Hi, guys. It's time for a new episode of the FAKTR podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle. Welcome, and thanks for listening. Today, you are in for a real treat as we welcome back one of my favorite guest instructors, doctor Tom Teeter, for a new 2 part series titled unlocking elite performance, strategies to transform your sports practice. We start off with a deep dive into the 6 stages of rehabilitation from acute management to fundamental capacity, and discuss why it's important to transition from a local to a global view when addressing the function of any exercise or movement based treatment. Doctor Teter goes on to explain that a common pain point in traditional clinical rehab is stopping care once pain is relieved rather than ensuring full performance readiness. He explains why this is a problem and what you should do instead.

This is one series where I promise you you'll want to hang on every word, whether you currently treat athletes or are just exploring the concept of becoming a performance focused health care provider. Let's cue the intro music and get started.

My name is doctor Tom Teeter. I have practiced for around 19 years in Kansas City, Missouri until my family made a big move, across the pond, and now we're over coming to you from Valencia, Spain. So I appreciate everyone taking the time to listen. I really wanted to spend some time talking about how you can go about just shifting some of your mindset and shifting the your perspective in the way that you're looking at things and how that can affect the way that we work with athletes. So if we take a look, historically, in the chiropractic profession, there's a really broad spectrum of providers who have a really wide variety of skill sets. Now one of the main reason that we have this is because we have a really broad scope of practice. And having this really broad scope of practice has allowed practitioners to gravitate towards a lot of different specialties. We tend to see things in pediatrics.

We think see specialties in geriatrics. We see general family practice, wellness practices. And amongst some of these populations that we are seeing chiropractors treat is athletic or athletes who participate in sports. And for some time, this has really been one of the fastest growing initiatives of practice with many of our chiropractic colleagues. So when we talk about sports, I mean, there are multitude of sports that people participate in. Some are are well known, some are a little more obscure, but you can see here that in each of these sports and things like MLS or professional soccer or football, where I'm at, track and field, tennis, basketball, professional baseball, or American football. We have chiropractors that work in all of these fields. Even we have a slew of chiropractors who work with Olympic level athletes.

And so chiropractic has has really done a good job of integrating itself into working with athletic populations. Now although this niche of sports chiropractic has grown a lot over the last few years, there's still a lot of challenges, in my opinion, that we have to overcome in order to maximize our ability to best serve the athletes and athletes under our care. Now even though we've made a lot of great strides in expanding our exposure within the world of athletics, we still have a few shortcomings that can limit our ability to really fully express our place within a team of individuals that treat athletes. Now because of these deficiencies that we're gonna discuss here shortly, I feel like we're limiting ourselves from helping our athletes reach their peak physical potential, and ultimately, achieving optimal performance. So one of the things that I often hear when I when I teach courses or when I have discussions with other colleagues in not only chiropractic but in other fields in musculoskeletal care is there's this concept of all of us are really trying to find a way to bridge the gap between what we would classify historically. If you look at this picture on the left of this diagram, which would be sports medicine, and on the right, which would be classified typically as sports performance. And usually there's just a big gap that exists between the professionals that operate in that area. And as sports chiropractors, one of the things that we've really tried to do as far as niching ourselves is trying to find some way which we can bridge the gap between sports medicine and sports performance.