Although we love our job as physical therapists, we don’t wanna see you injured. We feel like we’re doing our community a better service if we’re able to educate you and help you understand how you can prevent, mitigate these injuries as much as possible. This information is not only helpful for injury assessment or prevention, but it’s also helpful for your coaches or you as an individual so you can see where your performance deficits lie, and you can specifically work on those. We can tailor a customized. A performance plan for you so that you can specifically work on things that you may have, uh, deficits in, and, um, really use that to improve.

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 f.

Welcome to the podcast, everyone. Today I wanted to talk with you all about how we’re using technology in our practice to better serve our community and the local high schools around us. I recently had a young lady. Approached me about helping her with a project that she has at school, and we sat down last fall and planned this out, and I wanted to share this with you because I wanted to give you some insight into how we’re serving our community, how we’re involved, and how we want to use technology in our practice to analyze movement patterns and analyze different athletic tasks so that we can make sure that there are no asymmetries in our athletes that could. End up being a problem when they return to sport or when they’re in season and maybe they have fatigue effects. So we, we use this technology called Vault four decks. And the Vault four deck are force plates and they’re force platforms that we use to measure different athletic movement tasks in order to determine if there’s any asymmetry in the ability to produce or absorb force. And we look at these different tests and measures to determine. If there’s any red flags essentially in these movement patterns so that we can help identify injury risk potential and also help the athlete determine what they need to do in order to mitigate or avoid this risk. So this young lady and I met last fall and we, she had an idea because she values dry needling so highly and it’s really helped her in her overall athletic recovery process. Her idea was to determine if there were any effects of dry needling on overall recovery and performance. So in order to keep it relatively simple in the clinic, what we decided to do was to analyze the effects of dry needling on performance measures before and after dry needling. So the overall design of the study was that we took. 10 lacrosse players from a local high school, and half of them did dry needling and half of them didn’t. So before the dry needling intervention, we had these 10 athletes come in and do performance testing with our vault force deck force plates. So we had the athlete do a five minute warmup on the bike, and then we had them do five trials of each movement task that we wanted them to complete on the force plates. So the three tests that we chose to do were the isometric mid thigh pull, the counter movement jump, and a drop jump. And we’ll go into more detail about that in a second. But what we did was we tested them with the force plates and then immediately after half of them got the dry needling intervention. Then we dry needle, quads, hamstrings, and calves on five out of the 10 individuals who we were testing. Uh, individuals then came back five days later and repeated the test. Another thing that we did is on a visual analog scale, we had their measure, their perceived level of soreness or pain before dry needling intervention and before the testing, and then also after dry needling at the second follow-up test. So this is a project that we did with this local high school, and it was super fun. Some of the things that we really wanted to do here at Vic PT M performance is support not only our clients, but also support the local high schools and coaches and parents, and help them understand how we’re using technology in our practice to better serve our athletes and their team. Help prevent injury as much as we can. It’s not a hundred percent. We can’t prevent all injuries, but one of our goals is to help mitigate that risk for you as much as possible. So let’s dive in a little bit to the different test measures that we were using with the Vault Force Deck. Wanted to talk first about the Counter Movement jump and give you a little idea. For those of you who don’t know what it is, the Counter Movement jump is just a simple. Practical and valid way to measure lower body power. It’s considered a a cornerstone test, if you will, for many strength and conditioning coaches and sports scientists because it has been shown to be the most reliable measure of lower body power compared to other jump tests. It also has been shown to have relationships with sprint performances, such as the one rep max strength and explosive strength test. That counter movement jump tests are linked with max speed. Max strength and explosive strength. Why do we choose a counter movement jump test? I felt like it was a good test to use to determine their overall max strength and power and be able to look at right leg versus left leg and how much power they’re able to generate and absorb through the right leg versus the left leg and determine any, uh, movement asymmetry. So that was one test that we chose and it went really well. We didn’t have a lot of issues with. The girls having difficulty with the task and it went very speedily. The second test that we did was a isometric mid thigh pull test, so I wanted to talk with you all about why we chose that and what that is. If you’re not aware of that. The isometric mid thigh pull test is a reliable way to test max strength in youth and adult athletes. In this case, we were testing high school athletes, and the literature has suggested that performance variables from the isometric mid thiel test. Correlate to athletic movements such as the vertical jump in sprint speed. It’s also a easier and safer, more time efficient way than to test the one rep max, as I mentioned, with the counter movement test, and it is a multi-joint exercise, essentially designed to assess the strength and force production capabilities of an athlete’s entire body. So I thought it would be a good way to look at overall muscle recovery. Effects potentially from dry needling, and so it just requires the athlete to pull on a fixed barbell with a max effort of five seconds. We did this with them standing on the force plate so we can look at peak force, relative force and rate of force development and time to peak force, et cetera. There’s a lot of variables that we can look at with the isometric mid thigh pull test, and so why is that important? That test assesses performance qualities that are critical to most sporting activities such as strength and power. Definitely lacrosse involves sprinting a lot of change in direction, and so we look at those strength measures with the counter movement jump and can look at overall dynamic strength index and look at their overall explosive power and look at that force over time. It’s an important test performance test measure. That is one of the cornerstones for overall performance assessment. And so we wanted to pick tests that were really reliable and valid and also not overly complicated for these athletes to perform. The last test that we looked at was the drop temp test, so we’re looking at Reactive Strength Index with that test, and the reactive strength index was developed to measure the reactive jump capacity of athletes and determine how they. Cope with stress cope imposed on their body from tric type exercises. So reactive strength is related to change of direction, acceleration, speed, and even agility. We wanted to bring in a test in this process for these lacrosse players that could look at these types of measures and the reactive strength, because lacrosse does involve a lot of quick acceleration and change of direction and speed. One of the most common tests used for this is the drop jump test. With the drop jump test or reactive strength index, we’re looking at ground contact time. We’re looking at rate of force development, max strength, reactive strength, and we think that can correlate with overall skill, performance, and quickness on the field with lacrosse. Those are the three, three tests that we chose to use for the, uh, pre and post test. And then the intervention that we chose was dry needling. So I just wanted to talk with you guys about what that looked like on the day of testing and how we coordinated that in our clinic and why that’s important to us. So we had athletes come in on Monday morning on President’s Day and had time slots set aside for each athlete. Um, they came in, they filled out the visual analog scale, and then they did the warmup on the bike and we took them through the force plate testing. And then immediately after the dry needling and the whole process just went very smoothly because we had everything very organized and set up from the start. We had girls who were waiting in our practice just were able to talk, get to see our practice, get to know us a little bit better. So it was a really nice way to involve them in our new space, and they got to see the space and to meet us if they hadn’t met us before. So it was just a super fun time and the girls got to learn more about. How they can go through these tests is determine if they have any asymmetries. And I just think it was a really effective way to not only connect with these athletes, but also show them the importance of force plate testing and how that can transition into injury prevention and recovery strategies. The overall goal was to, for the study was just, just look at the interventional effects of dry needling. It’s just gonna be really fun to look at the data and analyze it and see what we find, uh, the reason why we’ve. Put so much importance in technology and using these Vault four decks, for instance, in our practice is because we, um, really want to be state of the art in the way that we’re assessing athletic movement and athletic tasks so that you can have the most information possible, uh, when you’re here in our practice, to be able to draw from, to determine what asymmetries you may have in. Your reactive strength index or your ability to produce force and how that carries over onto the basketball court or the soccer field or the track. We wanna give you as much information as possible so that you understand why your injury may have occurred, or if you don’t have an injury, how to prevent that from happening so you don’t have to be injured to come into our practice. That’s one thing we want you to know because we have a lot of tools to be able to do. Preseason testing, for example, which is very valuable for not only you but your coaches so that you can determine, you know, hey, does your right, um, leg not, um, produce enough force as you’re doing a single leg hop test. Or if you do a drop jump test, is that right leg not able to absorb or control as much force or not produce as much force as well? So it’s just way to objectively test and, and find out where you’re at and this will. Serve you well, and not only in terms of enhancing your performance, but also helping you get through the season injury free. Although we love our job as physical therapists, we don’t wanna see you injured. We feel like we’re doing our community a better service if we’re able to educate you and help you understand how you can prevent and mitigate these injuries as much as possible. And this, this information is not only helpful for injury. Assessment or prevention, but it’s also helpful for your coaches or you as an individual, so you can see where your performance deficits lie, and you can specifically work on those. We can tailor or customize a performance plan for you so that you can specifically work on things that you may have, uh, deficits in, and, um, really use that to improve. Enhance your overall sports performance. And so it’s really fun for us. We are constantly trying to learn and, and become more innovative in our practice, and this is one of the things that we’ve been able to implement in our practice and it goes way back. I started physical therapy school in 1996. From 1996 to 1999. I was able to utilize technology early on in my master’s level program in physical therapy to assess. Collegiate basketball players, and we used force plates in that study, high speed video analysis in a lab type setting. So that’s where my interest first started with all of this. And then in my doctoral level program. Again, use force platforms, high speed video analysis to assess collegiate basketball players to determine their ability to perform certain athletic movement tasks. That’s where my experience lies and that’s where my passion is because I think you guys have heard me say on the podcast in 1993, I tore my ACL my freshman year in college. So that was a big deal. Um, a lot of last time from sport. It was hard. So my passion and goal has always been to help identify factors and mitigate injury risk. So that you don’t have to go through that yourself, if at all possible. So the passion continues. I’m, I’m now doing this, it’ll be 25 years in June that I’ve been a physical therapist, and the passion continues to help figure out ways that we can do this better as physical therapist. And you have our wording commitment that. We as physical therapists at F Physical Therapy and sports performance are always on the cutting edge of innovation and figuring out ways to help you become a better athlete and become better at helping identify ways in which you can improve your overall sports recovery and hopefully. Decrease that injury risk. With all of that being said, spring sports are coming up right now. We’ve got soccer, lacrosse, track and field baseball. We’ve got off season football so much going on at the local high schools, and we, um, are here in your community as a trusted resource to help you identify anything that could be, um, a factor in limiting your performance or, um, maybe a potential injury. Risk factor that you didn’t know about. If I can just say it again, you don’t have to be injured to come into our practice. In fact, we’d rather you not be injured at all. But we have the means and the tools necessary to do preseason screening here. We want you to be. Involved in that, and we want you to feel like we are your trusted source in the community to be able to do those sorts of things. We have a few classes coming up and I’ve mentioned them in the last few podcasts, but I think this does tie into what I was just saying about force play testing. One of the classes that we come have coming up is a run strong class and a six weeks to Bulletproof attendance, and one of the things that we’re gonna be doing in that class on day one is performance testing. A few of your athletes has a concern about. Potential injury risks or wanna look at overall performance measures before you start your spring season sports. I highly recommend that you get involved in this six week training program. We will look at your overall performance assessment before and after that six week period of time, and we’ll be teaching you tools and strategies that you can implement in order to help improve your overall strength and power. And I think you’ll see. A positive effect from this training program based on the objective measures that we’re going to be testing with these force plates and with this technology that I was just mentioning. We’re just really grateful to be able to partner with different high schools coaches, athletic trainers, parents. Athletes. So stay tuned for more updates from our clinic and how we use technology and innovation to better serve you and better serve our community.