If you don't already work with the "opposing" profession (population B), why?!
I'm a Sports Therapist. Clinical staff. I'm also an ex "lift as much weight as you can"/"be powerful and massive" rugby player. I've also worked an internship as a strength coach in alliance with some study in S&C. So I'm somewhat biased towards the integration of medical and S&C towards common goals.
If you're a clinician like me, you spend your whole life sat in your little clinic room, running away from any hint of sunlight as you recoil back into your cave with your next "victim". The notion that people run around and bump into each other outside of that sterile and contained world is a scary prospect. However, people do, athletes do, and without embracing this, how can you offer a complete service? I will point out that you don't need to become an S&C coach (or vice versa), but understanding what the other world does is as important as understanding the different rehab demands of a hamstring or patella tendon ACL reconstruction.
This is how I spent my Wednesday lunchtime. The big tall people doing exercise type things are Surrey Heat basketball players. The people in black are the S&C team. I'm there to observe movement. Whilst I'm interested in the weight they're moving/height they're jumping, because decreasing performance figures can point towards movement issues, in this setting I care about the way that they move. Luckily this was a conditioning circuit, which gave me further insight into how they move under fatigue. Seeing a player continually cramp in his hamstring doing glute bridges under fatigue points towards a lack of activation endurance in his gluteals and a "mis-firing" posterior chain. You're right in thinking that I could highlight this in clinic and as part of the screening process this would be picked up (the player in question is yet to be screened). However, in picking this up during a gym session, we've avoided taking up any more of his time and instantly corrected the prehab programme with the S&C team. Which brings me to the working relationship between the 2 professions.
Tom is my friend. He's also an S&C coach. As well as being mind blowing using excel. He also has a fascination that his injuries only occur due to his "massive lats". Including his recent traumatic MCL sprain. Don't ask. He's the man looking at his watch in the picture. He runs the S&C programming for the Surrey Heat. A few months ago, he came straight to me and asked me to screen all of the Heat players and write bespoke prehab sessions for them. This in itself is not strange. Every athlete should be screened at the start of and throughout the season so that bespoke and constantly updating injury prevention programmes can be added into their general programming. However it came with the statement "because I want to make sure all these guys can move correctly before we start loading them up". No "get massive because it's better" philosophy there. Everything the players do is about movement: full range and with good consistent quality. And I'm yet to see any of them for anything more than niggles that they arrived to us with (which are all managed with their prehab and self massage/mobility sessions). Movement quality and efficiency is improved on court, and the players are fresher come the end of games. As a team of coaches, the S&C team has brought into the fundamentals of correct functional movement and as such embrace and push the prehab programmes for the players.
Similarly, there has to be understanding from my end as a clinician. If I don't understand the mechanics of a squat/clean/jerk/deadlift/etc, I can't make comment on the way an athlete moves in the weights room and therefore it's transfer to the way they move on court/on pitch and their subsequent injury predisposition. As a medical profession we need to wholeheartedly buy into the need for load in the athletic population. Load is good if administered correctly, because without overloading athletes, they won't ever progress, no matter how well they move. For me, it's this lack of understanding of loading that creates the friction between the two camps - people are too quick to dismiss load as all being bad and unsafe. Some examples:
- I just recently heard someone being told by a physiotherapist that they shouldn't stretch when they have DOMS as it's the bodies way of telling us it's damaged and stretching will damage it further. Aside from the fact that we still don't know definitively the cause of DOMS, if this was the case, no athlete would ever do anything the day after a training session. How do expect to create overload if the athlete never trains?!
- "Snatches are unsafe because the bar is unstable overhead", I was once told. True. But you think that 30 blokes running into each for 80 minutes is safer? A well coached lift is much safer than the non-sterile environment of a game of rugby.
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