery process is going, even if they don’t have an injury. One update that we have with their current practice is that we’re moving from a 952 square foot facility to a 4,300 square foot facility, and what that does is it provides us so much more space and opportunity to better serve our clients. So we’re gonna be offering more one-on-one and small group classes for active recovery and strength training. We’re gonna offer mobility and stretch classes, as well as one-on-one stretch sessions and massage therapy. We’re gonna offer so many more things to bring holistic wellness and community in our clinic, and that’s really the vision for Shake PT and performance moving forward is we want a community of people who feel very safe, who have fun in our practice, who come in, even if they’re not injured. And want to work on their overall wellness. We want to encourage overall atmosphere of wellbeing. We want this to be a place that you can come from start to finish and be a part of our unique and specialized community, tailored at helping you stay active and healthy for life.