what is a performance physical therapist?

Dr Evan here!

I’m a big basketball fan. Growing up one of my favorite players was Kobe Bryant. I loved the stories of his work ethic and his discipline. Staying at the stadium until 3 or 4 am to work on a single shot that he had missed at a key moment in the game. Waking up at 4 in the morning to lift weights and get a few hundred shots up before practice. He was a high performer and a master of his craft. 

One of my favorite stories is of the night he was drafted. You may not know this but the LA Lakers legend was actually drafted by another team - the Charlotte Hornets. The story goes that when Kobe learned of the news that he had been drafted by Charlotte, he told his agent he wanted a trade. His reasoning . . . 

“This is not what it looks like” 

Kobe knew what he had put into getting to this point. He also knew where he was headed and he knew damn well that no greatest player of all time ever played for the Charlotte Hornets. He forced a trade to LA at 18 years old and the rest is history. 

As a Performance Physical Therapist I can 100% relate to Kobe. I had that “this is not what it looks like" moment. It was on my last clinical rotation in PT school. 

Most doctoral programs have students complete a series of clinical rotations in order to graduate from the program and become a licensed physical therapist. This is very important. I got to see a variety of different settings, I learned the process of actually working with a patient and began to develop my own style. 

It was at the end of my last rotation where I really felt like I had started to hit my stride. I had begun to be able to integrate things I had learned from books I had read years ago into my patient care. I was putting theory to practice. My treatments had started to become uniquely my own and I was having a lot of fun doing it. 

I always enjoyed working with more active people. High performers. People who like to do crazy shit for no apparent reason other than the fact that they love it and it makes them happy. If you are reading this, this may be you. 

You force me to access every corner of my brain for information on how to best help you all at once. When I get this feeling I will often come home after work and tell my girlfriend that “my brain was on fire today”, that’s what it feels like. Multiple times a day I just get totally 100% invested into what I am doing at The METHOD… and it’s f*cking awesome.

Anyways, back to my last clinical rotation . . . The clinic I was at was awesome. I met some great people and had some fantastic mentors. We saw a wide range of different people but there was one patient that I will never forget. He was a cross fitter. He liked to wake up, go to work, go to the gym, and throw heavy weights around fast. I was all in. 

But here was the problem - every time he was in, I had another patient in at the same time as him. If I had him, and an older person who was working on balance, guess who got the majority of my time and attention?? Let me tell you, it wasn’t the fall risk.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy working with elderly patients. It brings me great joy to see someone at that level succeed and I love being the person to push them to do so. I could definitely do it for the rest of my life, it’s an amazing feeling. However, that person is never going to bring me that “my brain was on fire today” feeling. 

But back to the cross fitter guy, the other thing was that every time he was in he would describe issues he was having with a deadlift or a heavy back squat. As I looked around the clinic, I spotted a 20 pound kettlebell and a cable column that went up to 90 pounds on each side, this is what we were working with. 

I specifically remember asking this particular behemoth of a human to pick up that 20 pound kettlebell and thinking to myself . . .

“Nahhhh, this is not what it looks like”

That was a frustrating feeling. I felt like I was driving a Ferrari but I was stuck in a school zone that lasted forever and I couldn’t leave second gear.

At The METHOD we specialize in seeing people like the man in my story. People who want to do dope sh*t because it makes them happy. Our method . . . No pun intended ;) . . . Is designed for a guy like him to succeed. We all knew clamshells were not going to help this guy, he knew it, I knew it, and the insurance company most definetly fucking knew it. 

At The METHOD we work with you 1v1, for 60 minutes. There is no passing you off to an aide, there are no passive modalities with no evidence to support their use, and there is no bullshit. We are here to help you reach your goals and perform your best.

We use our skillets of identifying physical impairments like missing range of motion, muscular weakness and faulty mechanics to not only fix whatever it was you came in to see us for, but to make you better at whatever it is that you are doing. This takes time and energy. But that is what a Performance Physical Therapist does, and that is exactly what we are at The METHOD.