In the last blog post, we discussed how much ado has been made about injury prediction. To make injury prediction a feasible endeavor, though, we need to study the athlete in their environment like it is a complex-adaptive system (because it is).

When was the last time you ventured out on a trip using a good old fashioned roadmap and a pencil to mark out your route? I can remember my parents working at the dining room table before a long road trip to trace out the route they would take. A bunch of working rules or heuristics guided their decision making. For example, if you were traveling with little kids, you would probably need to plan for a break every few hours and, ideally, those locations would have toilets and space for a good run.

This is the final blog post in a four-part series on the Plantiga system and how it can help the individual patient, the athlete, the weekend warrior, the clinician, and the performance practitioner generate their own objective measures to optimize their health and manage recovery after injury.

As a physiotherapist working out of the Glen Sather Sports Medicine Clinic in Edmonton, AB I work with a large population of people (we’ll call them athletes here as most play sports anywhere from a national to recreational level) with knee injuries and have been lucky enough to spend a majority of my time on knee assessments and knee rehab.

In 2017, a reported 60 million Americans actively participated in regular, run-focused activities. With the exception of a few social and migratory animals, this seems to be a uniquely human pastime. Why is that? The answer to this question may reside in our evolutionary history. 

We’ve all heard that we should aim to walk at least 10,000 steps each day. While the number 10,000 originated from a 1965 Japanese marketing campaign, it is not far from the 7,500 steps per day that provide the majority of the reduction in mortality. The simple act of walking may seem trivial, but it is one of the most valuable steps we can take for our health (pun intended).