Can Your Brain Help Your Knee Pain? A Look at Graded Motor Imagery (GMI)
Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most common causes of knee pain in adults. It can lead to stiffness, weakness, and difficulty with everyday movements like walking, climbing stairs, or standing up from a chair. But managing knee OA isn’t just ...
Can Ultrasound Help Predict Tendon Injuries in College Athletes?
A recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at whether ultrasounds can help predict tendon injuries in elite athletes. The researchers focused on three common areas: the patellar tendon, Achilles tendon, and plantar fascia. These ...
Heavy Lifting and Your Future Knees
Many people believe that lifting heavy weights now could hurt your knees later in life. That sounds like it makes sense—if we wear out our knees, they’ll hurt more later, right? But new research says the opposite might be true. Lifting weights co ...
The Sleepy Athlete
Sleep and athletics. Athletics and sleep. We know that sleep is important. We know it is tied very closely to performance. We know that during sleep procedural memories are consolidated, immune responses are augmented, and anabolic metabolism is upre ...
Shoulder Instability: Surprising Findings in Nonoperative Management in a High School Athlete Population
I speak from personal experience when I say that there is nothing like the experience of dislocating a joint. It's as if your body knows something is really, really not ok followed by a certain nausea deep in the pit of your stomach. Having been thro ...
Dry Needling vs Corticosteroid Injection for Plantar Fasciitis?
It's there again... That pain in the bottom of the foot at the heel. Standing up in the morning is pure agony, like a hot butter knife cutting into the bottom of your foot. Maybe it's better to just stay in bed? Too bad someone can't just roll you in ...
Eleven Consistent Recommendations for Musculoskeletal Pain
There is an interesting phenomenon in the realm of neuroscience and memory where each time you recall the past your brain networks change in a way that can alter the later recall of the past. Why bring this up in a musculoskeletal pain post? I would ...
ACL Reconstruction: What to use???
Imagine... You've had a really bad day... A friend called asking if you wanted to meet for a pick up game. It seemed like a good idea at the time! But, then you pivoted to intercept that pass, heard the knee 'pop', and collapsed in pain. The crazy ...
Blood Flow Restriction: Proximal, Distal, and Contralateral Effects
Blood flow restriction (BFR) as been shown to promote greater increases in strength, hypertrophy, and endurance, when compared to low-load training alone, in healthy study subjects. Previously, significant gains have been shown in muscle fiber recrui ...
Exercise As Medicine: Youth Concussion
It has been found that individuals aged 14 to 25 years are disproportionately affected by concussion and, after suffering the injury, take longer to recover when compared to adults. A 2018 article, published in the Journal of Neurologic Physical Ther ...