COVER STORY PATIENT CARE PERFORMANCE THERAPY It’s all about the mindset T BY ERIK KLEIN AND CAITLIN MARSHALL he treatment of elite athletes has come a long way from the “ultrasound and ice mills” to elite teams of performance therapists inte-grating care to maximize performance and minimize injury under an unrelenting train-ing schedule. While most day-to-day clini-cians will never have access to professional, or Olympic calibre athletes, much can be gleaned from how these training programs work, and extrapolated to serve the weekend warrior or everyday patient. One such training program is ALTIS, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a high performance training centre for both professional and semi-professional track and field athletes. The program has 56 Olympic medals to their credit. For Canada, Andre deGrasse had been training in Phoenix when he won his Olympic bronze medals in the 100m, and 4x100m relay, and silver medal in the 200m against Usain Bolt. ALTIS offers internship and performance programs for therapists and coaches, and both of us attended between 2016 and 2017. As an organization they place a strong emphasis on education around sport performance, includ-ing performance therapy. Performance therapy involves bringing brief manual and therapeutic interventions directly into the practice setting, allowing for the opportunity to make immediate Collaboration forms the foundation for a successful training environment, allowing for improved training and injury prevention. DR. ERIK KLEIN is the CEO of Town Health Solutions, an Atlantic Canadian Network of corporate owned and franchised clinics, establishing a new model to rapidly scale chiropractic practice and businesses for new grads and established docs alike. Visit townhealthsolutions.com/franchising or email [email protected]. CAITLIN MARSHALL is an Athletic Therapist at Town Health Solutions and is lead IST with UNB Track and Field/Cross Country. Before moving to New Brunswick, she spent two years with the varsity programs at Carleton University in Ottawa working with men’s football, and women’s basketball. 12 Canadian Chiropractor February 2020 improvements to movement patterns. It requires collabo-ration between the coach, therapist, and athlete, otherwise known as the “performance trinity.” It is very common in many disciplines, including chiro-practic, athletic therapy, physiotherapy, and sports medi-cine to place a high emphasis on technology. There is no limit to how much you can spend attempting to get a leg-up on the competition. While now, most smart phones and computers have built in software that allows you to slow down video, make side to side comparisons, and even make drawings; many national programs are still utilizing heavy technology products such as Optitrack, which costs up-wards of $1,000 per meter! However, ALTIS stays true to the manual arts and the KISS principle and the results can’t be argued with. One of the biggest performance takeaways was the con-cept of a living movement screen. We had always known that warm-ups were important from an athlete’s perspec-tive, in order to decrease risk of injury and be fully prepared to take on the demands of practice, but we had never thought of them from the perspective of the clinician. Being on the sidelines for a practice provides us with the advantage of observing the athletes we work with. By being mindful and attentive of their individual movement www.canadianchiropractor.ca Matt_Brown /E+/Getty Images.
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