How To Manage An Athlete’s Injury Regardless Of The Restrictions By Learning First Principles-Thinking

One of the biggest challenges of being a sports rehabilitation professional is the fact that athletes dealing with injury often have varying levels of restrictions which makes scalable programming a difficult task.

This can leave practitioners can too caught up in specifics relating to injury that makes program design a time-consuming task. What if there were bigger pillars to address in the delivery of a rehabilitation program? Ones that actually can help guide the rest of your interventions?

This is where most practitioners fall down, they focus too much on the “magic exercise” in a rehabilitation program that they lose track of how to develop a long term plan to the athlete and give every exercise in the program meaning.

This module is designed to redirect your focus as a rehab professional to some key foundations that will allow you to know that the plan and program you develop is effective and won’t drain our most valuable resource as coaches, time…

In this module you will learn:

– How to create a framework for developing rehabilitation timelines and phases.
– How to structure a rehabilitation session.
– How to classify an athlete into a specific rehabilitation phase.
– How to apply a progression/ regression based model in a rehabilitation setting.

The Critical Transition That Gets Athletes Off The Bed & Onto The Gym Floor

Often athletes are kept at the plinth far longer than they should be and sheltered away from loading that is necessary in building the foundations for returning to running and ultimately the sport they love.

Transitioning an athlete into the gym can be a challenging task and with many different physical capacities to address it is easy to miss the mark in optimally preparing an athlete for returning to run.

This phase often dictates whether the athlete is going to have a smooth journey upon returning to the paddock or one that will be full of ups and downs, progressions and regressions and will either make your life as the rehab
professional smooth sailing or a constant headache. For that reason, it is crucial that we get this phase right.

In this module you will learn:

– How to safely implement a continuum of gait restoration drills to bridge the gap between the day the athlete steps into your clinic or gym to the first day they step back on the field or court.
– Understand why strength takes so long to build post ACLR and how to combat the specific deficits related to graft implantation.
– What testing battery to use to develop a sound physical profile, regardless of your budget.
– Optimising your strength programming to overcome the deficits related to surgically driven atrophy and donor site considerations.
– How to optimally overcome arthrogenic muscle inhibition and regain hypertrophy in the rehabilitation context.

This Is How The Pros Do It

Rehab running is more than a few drills scribbled onto a sheet of paper. Professional systems account for volume, intensity, and athlete’s individual needs.

This area is often one that is less accounted for amongst rehab professionals as no randomised controlled trial will
be able to accurately tell you what drills to use, how to optimally dose volume to your athlete and what to look out for in your coaches’ eye.

This stuff is taken directly from the field and the experiences of thousands of hours in the pro sport trenches amongst our high-performance team.

Understanding what capacities to focus on, high to appropriately build volume, speed, linear running mechanics and change of direction technique will be the
difference between a successful and unsuccessful return to sport.

In this module you will learn:

– How we introduce our athletes to running through an extensive and intensive model of progression.
– What are the common deficits athletes face during their return to run journey post ACLR and what do they look like in real life?
– An in-depth analysis of each pillar of rehabilitation running post ACLR as well as the how and when to introduce each concept to the athlete.
– How to develop a system for building technical drills so you can be sure that your athletes are improving with your drill components.
– How to piece all the concepts together to develop your own rehab running system.
– How we make athletic rehab running sport specific and keep it scalable in the process.

Why Strength & Strength Reserve Is King To A Successful Return To Performance

Majority of athletes fail to hit objective strength markers when they return to play, often at no fault of their own. This is where the understanding of the principles of strength development are fundamentally lost amongst most rehab professionals.

There is a combination of reasons why traditional rehab approaches typically fail athletes at ever restoring maximum strength scores. Rehabilitation professionals often aren’t trained enough in the principles of training and thus consistently under dose their athletes, never
training them at high enough intensities.

Strength & Conditioning specialists, whilst having
sound knowledge of the principles of training, fail to understand the finer nuances of how these need to be manipulated in a rehabilitation setting and thus usually are hitting the bullseye of the wrong dart board with their programs. Hence there is a need to connect the two fields together.

In this module you will learn:

– How to apply the principles and manipulate the variables of training to achieve specific outcomes in the rehabilitation athlete.
– You will identify based off our experiences with over 200 ACL athletes what capacities are generally underdone and how to ensure this doesn’t happen to your athletes.
– Applied concepts of developing hypertrophy, max strength, and power in the rehabilitation athlete.
– How to adapt these principles across the training age life cycle.

The Way To Guarantee You Deliver a Robust Athlete Back To The Court Or Field

When it comes to returning an athlete to their sporting environment, having a system of spoon feeding their demands is pivotal to a successful outcome. Sometimes everything can be done right in the clinic and on the rehab run field but our inability to appropriately transition an athlete back to their sporting environment can be the undoing of an otherwise perfect rehabilitation plan.

Similarly, being able to optimally plan physical preparation training can be difficult when an athlete returns to the commitments of team training and sometimes this can be when they fall off the wagon when they are so close to the “finish line”.

In this module you will learn:

– How to decide when an athlete is ready to re-engage with team training and provide them with a roadmap back to full training demand.
– How to plan an integrated training program that will fit in with the demands of their sport and bridge the gap between rehab and performance.
– How to develop a return to contact continuum with all the pillars that you need to address to build an athlete’s confidence in chaos.
– Understandings of performance-based capacities of change of direction, agility, and speed mechanics.
– How to periodise training effectively during these final phases of rehabilitation.

Why The Economic Principle Of “The Best Way To Make Money Is To Not Lose Money” Also Applies In Rehab

Cardiovascular conditioning is often left as an afterthought for the athlete in rehabilitation.

During an ACLR rehab journey, athletes will spend months off feet that they face the challenge of deconditioning and energy balance issues.

Returning a deconditioned athlete to the field will not only create psychological challenges in relation to performance but also will impact your ability to develop optimal linear and change of direction running mechanics.

Whilst not every athlete will have the training tolerance to be able to handle large amounts
of cardiovascular conditioning, having a system in place to be able to facilitate aerobic adaptations from the early stages of rehab will assist the athlete with everything from their fitness to body composition.

In this module you will learn:

– How to create a system of off-feet conditioning that will keep your athletes fit whilst they are in the toughest period of their rehab journey.
– How to design conditioning protocols to integrate into an athlete’s rehab running programs.
– How we utilise an extensive and intensive model to develop off feet conditioning protocols.
– How to be specific with your off feet conditioning prescriptions to target the capacities of either aerobic, anaerobic or alactic energy system demands that you
want to improve.
– How to prescribe HIT training during rehab running protocols.
– How to utilise circuit training during rehabilitation.

Deliver The Ultimate Customer Package So You Get Paid

One common trait between most allied health professionals and strength coaches are that
business skills usually isn’t a naturally born skill.

This road block normally impacts the ability of practitioners to truly be able to leave a lasting impact in the industry and help as many people as they’d want to help.

In this guest module hear from Director of Business Operations at Athletes Authority Karl Goodman, and learn how to:

– Sell your newly designed rehabilitation system to your potential athletes so that you build an empire in the rehabilitation industry.
– Set up the nitty gritty back end that will provide peace of mind to you as a business owner and that has created over 1 million dollars of revenue for us in the short time
of 1.5 years.
– How to sell the concept of long-term rehabilitation plans to athletes and be confident in knowing that you are selling best practice outcomes.

Build A Business That Becomes Permanently Profitable

Continue with Karl where you left off and help develop a system for business that helps you scale so you can become permanently profitable.

Piecing It All Together

You’ve learned the systems so now it’s time to be critically appraised by your peers.

This session occurs ~6 weeks after the completion of the mentorship.

One of the greatest things about our industry is that there are many paths that lead to Rome & each person has unique ways they can establish their systems.

In this session you will:

– Have your newly established rehabilitation system critically appraised by our Head of Sports Rehabilitation Justin Richardson.
– Have the opportunity to present your systems to your peers and gather tips and tricks from your mentorship cohort, ready to deliver to your rehabilitation athletes
the next day.