#104 - Rebuilding Better Athletes: The System Every Sports Clinician Needs with Dr. Tom Teter, Part 2

Welcome to The Factor Podcast, where we talk about the stuff they didn't teach you in school, how to grow your practice, refine your clinical skills, and get better results for your patients. We're here to help you navigate the real-world challenges of being a healthcare provider, from delivering top-notch patient care to running a business that doesn't run you into the ground. Whether you're fresh out of school or scaling your practice, we're diving into effective cutting-edge treatments to get patients better faster. We'll also talk about business strategies and tactics to help you work smarter and not harder, and the mindset shifts required to thrive as a top performer in your field so you can build a career you love without burning out. If you're ready to learn what works and what doesn't from leading experts, industry innovators, and respected clinicians across a wide range of specialties, you're in the right place, my friend. Let's dive in.

Hi there, welcome back to The Factor Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle. If you tuned in last week, you heard the first half of my conversation with Dr. Tom Teeter, where we unpacked the disconnect between rehab and performance and why so many traditional care models leave athletes underprepared and at risk for reinjury. Today, in part 2 of our conversation, we dig even deeper into what comes after pain relief. Dr. Teeter introduces us to the framework behind his Clinical Human Performance Practitioner certification. Including the 2 audit systems he's developed to guide both clinical care and performance training. You'll also learn how his model helps eliminate confusion on integrated teams, establishes clear roles between providers, and ensures athletes transition seamlessly from rehab to full performance. This episode is full of practical, real-world applications you can take straight into your practice or team environment.

That's huge. That's the first time I've heard someone so eloquently lay out exactly how that sports med team goes. And obviously, it's not just the sports med team, but it's that, that entire integrated team that is responsible for those players and that team. Achieving whatever goals they have. So I think that's huge. And how does this framework that you explained in terms of the clinical audit process, the fitness audit process, has that provided just a better level of— and I don't want, like, oftentimes when practitioners hear you use the word system, they're afraid that you're talking about cookie-cutter care, right? Because we've all unfortunately encountered practitioners that really just give every single patient the exact same treatment every single time they come through their doors, whether that's for financial reasons or just lack of knowledge or otherwise. So how does having a system or framework still allow you the flexibility to make those clinical decision-making decisions for each individual patient? Like, does it, does it help still allow for that flexibility, or— Do you feel like it also can kind of serve as a way to help guide younger, newer practitioners that are still getting started with all that?

All the above. Let me give you a really— I'm the king of really bad analogies, so I'm going to give you a bad analogy. I think of it like bumper bowling, right? If you and I go bowling and we put the bumpers up, those are the frameworks to make sure the ball doesn't get outside the lane. We need the ball to stay on the lane.

Yeah.

How you roll the ball is entirely up to your experience and your expertise and your comfort, right? But you have to know that this is the lane, here's my boundaries, and by having an operational framework, it doesn't allow you to throw the ball out. I mean, it's gonna be really hard, but you can't throw the ball outside the lane. How you roll the ball is entirely up to your education, how the techniques you use. It's entirely up to your professional designation, Are you a chiropractor? Are you a physical therapist? Are you athletic trainer? Are you a massage therapist? It's up to your education and it's up to your experience. I'm not telling you how to do technique X. I'm telling you where to use the techniques that, you know, in a structure of a system that gets you from point A, which is acute management, to point B, which is back on the field.

Now, on a day-to-day basis, what does something like this look like when it comes to that patient experience? Because I know, If I'm looking at all of these steps in the framework, if I'm looking at all these checkboxes I have to go through, I might be seeing time ticking up in my head, right? Like, I can't spend 2 hours with every patient. How do I implement this into my practice in a way that still allows me to be very efficient with my care?

Yes.

Give the patient exactly what they need, but then not have me hamstrung by 2 and 3-hour-long appointments with every single patient?

Yeah, well, the simple answer to that is build a team. You need, you need a process structure and build a team. Let's use our ankle patient again. Maybe the ankle patient acutely comes in with, with an ankle sprain. I'm making this up, but maybe they need laser and taping, and then they need manipulation and tissue work, and then isometrics, right? So if you have a team in your office, and I know in most states in America, in most states you can have a chiropractic assistant, and a lot of times that can be an athletic trainer, or it can also be— and on some ends of the spectrum, it could be a strength coach, right? So what we ended up doing in one of the environments I was working in was we would have the athletic trainer come in, do laser, and sometimes they would tape, sometimes I would tape, but they would come in and do laser and taping.

Mm-hmm.

I would do manipulation and tissue work, and that visit might take 15 minutes, and then I would hand— they would come to him first, Then they would come to me, then we would hand them off to the strength coach for isometrics and motor control, and then the other part of the equation. So if you have the right team of people, someone could be in your office for an hour, but you're only seeing them for like 15, 20 minutes depending on how your, how your style of practice is.

Mm-hmm.

I think part of the confusion when I have this conversation is that people feel like they're going to be doing all of this in their office, and that's not always the case. I'll be honest, I typically would do a huge chunk of this myself. It's not the smartest business decision in the world, but I did it because I liked it.

Yeah.

And that's where I really drew inspiration. It was my passion. Like, I wanted to control every aspect of that equation, so I was okay with not making as much money because I wanted to be able to do most of that myself. But then I was in other environments where it was more about a business decision of how can we still provide this care And everyone maximized their timeframe. So if I'm only seeing a patient for 15 minutes, but they're seeing the athletic trainer first and the strength coach after, I could see 4 people in an hour. That's really maximizing my time.

Yeah.

So how you do this in real life is depending on the style of practice that you want to have or the environment that you're in and/or the team that you build around you. You can't do all this— you could do all this yourself, but it's going to be like an hour visit. And that's not really the most economically advantageous or financially motivating decisions to be able to run a really effective practice.

So let's talk a little bit about fitness and kind of ongoing fitness training or ongoing progressions of fitness with your patients. While you mentioned that sometimes in the short run, it's not always the most profitable decision to have Longer treatment visits or longer visits and things like that. Do you feel like you've been able to effectively utilize fitness as a strategy for continuing the interaction with patients, continuing to engage patients after they're out of pain?

Yes, I think there's a part there too, is it's not a great advantageous decision for, for one Chiropractor to do all this in one visit.

By themselves.

Yeah, by themselves, because I knew that I was giving up time for money and I was fine with that. However, one of the things I found super effective, and it's a big trend that we're seeing in chiropractic, is this idea of chiropractors owning their own gyms, right?

Or—

and I'm trying to— I'm really sorry, I'm blanking on the term I want to use, but it's like—

Kind of like a hybrid model.

Oh, clinic-gym hybrid. That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah, clinic-gym hybrid. It's hugely popular. Why? Because if you want to maximize your time and your license, you can then do acute management kinematics and motor control in a short amount of time. And then once the people are out of pain, you keep them building their physical capacity and introducing and improving physical qualities by putting them in a structured program in the gym. And then you hire a really good strength coach to manage that for you. And then what do we call that? We call that clinical co-management.

Yeah.

Because just because they're not on the table anymore doesn't mean we're still not involved in the process. The thing I want to point out is in order for that to work, you need a system.

Yeah.

And that's one of the reasons why we created this. I spent the majority of my 20 years in practice when I was in the United States in a gym. And I got to meet and work with a lot of really, really amazing personal trainers. And one of the reasons why I felt like my practice was so successful Yeah. Is because I had 2 or 3 trainers that I trusted, and we had conversations, and I trained them and trained with them, and we really thought on the same page. And then when I handed the person off, I was like, hey, they need this, this, and this. And they're like, cool, I got it. And because we were working off the same template of training, I knew exactly what was going on. Or if one of those people got hurt, they got hurt saying we were doing a squat, I know how to reverse engineer that and what I needed to check in the clinic. So if you want to really maximize time, start— open a gym and own and control those processes. Not to say you have to do that, but I think that's one of the ways you can really maximize your license. And that's one of the things I was thinking about this yesterday in preparation for this talk. It's like, I think one of the challenges we have as chiropractors is we feel like, or we've been pigeonholed into thinking, our license is tied up in manipulation. It's gotten better over the last like 15 to 20 years since I've started practice. And now we're seeing people branch out into soft tissue and needling and rehab and all these really amazing things. But if you look at the scope of our license in almost every state, human performance is really everything we can do. There's nothing that says we can't do strength and conditioning because exercise is within our scope of practice. There's nothing that says that we can't do monitoring and recovery because that's in our scope of practice.

Right.

So if we really want to maximize our license, then we shift our focus just from rehab into this broad realm of human performance, and then we just build a team of people using an operational system that allows everyone to function in the same umbrella.

I love that. So, and something you said there is something that I think is often overlooked and something that doesn't get enough attention, and that is recovery. And how important recovery is as part of all of this.

Yeah.

So speak to me a little bit about how you feel like healthcare providers can really have an effect on helping their patients recover better as part of their strategy for continual improvement.

Because if you're not recovering, if you're not taking the time to do what you need to do before you get to the next level, I feel like that's where Yeah, so I fast-forwarded through some slides so I can show you this picture, and I'm gonna apologize in advance because I know you're not going to be able to read this, and that's okay. But I want to use it as a point because one of the things we talk about in class— we have a lot of information on managing stress and promoting recovery. Recovery is the single most important thing we can do because one of the things I teach in the class is everything we do is about biology and physiology. We're talking about physiology. We're talking about introduction of stress and how we respond to stress through the general adaptation syndrome, right?

Mm-hmm.

So if we're going to efficiently have people train and have them recover appropriately, we need to have a way we can monitor their stress. And here on this diagram on the left is everything we do for acute monitoring, subacute monitoring, and chronic monitoring of an athlete. And then everything on the right is what we do for recovery. And that includes sleep, nutrition, hydration, supplementation, regeneration, movement, and different variations of altering your training program. And so we came up with this algorithm here where we can tell you on the left what we're doing to monitor the stress, and when it gets abnormal or into overtraining, here's the things on the right we're going to do to help them recover. And all of those things I just said fall into our scope of practice. Sleep? Absolutely. Nutrition and supplementation and hydration? Of course. Then you have regeneration, which is— regeneration is really like some of the more fancy tools that we might use, like contrast therapy, pneumatic compression, vibration percussion, like some of the stem, some of those things that— those trendy tools that we might use, but they have a place at some point.

Mm-hmm.

And then we have movement as a tool, and then alteration of training. All of those things fall under our scope of practice. So what I want to get across in this course is like, it's not just about the chiropractic or the just the clinical part of where we want to live with manipulation. If that's where you want to live, God bless you, like be awesome at manipulation. But just know why all this stuff is important, build a team around you, and know the parts of the structure that you're going to involve yourself in. But our license really do allow us To be on the spectrum of human performance. So why not take advantage of it? And one of the things we spend an enormous amount of time talking about in the course is monitoring and promoting recovery.

Absolutely. Where do you feel like there's confusion? And you can speak to this from the general population perspective. You can speak to this from the perspective of the fitness community or even the healthcare community. Where is there confusion between rehab and fitness?

Say that one more time. Where's the confusion between rehab and fitness? Is that the question?

Yeah, between like the definitions, the definitions of what is rehab, what is fitness, what is that gray area in between, and where— I, I don't want to say where should each live, so to speak, but there is, there seems to be some gray area between the two.

Yeah. So I think there's 2 parts to that. If we look at just the textbook definition, rehab is restoring lost function, right? Your ankle was sprained. It's not functioning the way it was intended. We need to get that back. I'd like to change the definition of rehab. Not only are we restoring lost function, but we're restoring fitness, right?

Mm-hmm.

Because they still need to be fit enough and have the physical qualities to do the task. that they're being demanded in sport, and they need to be able to get their joints in the right positions to absorb stress and adapt to the stressors of training, right?

Mm-hmm.

And, and, and so I think the definitions don't entirely still fit the way that I like to view this. And then I think the other thing, to answer your question, I'd like to show you another diagram if I can. Sorry, I'm kind of going around the diagram, but I think where we lack a common— the gap exists Because there's a gray area, but right after motor control and right before functional integration and strength training that no one knows what to do, essentially. And one of the things I've found is that we kind of lack a common language. In rehab, we tend to use movement as our language, and in strength and conditioning, we tend to use forces as our language, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so there's a confusion on how we disperse the work because we don't share a common language. Now, it is true that movement intersperses throughout sports medicine and rehab and sports performance, but I don't think that's the language that really is pervasive in the way that we need to be describing this. So one of the things that I did was I came up with this concept that we have here on the screen called the rehab continuum. Now, again, the rehab— there's 6 stages of rehab: acute management, foundational kinematics, motor control, functional integration, Progressive kinetics and fundamental capacity. You can see those along the top underneath where it says rehab continuum. Then one of the things I started thinking about is I am a firm believer that everything we do is based on physiology and everything has some type of stress response in the system. Now, we also need to rethink how we describe stress. What I'm describing is the concept of load. Some external burden that's being placed on the biological organism, that's called load. How our body responds to that is called stress through the general adaptation syndrome, right? So what I wanted to come up with was a common language that we can use across the rehab continuum regardless of profession that uses load as the common denominator. And so what I then did was I took the most common interventions that we did in each of those stages of care. And I ranked them from the lowest systems load to the highest systems load. And one of the things that really drew me to this, it's kind of a strange story, but I woke up one morning, and this is a true story, at 2:30 in the morning because I had this idea. For months I was trying to figure out a way to describe load as the common denominator. And then I thought, why— it's the periodic table. Periodic table is a way to rank your elements. And then you organize them in like classes. And then you rank them from the highest— the lowest systems load in the top left to the highest systems load in the bottom right. It's like, well, why won't we do the same thing for our interventions that we use in each of these stages of care? So, for instance, if I'm in acute management, if I'm sitting here telling you your diagnosis and educating you on things you need to do, that's a really low systems load, right?

Mm-hmm.

Versus in acute management, maybe I'm doing something like acoustic waves. That's a pretty high systems load.

Right.

And so I took each intervention that we do in these stages of care and I ranked them based on the load of the system. And then we did that throughout the entire rehab spectrum of care. So if we look at acute management, we have education, diaphragmatic breathing, dynamic taping or any version of taping, cold laser or red light therapy. We have dry needling and/or electrical stimulation. We have vibration, percussion, and acoustic wave. That's all the stuff we typically do in acute management. Then in kinematics, we do myofascial decompression, cupping. We do compression flossing or factor flossing. We can do direction-specific movement and/or we call that McKenzie. We can do nerve flossing, neurodynamics. We can do joint mobilization or joint manipulation. Obviously, mobilization is going to be a lower systems load. And then we do any variation of soft tissue therapy, whether it's like deep tissue, Stecco-type work, active release. We can do instrumentation, ISTM. These are All the things that we do. Now, if we were doing really aggressive soft tissue manipulation, that's probably a higher systems load than compression flossing, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so, that's how I kind of started looking at things was now load is the common denominator. If we look at motor control, we have positional isometrics, we have developmental and positional stabilization, which we call DNS, or variations of DNS, grip, et cetera. We have pails and rails from functional range conditioning. We have combined loading, eccentric loading, and then blood flow restriction, right? So these are all the things we can do under motor control. If we just continue adding load, now if we get into functional integration, this is just general physical preparation. And so we can do fundamental patterns of movement, strength training with progressions for resistance training of the upper body, trunk and spine, and lower body, and then aerobic endurance, right?

Mm-hmm.

These are all just general physical preparation, which is the first stage that we typically go through in strength or resistance training. Then we get into progressive kinetics where we're talking about explosive power or recycling power, sprinting, jumping, and throwing, and/or Olympic lifting. So this is just rate of force development.

Mm-hmm.

And then the last one is fundamental capacity where we're working on reaction time, sport-specific skill, agility, change of direction, and more capacity. So all I did was take all the interventions that we typically see regardless of provider, put them in the stage of care that's like We're classifying like elements and then rank them in a score of load, a theoretical score of load from 1, the lowest systems load, to the highest systems load. So now when I'm having conversations with a provider, I don't care what your designation is. We have a common language that we're looking at the load that's being put into the system, because if we overload the system or we put in the wrong load at the wrong time, we're going to have an adverse reaction. So if we want to continue to make long-term physiological adaptation, We have to give them the right amount of load at the right time for the right person. And now that we've created this common language of load, we have something that we can all use to determine if we're making the right decisions.

Are you a clinician, trainer, or performance coach who's tired of seeing the gap between rehab and real performance care? Then let me introduce you to the Performance Practitioner. A free Substack newsletter created by Dr. Tom Teeter of Rehab to Fitness. In this newsletter, Dr. Teeter brings you into his system for bridging the divide between rehabilitation and fitness, using structured, data-driven strategies to help athletes recover, perform, and stay resilient. Each week you'll get practical insights on things like integrating rehab and strength training, smart loading strategies for recovery and performance, real-world case studies, and even myth-busting breakdowns of what's actually working in human performance. Whether you're managing injuries or optimizing your athletes, this is a must-read for providers who want to challenge outdated models and redefine their methods. Subscribe today at theperformancepractitioner.substack.com or visit the link in our show notes and start thinking more critically Practicing more intelligently and delivering better outcomes. Let's build better athletes together.

Drop the mic. That was amazing. It never fails to amaze me how your brain works and how you were able to kind of see the matrix on this. Because what I think is important and what I've experienced many, many, many years throughout business education— obviously, I'm not a clinician, but on the business side, I'm an avid learner and have done lots of trainings over the years, frameworks are so important. Having a system, having a framework, having a way to describe something, and having a common language are really the way that you can have that interpersonal dialogue with other healthcare providers. And like you said, kind of have a common, common language to use and a way to describe things. So looking at the rehab continuum, talk to me about CHPP and kind of where we pick up with this course from what is often taught on the clinical side when it comes to dealing with people in pain?

Yeah, none of the, none of the things that we're learning changes. We're just adding stuff to the equation. So this is an outline, what you're seeing on the screen. This is an outline of what the current version of the, the CH— the Clinical Human Performance Practitioner course looks like. The very first thing we talk about We call it Laying the Foundations, or the Foundations of Fitness and Human Performance. We talk about the current definitions of rehab and fitness and what we think they should look like in regarding to function and performance. Then we talk about the physiology of stress because that's everything that we do. Then we talk about how to prevent— the best ways to prevent injury. And then we talk about practical principles for managing movement. So this is like setting the table, right? We're going to tell a story. We're setting the table. Then we talk about how to create a system, right? And that goes through the structural or the operational algorithm, how to create an integrated support team, how to use our operational algorithm, and then the clinical audit process and the fitness audit process. So once we have a system that we can operate from, then we need to know how to establish a baseline, right? So we're going to talk about health screening, breathing screening, movement screening. And then fitness testing. So we need to know what you can currently do before we start creating a plan. Then once we have a baseline, then we teach you how to build a plan, right? So this is strategic programming. So we go through a programming taxonomy. So you start at the highest level function and we work all the way up, all the way down to the gritty details.

Mm-hmm.

Once we have a plan, we really have to have a firm understanding of biomechanics. So we go through 5 modules on the biomechanics of exercise. It's not a compendium on biomechanics, but it's just the ins and outs of the smallest things you need to know in order to make this system work.

Mm-hmm.

Once we do that, then we get into the nuts and bolts of what we would typically do during a training session. So we talk about restoring control. One of the things that we have is a training template where we talk about the 6 Ps of training. If you're going to create a structured performance program with someone, you typically have what we call prime, Prep, power, push, propel, and promote. First thing we talk about is prime. This is how you restore motor control in people who have painless dysfunction. Then we talk about prep. How do you prepare people for activity? The specific ways we can warm someone up and how we do that. We have progressions for how we warm people up. Then we talk about cultivating power in either sprinting, jumping, or throwing, because those are the main things that we use typically when we're working athletics. And then once we get through power, then we start talking about strength training. So we're going to find ways to increase your strength with resistance training through the upper body, trunk and spine, and lower body. And we have a series of progressions I can show you shortly of how that works. And then we talk about developing capacity. So that's— so we have prime, prep, power, push. This is propel, right?

Mm-hmm.

And this is conditioning. And then promote is how we go about the things we talked about earlier with monitoring stress, and managing recovery. So we're literally teaching you the after motor control, here's everything you need to get to know. We're giving you the system to be able to operate in acute management kinematics and motor control, but you probably have learned some of that on your own through your clinical chiropractic education or some of the continuing education courses that you've taken on your own. We're just giving it structure and telling you when to use what and with whom. Then the last thing we have in this is we have a really, like I said, robust core or modules on monitoring stress and recovery. And then the very last module is how to tie it all together. We teach you start to finish how to use a model. We call it Living the Model. And then we give you 6 different case studies with different athletic sports to show you how a real patient came in and how we walked them through all of these stages of care and what exercises we chose.

Mm-hmm.

How we went about doing that, etc. A lot of times it doesn't do you any good to tell you how to do this stuff if you don't see it done in real time.

Mm-hmm.

So what we're really trying to teach— the way I kind of came up with some of this is sports chiropractic. Right now we have the CCSP, which is phenomenal, right? But then the question I always have— always had the people that ask me is like, well, what do I do after that? After kinematics or motor control, like, there's still more to the puzzle. And that's why we have the gap, because we didn't have a clear path for education after we release people from MMI or we get done with motor control. And that's where we pick up. We're just teaching you the rest of the puzzle. We're not trying to replace the strength coaches on your team. If you have, if you have one on your integrated support team, this tells you how to communicate with them. It gives you suggestions of things you can have conversations with them about. It gives you examples of different variations of exercises you can use. with those coaches to help slowly progress people over time. It's another way that we create a common language with our colleagues. What we're trying to do is teach the after, and that's, I think, what you and I both have agreed is kind of missing from the piece of the puzzle with human performance and clinical education for chiropractors.

Absolutely. And I think something that is really important that you've kind of spoken about throughout this is, is kind of shifting the mindset from Kind of a technique-focused approach, right, to a load-focused approach to care. And what you showed on the rehab continuum had specific techniques or modalities or treatments that practitioners might have in their toolbox. But then when it comes to this next phase, picking up where we leave off with motor control and really getting people to the next level, it really has a shift in mindset from just looking at different techniques and tools and treatments that you can throw at someone to really look at over time improving that capacity and, and progressing through load. Would that be a fair statement?

Yeah, I, I think I've— what I would challenge people to do, I think, is I, I don't necessarily think in terms of— I want to go back to that chart if I can— but I don't think in terms of techniques anymore because the intervention or the technique I use is just The delivery system I use to put load into the system to get whatever adaptation I'm looking for. You still have to learn techniques and learn interventions, but we get this kind of isolated silo mindset when you're like— I can't tell you how many times I've met other colleagues and they're like, I'm a grassland guy, I'm a DNS guy, or I'm an MPI guy. I'm like, cool, that's a delivery— it's like a drug, that's a delivery system. How are you titrating the dose?

Yeah.

So I think of everything in a dose response relationship, and the only way we can communicate that is through load, right? We do it, we do it in medication with dosage. We do it in this idea of this theoretical framework we've created for the rehab continuum. We do it through load. And so if we can shift from just thinking about these isolated techniques, because at the end of the day, if I need to, to, let's say, move a joint, if a joint's stuck and I need to move it, Mm-hmm. I have to decide, do I want to disperse a low systems load with some gentle grade 1 mobilizations, or do I want to bring the thunder with a really aggressive manipulation? I have to make that choice, and I need to base that choice on the person in front of me. If someone's really acute, probably bringing the thunder might be more than their system can tolerate at this point, and it might be a better idea to choose something with a lower systems load that's going to give us the same therapeutic effect. And so that's kind of— I don't think in terms of techniques per se. I just think of the load that I'm imparting into the system, and the technique is just the delivery system to get the therapeutic outcome I'm looking for.

Absolutely. And so when it comes to this course in particular, and I know, guys, that we're kind of at the 1-hour mark, so I certainly want to open up the floor to questions. We would really love to kind of hear from you. We've talked a lot about the foundational aspects of the Clinical Human Performance Practitioner program. We've Introduce this concept of really looking at your patients from a performance standpoint and from a load standpoint, as opposed to just specific techniques or trying to help them when it comes to only dealing with pain and dysfunction. But I'd like to hear from you guys. I know we have a few of you that are joining us here live in the room. There are more of you that are going to be joining this in the recorded replay. Do you have any questions for Dr. Teeter or any thoughts? We did have someone chat in a little minute ago talking about they had a patient that had a high ankle sprain tear in his, and I'm probably going to butcher this, bear with me. He had a high ankle sprain tear in his syndesmosis anterior inferior tibiofibular ligament.

Mm-hmm.

Had surgery, the ortho cleared him to his work duty, and now he's been cleared again to run and play soccer. And this practitioner was just saying that they really appreciate Factor and they really appreciate the education we've provided from a rehab standpoint. Because they have work to do, but they bounce back quickly. Having these skills and having this understanding of progressing someone back to sport is, is so important. Another question that someone asked about was, what would you suggest in terms of the type of equipment or the type of tools, or—

Yeah.

If I want to become a clinical human performance practitioner, What do I need to be prepared for in terms of my practice and kind of the tools of the trade, so to speak, that I need to have on hand?

Yeah.

Do I need to have a whole gym?

Yeah, I'm gonna break down the 2 parts. Okay, what I like to tell when I get messages from clinicians asking the same question, so what I like to do is I give them this diagram right here, the rehab continuum. I want you to take a red Sharpie and I want you to— and I give them the key so they know what everything is. I want you to check off the boxes that you currently have a technique or you have equipment to do X. And what it does is it quickly shows you your blind spots. Now, the second thing I do is I say, take a blue marker, and I want you to check off the boxes where you have a relationship with someone that you can communicate with and collaborate with regularly that can do X thing.

Mm-hmm.

And so then what you're left with is your entire blind spot, the things you need to learn Or maybe equipment you need, right? So we can, like, you can break that up into 2 parts where it's like, what clinical equipment do I need? It depends on what your clinical education is. I mean, and for instance, you're probably going to need some tape, right?

Mm-hmm.

You, I would probably recommend if you're going to work with athletes, you have some type of red light therapy or cold laser. You might want to get some needling and some electrical stim. And then if you can afford it, obviously acoustic wave is Legit. You might need some cups, some floss, some bands, some instruments, etc., like Factor Instruments, Factor Floss, right? And then obviously the rest of it is how you want to piece it together. You can get away— I did a whole— in my old— one of my old practices, like, you can get away with super simple equipment in a very small space. I had a space that was, I believe, like 380 square feet. And that was what I used as my first performance space. And I, I bought a simple rack with a bench, a set of adjustable dumbbells, a bar and some plates and bands and different various yoga blocks and things like that. And you can get away with a really small footprint. You don't need a whole gym to do a lot of this stuff. And that's where it comes back to is like, what do you want your practice to look like? You can go as far as, for instance, like I see down at the bottom here, Travis Rogers, who's a colleague of ours who's taken this course and they're implementing it. And I want to give like high fives and kudos to those guys because they're doing exactly what the system says. And I believe that they're both practicing out of a gym. I don't think they own the gym, but they found a space in which they can collaborate. And that would be the other thing I would say is one of my practices, I had a, I had a small room.

Mm-hmm.

It was maybe 250 square feet, but I was in a gym and I collaborated with those people. So really my office was like 8,000 square feet because I had the whole entire gym space to do whatever the hell I wanted.

Mm-hmm.

And so you don't have to have all this stuff yourself. Go out and form relationships with business owners who have either the techniques and interventions you need or the space that you want. And I think if you go in and explain things the way that we've tried to explain things today, We're trying to make your people better, and I need the space and the tools to do that. If you want to build out a gym, man, go for it. It's not— I don't think there's a better time to be a gym owner running a system like this, because if you do it well, it can be very financially profitable. If you do it poorly, it obviously can be detrimental. So the answer, like, the answer about equipment is it just depends on what, what, what do you want to do? How much space do you have? And can you find other people that can do the things that you can't do? I think we actually in the course have an entire list of every piece of equipment that we use. We have a simple list of stuff you can buy just for your office that doesn't take up a lot of space. And then we have like an expanded list that's like, hey, if you want to have a gym space, here's all the stuff that we would recommend you possibly buy.

I love that. Absolutely. Someone else was asking here about what your thoughts are in How you utilize this knowledge base when you do travel with teams. So let's say you're on a support staff and you travel with a professional team, you travel to large events like the Olympics, World Games, et cetera. How does a lot of this knowledge base factor into that? And how can that be an advantage for you when you are working on the road like that, so to speak?

So I want to break that into 2 parts too. And the number one part of that is I personally don't travel with a lot of teams. I did it early on. It's not my favorite thing to do. I much prefer being the person behind. It's like, hey, let's figure out why you can't squat. Let's figure out what qualities that you don't have that's preventing you from doing X. I would probably direct that question to Dr. Little.

Mm-hmm.

I think he's the perfect person to answer that question. But the second part of the question is, how can you use the system when you're working with teams on the road? By following the system. We've given you the algorithm to have these conversations. You designate when you have— I know, I, I literally was just listening to the podcast with Dr. Riddle and Dr. Stark yesterday when I was walking my dogs, and one of the things they talked about was how they go about collaborating with other professionals on their team.

Mm-hmm.

Because they're using the system, right? Everyone knows their role. You use the things In this diagram here that you feel comfortable with, and then you find other people to be on the team that can do the other parts that you don't know how to do or you don't want to do.

Yeah.

So it doesn't change whether you're traveling or not. It changes more on where do you feel comfortable in the process. I don't mind traveling. I just, it's not, I know Dr. Riddle absolutely loves it and thrives in that environment. I much prefer being the behind-the-scenes guys like, hey, let's check biomechanics. Let's find out why you can't squat. Let's make you sprint faster. Let me work with the strength coach on some exercises we can give you to make sure you get back control in this range of motion. If you want to be the person that travels, do that. It's just not my— it's not my favorite thing, so I don't do it a lot unless I have to.

Absolutely. One final question for you, and guys, if you have any other ones, please chat those in, but I know we're getting a little long on time here. What do you— if you had a crystal ball, and you could look and see what's next for the human performance world, the trends that we're seeing. Obviously, I think the, the general population is more and more interested in ways that they can biohack themselves or shortcuts to wellness. Or what do you see in the next 5 to 10 years that is going to change within the world of human performance? If you could give a guess as to what you're seeing and what's coming in the future.

I don't know that I can guess, but I want to touch base on something you just said. There are no shortcuts to performance, right?

Yeah.

I, I get really annoyed, and I know I've had this conversation with Dr. Riddle and Dr. Marv. Like, people always want the fast track to fitness, the fast track to recovery. You know what the best thing you can do to recovery? It's not getting in some pneumatic compression boots and going into a cryochamber. It's making sure that you're sleeping 8 hours every night. And you get 5 to 6 REM cycles every night, and you're going to bed the same time every night, and you're getting your proper nutrition. It's the boring stuff that really gives us the biggest advantages. So there's all of these podcasts and the social media about biohacking. Well, I'm not trying to hack anything. I'm just trying to do the simple stuff that really gives me the best and most effective results.

Mm-hmm.

So I, I, I think I tend to get annoyed because if we look at people who are doing all these biohacking techniques, They're the same people who promote the grind lifestyle and they sleep 4 hours every night. The reason maybe why you do have to do more biohacking techniques is because your sleep sucks.

You're killing yourself. Yeah, slowly. Yeah.

What I think would be— so, well, I think what you'll start to see, human performance is not just for athletes. It's for— if anybody's concerned about their health, their longevity, like these are the things that we're talking about. It does not— everything I've just said to you does not change. Whether you're a grandma chasing their kids, a recreational athlete, or Patrick Mahomes, right? The only place that is different is your ending point. That's it, right?

Yeah.

And so I think we're going to start to see more people getting concerned about health, longevity, and performance. And then I'm also going to— we're going to think we're going to start to see more clinical institutions, particularly as an example in chiropractic. I say that recently I read that it Parker that just added Dr. Andy Galpin, one of America's foremost sports scientists, is the head of their Institute for Human Performance, right?

Mm-hmm.

So now even chiropractors are understanding why this is important. We need to talk about this stuff. If, if we can be at the forefront of how we're creating these systems and these educational processes, then people are going to not only— because right now what I think, people only think of us as we're either spinal manipulators, which is one camp, or we're just someone you go to when you're in pain. We've got so much more that we can offer outside of just that.

Yeah.

That I think if we come up with the right message and the right educational process behind it, we can really be part of that conversation. And it's just making the right relationships and having the right education process behind us.

I love it. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. This has been an incredible discussion. I know it's probably piqued interest for a lot of our attendees that have joined us live, and for those of you that are watching the recorded replay, we are very excited about this new program that we are launching. So we will be sending you additional information and links so you can check out the Clinical Human Performance Program for yourself. As Dr. Teeter mentioned, and we— I think we have screen that had the outline that kind of gave the 12 different topics or modules. So essentially you have a 1-year timeframe to complete 12 different course modules. And each of these vary in length depending upon the topic that's at hand, but every single one of them is fully online. It's self-paced and it offers a number of different lectures, whiteboard trainings. We have diagrams, charts, graphs, information, downloadables. We have research that supports everything that's in each of these modules, as well as tons and tons of exercise videos, demonstration videos where Dr. Teeter walks you through exactly what you do in that experience with your patient that you're walking through a specific progression or regression. It really is chock-full of tons and tons of content and great information, and it's something that you can take in your own time. You do have that full year to complete all 12 of the courses. And there's a specific learning path you can take to take them one at a time. Or of course, if you want to enroll in the full program, you unlock access to all of those. So we'll be including that information as a follow-up for all of those of you that registered for our webinar today, along with a special offer, because this course launches now. We're actually opening up registration now, and we're excited to kind of introduce this to the world. It has been a labor of love for quite some time for Everyone here on the Factor team, and of course Dr. Teeter, who has been the the brain behind all of this. Again, he's taken his full twenty plus years of not only clinical knowledge but also knowledge in the strength and conditioning world, and really poured that into this program, and really done a great job of condensing it down in a way that's easy to digest and easy for you to understand how to implement into practice right away. So. More information to come on that. Definitely check your inboxes for more details. And Dr. Teeter, thank you so much again. We really appreciate you being here today. Be sure to, guys, to tune into our Factor podcast. We have a new episode series launching in 2 weeks from now. So today's Friday, October 18th. We'll be launching exactly 2 Fridays from now. So not next Friday, but the Friday afterwards, a new 2-part series where Dr. Teeter is actually going to be talking a little bit more about this shift in mindset from being really focused more on kind of just that very rigid clinical model of what we now do from a rehab perspective with your patients and really shifting more to a performance mindset and how all of this factors into that. So definitely tune in for those 2 episodes as well. And Dr. Teeter, again, thank you so much for joining us.

And it's been my pleasure.

That wraps up part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Tom Teeter, and I hope you're walking away with a fresh perspective and a few light bulb moments on how we can better guide patients and athletes through a truly complete continuum of care. If today's episode sparked some curiosity and you're ready to learn more, check out the Clinical Human Performance Practitioner Certification. This comprehensive certification program is designed to help you integrate rehab and performance with a structured, evidence-informed system. Check out the link in our show notes to learn more. And if you want to hear more from Dr. Teeter, be sure to check out the show notes for a link to The Performance Practitioner, Dr. Teeter's free Substack newsletter for regular case studies, research insights, and strategies to help you sharpen your clinical thinking. Sign up at theperformancepractitioner.substack.com, or of course, check out that link in our show notes. If you enjoyed this 2-part series, be sure to like, follow, and share the show. And as always, you can find more resources and links in our show notes and at factorpodcast.com. That's factorpodcast.com. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, I encourage you to visit our website at factor-store.com. That's spelled F-A-K-T-R-store.com to find out more information about all that we have to offer. We have a variety of online offerings as well as our hands-on Factor Rehab System course scheduled in cities around the globe. Be sure to also check out our event calendar and bookmark any of these upcoming live webinar dates coming up in the near future so you can join us live. And of course, the biggest compliment we can receive is for you to help us spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and classmates. You'll find all the important links as well as info about our sponsors in the show notes, so be sure to check those out.