Finding a good mentor is hard. Many people don’t have access to someone who wants to help them accelerate their career.
We often start our careers and have so many questions. We’ve all been there.
In this week’s podcast, we talk about what we recommend you do when you aren’t in a spot where you have a great mentor.
Champion Sports PT Mentorship
This is also why we started our new Champion Sports PT Mentorship online program. We know many people don’t have access to great mentorship, and we want to help, so Dan Pope, Dave Tilley, and I wanted to start this program to help you and your career.
The first cohort starts in a couple of weeks!
To view more episodes, subscribe, and ask your questions, go to mikereinold.com/askmikereinold.
#AskMikeReinold Episode 337: The Most Important Thing You MUST Do to Accelerate Your Career
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Transcript
Mike Reinold:
I am here today with Dan Pope, Dave Tilly, an intimate episode with the three of us here, and we want to talk about mentorship, and part of the reason is the three of us, we’ve been talking about mentorship and we take so many students at Champion up in Boston. We take so many people with us that we’ve been talking about building an online mentorship for years.
How do we help people that just don’t have access to good quality mentorship and guidance into how to accelerate their careers to get started? Whatever it may be. How do we solve that problem? And I think we got it. We actually got it.
We just started this new online Champion Sports Physical Therapy Mentorship. The first cohort is starting up soon, and that’s a big part of it, but you can get on the waitlist if you’re listening to this in the future and join. Check the show notes on that.
But anyway, enough. I want to talk about mentorship in general with these guys.
So again, Dan Pope, Dave Tilly here. I think we’ve got a lot to share on this one, but why don’t we start with this? Why do you guys think it’s so important to have mentorship? And the reason why I ask you is I know the three of us are the same. I know we all sought out mentorship in our lives, in our careers. I know we’ve all benefited from it, and I know we all now tell the next generation to do it.
Let’s start with this. Why do you think it’s so important? Dave, you want to start this one?
Dave Tilley:
Sure.
Well, the first thing that’s hilarious is, as you were saying that in the intro, I feel like… Is this our acoustic tour? You know how a band does every seven years, they do their own main show and then they have a campfire like acoustic only. I feel like we’re doing that with mentorship.
But anyways, yeah, I think that everything in PT… Everybody goes into the PT field or goes into this type of career because obviously they love learning, they love helping people. It’s a rewarding job. I feel like one of the things we all enjoy is constantly learning and doing stuff, but I think for me personally, I can speak to my experience and it resonates with a lot of students who I think we take is, your expectation of how you feel coming out of grad school and getting your first job or even after a couple years on the job, the expectation of what that’s going to look like and feel like is oftentimes very different than the reality.
I know me and Dan, that’s how we found you and Lenny and Champion, is like, okay, I felt really prepared at the PT school when I came out. And then when you start to be in the trenches 6, 7, 8 hours a day, and you have a lot of people with a huge variety of things walking in the door, I felt really overwhelmed, that I really wasn’t as prepared as maybe I thought I was.
So, from an academic technical knowledge, I feel like, “Okay, I got across the finish line for PT School, but I didn’t feel super prepared for day three post-op tenodesis or an ACL six, eight months out who is looking for the advanced phases. And particularly in sports, I felt like there was a lot of untapped knowledge I didn’t quite get access to, so that was one part of it for me, was the academic knowledge that I feel like it made me a little uncomfortable at work because I wanted to enjoy my day-to-day grind, and when you don’t really know how to help somebody or you’re stuck with a case or you’re frustrated and you don’t have a mentor, it’s really hard because the textbook doesn’t offer you, “What do you do with a stiff knee that’s not getting better even though you’re doing all the exercises on the protocol and you’re doing everything that you think you should be doing.” So, there was that, “Okay, tough situation, tough patient, I need someone to bounce some ideas off of and stuff like that.”
But then there’s the other side, which is more like the emotional happiness with work is, I personally find now at Champion… Obviously, there’s more to learn, we always get stuck and I am still asking Mike for help sometimes on certain cases, but generally my day-to-day life is much better as a clinician because I really feel confident in my skill set. I feel like most things that walk through the door, I feel pretty good about and I feel like even if I’m a little scratching my head, I know how to find PubMed. I know what articles to look up, I know who to talk to about certain expertises, and that personally makes my day-to-day life much, much better. As an overall, my happiness levels now versus 10 years ago, because of my career and mentorship that I’ve gotten, is a lot better.
And so yeah, there’s two parts for me. The academic side, knowing what to do with advancing your career, and then the general wellbeing and happiness as a clinician. That’s personally for me why I think if I could go back and do it again, I tell the students, I would take a pay cut and go somewhere else to get a mentorship for the first couple of years just to get that kind of stuff going.
Mike Reinold:
Wait a minute, would you take a pay cut now? Just out of curiosity.
Dave Tilley:
If I didn’t have mentorship, if I didn’t have you and Lenny and everybody else, maybe. But in my first job, I should have looked a little more to make sure mentorship was there.
Mike Reinold:
I think you hit that really well. Dave. I love how you’re talking about your wellbeing and your own personal satisfaction in life because is there anything worse than not knowing what to do with somebody? And then feeling like you might let that person down? We’re a service-based industry. We’re here to help people, so what a terrible way to go home at night, feeling like you don’t know what to do. I love how you tied that into your personal feelings. I think that was very helpful. That was cool.
Dan, what about you? Why do you think mentorship is so important?
Dan Pope:
Yeah, first and foremost, I definitely agree with Dave. It’s funny as a new clinician, have a patient come in, they’re in a sling, and then there’s a note from the doc. It’s like, “distal clavicle excision.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, let’s have you do some pendulums. I’ll be right back.” Just go look in a book. You know what I mean? Just no idea.
Dave Tilley:
30 minutes of heat while you look up on PubMed.
Dan Pope:
Yeah.
Mike Reinold:
We need an arm bike. We don’t have an arm bike at Champion. That was a good one.
Throw them on the arm bike for 10 minutes and warm up.
Dan Pope:
Yeah.
And obviously, there’s a lot of gaps in knowledge, and I didn’t realize how many gaps there were. Going back to this idea of post-surgical shoulders, I basically graduated school. I was like, “All right, I got it. The three types of shoulder pain that exist, I know how to hammer that.” And I go in and there’s just way, way more, way more nuance. That was something I realized right away I didn’t know enough. That’s a big one.
But you… Going back to the idea of the desires that I think we had when we graduated, we’re not quite the “punch the clock” type of clinicians and I think a lot of folks out there, they don’t want to be that type of clinician that works in a mill… Nothing against mills. I think that’s fine, but they want to be able to connect with patients, do a thorough job, and be the best therapist that they can, and school prepares you to work with the average person, but I don’t think they teach you how to go deep on that. And at least for me, and I think for all of us, is that we just want to be really, really good clinicians. That’s important to us. We want to be experts.
Also, you want that peace of mind that we’re treating that person appropriately, but also want that sensation of like, “Okay, I am good at what I do and this patient’s getting the most value possible.” And you basically are getting the respect of the community that you’re working with, not just respect of the patients, but also largely the physical therapy community. It’s cool to be looked up to and be an expert, so I think that’s one of the reasons why people seek out the mentoring because that may not be the thought in the forefront of their mind, but deep down, that’s one of their actual desires that they do have. At least that’s one that I had.
I think the other thing that’s really big is seeking out mentors accelerates your career so much. Think about all the mistakes that we’ve made over the course of our careers. How many people have we hurt or had bad outcomes or did something stupid? If you find someone that’s 10, 15, 20 years out into their career and they’re doing exactly what you want to do, why would you not reach out to that person and try to figure that out? Learning from them and seeing how to get to that point without getting all the battle scars that they’ve gotten over the course of time by making all those mistakes is going to be tremendously valuable for a clinician trying to advance their career.
Mike Reinold:
Awesome.
Dave Tilley:
Yeah.
One more thing that just popped into mind quick is that all of us, especially in sports PT, we all have a sub-niche that we really want to do. Gymnastics, CrossFit, Olympic lifting, baseball, whatever. Mike, you probably went to Alabama and tried to find Kevin and James Andrews because you really love baseball and you knew eventually you wanted to work in baseball. It’s unfortunately not going to be at a general outpatient setting where you find someone who’s an expert in baseball and is going to be there. It’s going to be someone you seek out individually, so I think we see that a lot.
As in sports in general, there’s no better feeling than having somebody who comes in with a very specific ACL, like a type of injury or a certain sport, when you connect with that person, you speak their language. When they hear you say, “Slow pitch curve ball,” I know that’s a popular one. I’m just kidding. But when they come in and they hear skills and jargon and you’ve done that or you know that, it’s instantly sticky for them and then they send more people to you. Obviously that’s great, but also it feels good when somebody comes to you.
I get it all the time. Like, “My back’s been hurting for six months and doctors said, ‘quit gymnastics.’ Nobody can figure it out.” And for me, I’m like, “I’ve seen 400 of you in the last five years.” You want to find those people who have those experiences and try to latch your wagon onto them because if they can speed run you, like Dan said, and you love softball or baseball or ACL or concussion, you need a mentor who’s going to help you be very specific, who has seen a hundred, 200, 300 of that specific thing. Most people who are in sports PT like some degree of a niche because they enjoy working with that population. And mentorship, like Dan said, just speed runs you on knowing exactly how to help these people.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah.
Dave, I hate to break it to you, but I went to Alabama for the barbecue and the humidity. I stumbled into baseball rehab from there.
But no, I was going to say the same thing, Dave. To me, that’s a really important part of mentorship. It’s not just help and guidance and helping you learn from people’s mistakes. That’s great. But if you also have a very specific niche you want to get to, I think it’s super important that you try to find a mentor in that area because now you’re getting all the benefits of mentorship, but now it’s a specialized mentorship, which is pretty neat.
And that’s what I did. That was my experience. I sought all the people that were the best at what I wanted to be the best at and join them, learned from them, and then became one of them. And I think that was the neat part for me, was to get to see that. So always important.
We all know why it’s important to get some mentorship. Why do you think it’s so difficult for people sometimes to get mentorship? What do you think?
You want to start this one, Dan?
Dan Pope:
Yeah.
I think one of the big ones is that folks will graduate and they know they want to have some sort of mentoring and they have a couple different options. I think the big one that’s gotten more popular, and I think the reason why it’s popular is because at Champion PT and Performance, we tend to attract stud students that want more from their careers. And I don’t know if every single student necessarily feels this way, but the ones we see tend to feel this way, is they feel compelled to do a residency, and I think the residencies are actually very good, but there’s certainly pros and cons.
For one, they’re expensive, it’s a lot of money, and it’s a lot of commitment. So I think that’s part of it. You think about the money you make per hour, your salary is going to be lower and you’re probably doing twice as many hours or close to it. If you think from that perspective, you’re automatically making a lot less for a period of time.
And then obviously students come out with a lot of debt, which is a huge problem for students, so that residency seems like a nice natural progression. I do believe it is for some folks, but it’s extremely expensive and sometimes it’s not specific to what they want in their career, and a lot of students haven’t really sat down to figure out what they want with their career. They just feel like that natural step is to do a residency.
I think the other place that people look for mentoring is essentially at a clinic that hopefully has some sort of mentoring. And it does seem like nowadays a lot of clinics are offering some sort of mentoring, so essentially you work X amount of hours per week and then you get certain amount of hours each week to talk over a case study and so forth with one of the clinicians. But I think often what happens… And some clinics are really good, so I’m not trying to throw them under the bus… But a lot of clinics will say that they offer mentoring and what happens is that the clinicians are all very, very busy, particularly the one who’s running the clinic because oftentimes the person who runs the clinic has to have the busiest schedule, because of what you need to do to advance within that clinic within the company. And on top of that, they’re trying to manage people, which they’re oftentimes doing it poorly because they have too many patients.
Now on top of that, they’re supposed to mentor. And what is probably going to happen is each week maybe it starts off, you have some strong mentoring, then after a while it fades off just because everyone’s so busy, and then you were left in the situation where you were promised a little bit of mentoring and it’s a bit of a bait and switch.
I think that’s just the nature of our industry. It’s not really set up for success, so a lot of students end up having a challenging time trying to find some good mentoring, because either extremely expensive to do that and potentially not what they want, or it just doesn’t happen at all, or not to the degree that they’re happy with. I think those are the two major ones, anyway.
Dave Tilley:
Yeah.
I think my thoughts on this is when I think back to what I was going through and what I think every PT student who comes to us or people who would just visit the clinic. We have a lot of PTs who just visit the clinic and want to see how we do things. It’s overwhelming. That’s the only word that comes to mind.
You just spent three years, a lot of money like Dan said, and you’re probably sacrificing your weekends and a lot of extra free time so you can do well in PT school and get out, or to get ahead. You get your job, you finally get all locked up, you’re excited, you passed the board, you get out into the real world, and then the baseline level of your time and energy is just patient care. Just treating 10 people a day, keeping up with notes, getting there early, getting out late, it’s already probably 50 hours a week if we’re being honest, even if you have a 40 hour per week job. You’re working through lunch. You’re staying late to do your notes.
So, all right, you’re 50 to 60 hours in already, and in order for you to get ahead or feel better, it’s a ton of time on the weekends to get to a course or study articles or find research or do whatever, or seek out a mentorship program in general. And then it’s expensive, as Dan said. You have a ton of debt already on top of you and you’re trying to pay back your loans. You’re trying to dig out of that a bit, and now you got to spend more money on courses, more money on books, more money on traveling to a course, flights, hotels, whatever, because sure, some clinics help out with that but the reality is that you’re probably pulling some stuff out of your pocket if you want to really go above and beyond. I got a pretty rude awakening on how expensive con-ed was that first couple of years out of PT school, which was great, but that’s really stressful.
And then the other thing too is now more than ever, social media is amazing for certain things and the internet, blogs, whatever courses, but it is so much information even on subtopics. Even if you just want to study the knee, it is thousands and thousands of blog posts and articles that you sift through and some of them are amazing. It’s a bell curve. The 20% on top is really high quality, really well researched. If you stumble upon Lenny’s blog post on ACL, it’s probably pretty solid. But as we know, man, there’s a lot of not great information out there on social media and everywhere, so then you got to think about, “All right, if I spend all this time and all this money and I find courses or I find things that are good, is this even quality and is this relevant?”
And then also too is when you do con-ed yourself with no mentorship, it doesn’t always apply to the people in front of you. You don’t always walk in the clinic and say, “Oh, this is the person I picked up in chapter 4.1.a of my textbook that correlated to the course. I know these five exercises to help this person with a stiff knee.” That’s not how it works. And sometimes you just want a five-minute conversation with someone to bounce like, “Hey man, this person’s kind of stiff. It’s eight weeks out. They should have their extension back, but they’re not. Am I missing something?” And then someone would be like, “Yeah, have you checked a cyclops lesion?” And you’re like, “Never thought of that.” It’s very quick and it’s very context specific.
Dan Pope:
Yeah.
A little thing I want to note upon. Even with research… It’s funny because I was looking at a lot of SLAP research recently and I was looking at a meta analysis in 2022 and they just had five studies about treatment for SLAP tears, and it’s mostly in pitchers, mostly overhead athletes, and every single one of them recommended posterior capsule stretching. What’s funny is that at Champion… I don’t think we’ve done a sleeper stretch since the inception, and then Mike here is working with elite level athletes and he wrote the current concept paper in back 2005.
So, if you’re a student trying to read through a bunch of research, it doesn’t often give you the most up-to-date information on the best concepts for treating things in a specific niche, so you have to be able to take a lot of the research with a grain of salt, and it’s hard to do that as a new grad. It’s hard to see the nuance in that.
Dave Tilley:
Not to jump in, but that’s a perfect thing… When you read research and stuff, that’s one third of whatever that triumph we talk about. It’s patient values, research, and then clinical expertise, and when you work with people who have worked with one niche or one population over and over and over again, they’re the best people who have taken the research they’ve done or they’ve read about, they’ve applied it to the person in front of them, and they’ve tried it.
So, Mike learned that the sleeper stretch was not helpful probably early in his career. People didn’t get better. A lot of people probably still had problems and were sore, but until you treat 30, 40, 50 healthy baseball players and then you treat a bunch of people who are post op, and then you treat a bunch of people who are getting drafted and are trying to go to this with a sore shoulder and are trying to get through. All that gray nuanced area, that is what mentorship allows for because I guarantee there’s not a single paper that’s like, “Someone’s trying to push through for a division one scholarship in gymnastics on their third week of their season ending. How do you treat their back when it’s not a stress fracture, but it’s not enough to not compete?” There’s not going to be anybody you can find in a textbook or research that’s going to give you a plan for that, but as someone who has seen a lot of those, I can probably give you a pretty good idea of what to do and what to be worried about.
All that gray, murky area is really, I think, where the best of the best patient care comes from, when you take the best of research, apply it to the person in front of you, and have a lot of experience. But like Dan said, when you have someone who has 15 years of going through baseball seasons over and over again, I’d probably want to find that person and listen to them to help apply some of the research.
Mike Reinold:
It’s funny, we’ve talked about misinformation from social media for years now because we’ve all seen it. We see posts, we send it to each other, we talk about it, we say, “Wow, this is wrong. This person is going to regret this post in three years when they figure it out.” We talk about that all the time.
I think we’re actually at a point now too where there’s a lot of misinformation that’s published in the literature, and it’s a sad point here, but we have so many journals now, so many predatory journals, everybody’s starting an open access pay for play journal now. They just want to churn out stuff. They’re getting everything published. We don’t have enough quality reviewers for journals. So, you have to be really careful what you even read in the research nowadays, and that stinks that we have to do that.
We talk about all the time with SLAPs with Dan there, him and Kevin were getting ready for a podcast on SLAP tests, and they’re going through all these meta-analyses and I’m like, “Let me tell you why all those meta-analyses are wrong.” You take a bunch of studies, you put them together… You take a bunch of crappy studies, it doesn’t make a good meta-analysis, it makes a crappy meta-analysis when you put a bunch of crappy studies together. But there’s so much more out there than just that. And that’s where you need to have somebody that’s lived it, been through it, failed at it, figured it out, fixed it, got better at it. It’s crazy.
So, I don’t know. It seems like, for me, we have a few options. Residences are structured, but probably not realistic for everybody. For time-consuming, geographical, financial implications, not everybody can do a residency, but it’s a nice structured mentorship.
Your work situation, you might try to do it, but you’re probably going to be inconsistent, maybe not get the quality or the consistency what you want.
I do want to add a third group of mentorship here too that we haven’t talked about yet, that I think you can start some peer mentorships. So, maybe with your friends, your colleagues, your classmates from school, people that share your value in personal growth, and get together and geek out, do a journal club, talk about things together. I think you can do that, but that has one thing that’s missing that is also important too: experience. You may be able to structure it with peers, but none of you have the right experience for that.
So again, these are all good for various reasons, but they all have certain limitations. One of the best parts of mentorship for me is learning from somebody else’s experience. If you don’t have access to that, by all means, groupthink with some peers and you guys will go through it together, but you’re still going to have to go through it together. That’s an interesting part.
All right, that’s a little bit about that. Let’s shift gears.
Okay, what can people do now? Let’s give people some actionable advice. I think that’s the important part of any podcast for me though, is that, “Okay, we’ve talked about why we need mentorships. We talked about why it’s hard to get those. We talked about the different types of mentorships. Let’s come up now with actionable steps.”
What do you guys recommend you do for somebody that’s seeking mentorship? What should they do? Dave?
Dave Tilley:
Yeah, I’ll go first.
I think that one thing that’s important to note what you said along the local, call it a book club, a journal club… Get together and do whatever, even via Zoom or whatever. Those things are fantastic, and I have done those before, but when you work with a very similar clinic, group of people, you risk being in an echo chamber and you risk hearing the same types of approaches, systems, principles… And we’re guilty of that at Champion too. We sometimes get into our own ways and we go to a course or we hear someone’s perspective that we value.
There’s a lot of people in our crew outside of Champion who are really seasoned veteran connections. And when they say something that’s different about BFR, different about the way to do graphs, even Lenny is good at this… Lenny’s like, “Huh, interesting. I didn’t think about that. Let me lean in a little bit and see if I may be wrong here, even though I have 20 years of working with ACLs” or whatever.
On that note, I think the best thing you can do is spend… Is think about the topic or the area or something that you’re either most frustrated with or that gives you a little bit of nervousness in the clinic or that you’re generally just really passionate about learning more about. And I think the best thing you can do is you can try to look into the literature or courses or notable people on social media and people who have pretty solid academic standings, and just try to pick the brains of each person. And this is what I did with low back pain when I was coming out of school.
The most popular thing in gymnastics is back pain with female gymnasts, so I was seeing a lot of gymnasts and people with back pain in general. The first person who I connected with, because he was publishing a lot on it or sharing a lot, was Erson Religioso. So that was the first person that I was able to reach out to because even though I was seeing a lot of people with gymnasts, back pain, I was seeing a lot of chronic adult nonspecific workman’s comp low back pain. Arguably, Pain Science of people who were chronically sensitized. I needed the sports side, but I needed more of also the general population. And that’s honestly how I got into the mixture of Erson, Pain Science, and Stuart McGill.
In 2010, years ago, you would think that those two things were so completely polar opposite that there was PRI, and Pain Science was over here and Stuart McGill, and they all yelled at each other and said that each other was dumb and, “How dare you not log roll in the SFMA. You should be doing press-ups.” “No, you should be doing Pain Science education.” And I was like, “Okay, well I’m just going to try to do each of these things.”
I took McKenzie scores, I talked to Erson, I read Stu’s books, I did a bunch of stuff on Pain Science, and then I got to the other side, I was like, “80% of this is overlapping.” The explanation for why it’s working is maybe the 20% that people have theoretical differences on, but it’s working when you do it in the right population and all four of these different camps you would say are great.
That approach worked for me and then I eventually got more in gymnastics and I realized that Pain Science is great, that stuff’s awesome, but sports are hard on your body and sports are different than the general population, which is when I very much leaned into you and Lenny and many other academic sports researchers because as you say, throwing a baseball is bad for you. Gymnastics is not probably good for your spine long-term and it’s weird. It’s weird and unique and different, so what I do for a gymnast who’s trying to get a scholarship and go to some university, it’s very different than the 40-year-old mom who just wants to hike and pick her kid up.
But I think that that’s how you approach it, is you just like, “All right, what topic do I feel nervous about?” Or, “What topic is interesting to me? And what are the three to five best current things that have stood the test of time, 10, 15 years, that people are doing really well with? How can I get exposure to each of those, and then make my own opinion about what I feel like is good to approach these things?”
Mike Reinold:
Nice, Dave. I like it.
What about you, Dan?
Dan Pope:
A little side note, but very relevant. Dave does practice what he preaches. Dave reached out to me… I don’t even know, 10 years ago? Something like that.
Dave Tilley:
Yeah, that was the first podcast. That was pre-Power Monkey about back pain podcast for CrossFit athletes.
Dan Pope:
Yeah, Dave reached out to me and then through a series of events we’re here together today. Had Dave not reached out…
Talk about accelerating your career. I think that’s just… It happens when you reach out to people, you make cool connections and it does advance your career from that perspective.
But just to add to what Dave said, and this is maybe a step back from what Dave was talking about and I mentioned this earlier, but I think it’s important that you figure out what your goals are, and I think that’s hard as a new grad because you don’t know exactly what you want, but then you want to write down what you do want. Do you want to be a better clinician? Is there a specific population that you want to work in? Is there a type of clinic that you’d like to work in? Do you want to have a mixed career where you’re doing a little bit of writing, you’re doing a little bit of making courses? Do you want to be more in a fitness environment and do more fitness programming? And then just design what you think is your ideal life, and here’s the thing… It’s going to change over the course of your career, but I think it’s important you start with a little bit of a goal set, and from there, it makes it easier to make future decisions about mentoring and getting better.
What I did is I knew I liked to work in strength and fitness, and I essentially wanted to be really good working with, at the time, CrossFitters because that’s what I was seeing a lot of and I was doing a lot of and I really enjoyed it, but also strongman power lifting, all the stuff that I still talk about and love. So, I reached out in my network and tried to find good local physical therapists who treat a lot of CrossFitters and I basically reached out to them and said, “Hey, do you mind if I shadow a little bit?” And I went over there, bring in some donuts, bring in some pizza every once in a while. I try to help them out as much as possible and I just get free mentoring, which is awesome. And then I have this person in my back pocket when I have a really tough patient, I just want a little bit of extra information, I would go and learn from them.
And I tried to do that in a variety of different ways with a variety of different professionals. I did the same thing with local surgeons, and then what was nice about local surgeons is they were treating a similar patient population, which was cool, because I would get referrals from them and I would give them referrals and I could also ask questions. They would allow me to watch surgeries and I could pick their brain about certain patients. So it worked out really well.
I think the other thing you can do with the information, with that knowledge of your own goals, is to find specific courses, just like Dave said. What was interesting for me is that I wanted to learn more about physical therapy for strength and fitness folks, and unfortunately, that data didn’t exist at all. If you went to PubMed and started searching around, there’s very little research about it. There’s one study in 2013 on the stress on the patella femoral joint in a deep squat and it’s super biased and it gets passed around a ton on social media and it’s not really that helpful.
Over the course of time, there’s obviously more research, but back in the day there wasn’t, so when I did continuing education, I went into a different industry. I started to learn from basically the fitness field. I went and learned mostly from the Power of Monkey fitness crew, how to do all the gymnastics movements well, how to Olympic lift properly. I went to the strength conditioning world and looked at big research and prominent names to learn about strength conditioning principles. What does the research say about things like hypertrophy, building strength, and all that stuff? So I don’t think I would be able to build my career in the way that I wanted to without being clear about how I wanted my career to be in five to ten years as a new grad or as a student.
So that’s what I would do first. It’ll help to dictate your learning.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah.
I always tell people too: take a step back and audit where you are. What do you need to get better at and what do you want to get better at? Those are two things.
Need is maybe the clinic you’re in is a ton of low back pain and you don’t feel a lot of low back pain, or you don’t feel comfortable with low back pain. That’s a need. And you got to set out a path to figure that out.
The want might be like, “Okay, I’m dealing with this low back pain, it’s in the clinic every day, but I want to work with football players. I want to work in the NFL one day.” That’s your want, and then build that path.
But so far we’ve talked about this and I think we’ve succeeded with this, but it’s creating your own mentorship path… And I want to enable everybody listening to this to do that. To say, “What do I want to get better at?” And explore how to do that. But that’s daunting, and that’s part of why we created our new online mentorship that we’re going to do here, is that we want to be able to fill the pieces of this puzzle for you. We want to fill those gaps for you.
We wanted to come up with a program that was accessible. It’s online. It’s all the time. It’s easy. It’s affordable. This might be one of the cheaper programs we’ve come up with because we want the masses to be able to appreciate this. We want new grads, maybe even students. We want people that are in the early and middle portions of their career to make this a no-brainer to do it.
It’s structured. It goes through week to week with a curriculum that we think is important to become a very comprehensive and well-rounded sports physical therapist.
And you get to benefit from our experience. So, you have people with a wide variety of experience that have gotten to the place that you may want to get to. We want to offer that all together.
So yeah, you can do things like residencies, you can try to get lucky at work, you can try to build your own curriculum. I think everybody should do that, but for those that are looking for a little bit more guidance and structure, I think that’s what we’re here for and that’s what we’re really excited about.
I don’t know. You guys have anything else you want to add to that?
Dave Tilley:
Yeah, my just parting 2 cents is that I think people should realize that we made this for the people we wish we had 10 years ago. All of us are very busy. We have stuff to do, we’ve made courses, we have lives, but when we got together, it wasn’t like, “How can we make something that’s going to make a bajillion people and get all this money?” That’s not at all why we did this all. It was like we reverse engineered what we were frustrated with. It was like back to the overwhelmed thoughts like, “I don’t have time to go through 30 hours of research and courses when I’m working 50 hours and I have a kid,” or, “I have other stuff I want to do.” So we tried our best to make this what, in an hour and a half per week, maybe, you could get through the lecture and read the articles that we have. We tried to summarize that.
But also, I’m not ashamed, but I’m also, when I look back at how much money I spent on con-ed between courses, books, traveling, hotel, food, dude, it was so much money to spend on all that stuff. And honestly, obviously, online con-ed, I still have Kevin Wilks’s hard DVD that I bought in functional stability training on my DVD case. Thank you. My relic.
Mike Reinold:
Nice, nice.
Dave Tilley:
So, obviously technology has allowed it to be more.
Yeah, I feel like our approach is very affordable and we want to help people with that, but also I think the biggest thing that we offer that I think we do well is, I think our information is high quality because we all spend a lot of time in the trenches, but also we, I think, are the perfect blend of academic and clinic-based applications. We all either read research or write research, are involved in it, but also we see people every day. We’re actively treating clinicians and no knocking to anybody who does it, but there’s definitely some times when I’ve gone to courses and you’re like, “Do you treat people anymore? I can tell by the way you’re talking. Do you actually treat people anymore or do you just do courses?”
And there’s nothing wrong with that academic or whatever, but I’ve definitely had some times where I’m like, “Yeah, this guy doesn’t treat anybody.” He just sits in the nerd room, which is fine as a nerd, but you need someone who actually applies this stuff and deals with the cranky shoulder that’s not getting better after 12 weeks. You need those boots on the ground applications.
Dan Pope:
Yeah.
Mike Reinold:
Dan, parting words?
Dan Pope:
Yeah. I’m just really excited for it. I’m a psychopath. We all run our online businesses. I’m constantly asking all the students that come into Champion, “What do you want most? What is the most valuable thing that a group like us can offer you guys?” And it’s always mentoring. Everyone’s looking for some sort of mentorship. And partly in my mind, I was like, “Dang, stop saying that because I don’t have a solution for that right now,” but what’s cool is that we all came together and we’re like, “How do we solve this? People are obviously asking for it,” and it has literally been years of students asking for this, so we put our heads together and we put together something really, really cool. I’m very excited just for people to take a look and let us know what they think.
The other piece is we’re constantly going to be updating this over the course of time. The first time going through, obviously, we’ll see how it goes, and then we’ll just make updates based on what people want. Try to give the people what they want, I guess.
Mike Reinold:
Wow. But you’re the man of the people, Dan.
Dan Pope:
Oh yeah.
Mike Reinold:
I appreciate that. That’s why we all appreciate you.
Dan, Dave, thanks for doing this episode, the special edition of the podcast.
Dave Tilley:
Our acoustic tour.
Mike Reinold:
Our acoustic tour.
Dave Tilley:
Private acoustic tour.
Mike Reinold:
That’s right.
If you want to learn more about our mentorship, head to the show notes and we’ll have a link to get there and hopefully we’ll see you, and if not this cohort, maybe a future cohort. That’d be great.
But again, thanks so much for joining us. If you love this podcast, please let us know. Rate, review, subscribe. And if you have questions you want us to answer, head to MikeReinold.com, click on that podcast link, and we will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much.
