Over the weekend I held my New Grad Physio LIVE event.

It was great to back to face to face teaching, getting hands-on and helping therapists put into practice the content we covered over the two days.

There was a mixture of therapists that I know and are part of my new grad physio membership and other therapists that I didn’t know and was interacting with for the very first time.

Students and new grads…

Physio’s and sports therapists…

Therapists from the NHS and private practice…

And some working in amateur, semi-pro and full-time professional sport.

I’ll be honest…

I felt a bit rusty to start with.

Probably the result of not doing any face-face teaching and holding a course like that for close to two years.

After all…

You use it or you lose it!

And this is a big lesson.

The longer you go without putting what you know into action the worse you actually get at applying what you do know.

This might be your patient handling, special testing or your hands-on treatments.

It could be how you communicate a diagnosis and prognosis to a patient…

Or how to design a rehab plan for a lower back, shoulder or knee injury.

That’s why we do CPD isn’t it?

To keep our skills sharp and knowledge up to date.

At the start of both days on the course I asked the therapists what their one big goal was.

Or put another way…

What was their biggest challenge they had with their patients day to day, that they wanted help with?

Nearly all the therapists mentioned structure.

How they wanted a simple structure to follow for their patient assessments…

And a simple structure to follow to guide their treatment and rehab planning.

A man much more knowledgable than me called Albert Einstein once said…

”Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

I referred to this quote yesterday as we closed out Day 2 of the course (I actually could not remember this quote in full but did my best to explain my point!).

The point I made was that we can’t make the human body simpler.

It is a highly complex thing.

But what we can make more simple is how we assess, treat and manage the human body when it is injured.

Having a simple assessment and rehab structure makes your life as a therapist so much easier.

It gives you the confidence to know what you are doing during your patient assessments…

To know what questions to ask during your subjective assessment and understand why you are asking these questions.

It gives you the confidence with your objective assessments, as you have a set structure to follow…

Which stops you missing anything serious or missing important tests that are needed to find the right diagnosis.

And having a step by step treatment and rehab plan makes it easy to know exactly what hands-on work and rehab exercises your patient actually needs…

Stopping you just using the same techniques and rehab exercises over and over again, for almost every patient you see.

Basic things done brilliantly work for 9/10 patients.

You might think you need some advanced course or to learn some new treatment technique or method when in most cases all you need is to actually get better at the things you are already doing…

And have an assessment, treatment and rehab structure that you actually understand and have confidence in to get you the right patient diagnosis and tells you exactly what treatments and rehab exercises you actually need to prescribe.

Andy

The New Grad Physio Mentor

PS. Want to learn a more simple way to assess, treat and rehab the patients or athletes you work with?

Head here to find out more