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Tag: activity progression

Visual diagram showing the journey through the Smith Performance Center system, including clinical phases of rehabilitation, activity progression, and performance development. Highlights each stage a patient moves through from initial injury to independent training and long-term success.

What are the phases at Smith Performance Center?

Craig Smith November 6, 2023

At Smith Performance Center, we focus on the main problem of the client. This focused process revealed a recurring set of problems that many of our clients experienced. This led to an overall process we call SPC Phases. There are 5 phases for our clients at Smith Performance Center: Diagnostics and Home Plan Development, Symptom Stabilization, Activity Progression, Exercise, Maintenance, and Monitoring, and Maximize Performance. Each phase consists of a main problem, the common challenges experienced by the clinician, coach, and client when managing your problem, steps to achieve along the way, and a promise for what you get when you complete the phase. We believe a clear process matters to your overall success. We want to explain the problem, common challenges, steps to achieve, and the promise. The Focus On A Problem The focus of a phase is the problem being solved.  In Diagnosis and Home Plan Development, we

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The 5 Common Modifiable Variables For Programming A Great Workout and Program

Craig Smith September 28, 2023

There are numerous modifiable variables in an exercise program that you can use to improve your workout experience, increase effectiveness, and make the workout more fun. A Modifiable Variable is anything you can manipulate in a workout program (which is literally everything) to change the challenge. It includes exercise choice, movement patterns, exercise pool, alternative exercises available, sets, reps, intensity, rest breaks, prep exercises, warm-up, exercise order, recovery activity, support exercises based on body response, and workout frequency. Our Team believes the most important initial modifiable variable is exercise choice, which is often not used well. This is one of the reasons we start with a movement assessment.  But all of these variables are important and have a huge impact on your experience and the likelihood of success with developing an exercise habit. Our team targets these variables beginning in activity progression and it remains a critical aspect of training

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The 5 Most Useful Tools for Progressing Your Workouts After an Injury

Craig Smith September 19, 2023

Too many fail in their effort to progress activity after an injury. You arrive at the gym feeling good but later in the day the low back soreness that has been feeling better comes back or the knee pain that seemed to be going away comes back with a vengeance after your second run.  The regression happened even when the workout felt easy and pain-free at the time. Why is this happening? Why is this phase of rehab frustrating?   It’s due to a fundamental mistake or what we call a violation of the rehab standard, which is training at exercise capacity, not tissue capacity. When individuals make this mistake, they start telling themselves stories like ‘I am getting too old,’ or ‘I guess I need to do something with less impact.’ However, the problem is not due to aging or the fact that the body can return to preinjury levels.

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The 7 Tissues to Consider When Progressing Activity After Physical Therapy

Craig Smith September 18, 2023

The Rehab Standard is an SPC concept that defines when a client has a higher exercise capacity than tissue capacity.   When your tissue capacity is lower than the exercise capacity, the focus of the workout is not how hard you worked out.  It is not how much you sweat or how good of a muscle burn you got. The focus is on the healing tissue and that is was not overloaded, irritated, or provoked.  A violation of the rehab standard can present as pain after the workout or the next day, even if there was no pain during the workout. The key is to focus on tissue capacity in the exercise selection, intensity, volume and the type of tissue injured. We want to look at this last one, the type of tissue injured, in relation to activity progression following an injury. The 7 Tissues to Consider When Progressing Activity Improving

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The 5 Big Problems Facing Clients with Pain and Injury Who Want to Get Back to an Active Lifestyle

Craig Smith September 1, 2023

There are numerous problems facing people in living an active, healthy life, but it can be difficult to articulate the problem that needs to be solved. Let’s look at two people dealing with low back pain. One person bent over this morning to grab a pencil and now cannot stand up straight. The second person developed back pain years ago and stopped doing certain movements because of discomfort. The pain is still present daily and they use a combination of meds, massage, and chiropractic to keep big flares up away. Their problems are different despite both dealing with low back pain. The solutions are very different. The person who just hurt their back needs a diagnosis and a home plan targeting healing strategies and triggers. This may mean more frequent visits and removing anything that makes their symptoms worse. We will likely see this person a few times per week

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The Injury Types That Are Mismanaged During Activity Progression

Craig Smith August 1, 2023

The rehab standard is simple; the limit to your exercise is not how hard you can work out, but rather working as hard as possible without going past your tissue capacity.  Our team sees violation of the rehab standard as the most frequent cause of failure during activity progression. A client will feel great and start to progress their workouts. There is no symptoms during the exercise and often no symptoms the same day, but the next day they feel horrible.  We know that in activity progression, you need to understand the type of tissue that is healing, the specific exercise, and volume. We also need to consider the type of injury: chronic, recurrent, and acute.  Chronic Injury For chronic, we mean is has been present for a long time. When you have a chronic injury or chronic pain, there are two issues: your exercise capacity is lower because it

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The 5 Components of Invisible Triggers That Cause Your Rehab Progress to Stall

Craig Smith June 14, 2023

You keep getting close to feeling good but then fall back into an injury because of a common, but often unrecognized issue – invisible triggers. An invisible trigger is an action or activity that does not seem to be causing your injury to worsen but is actually causing your injury to remain and not heal. If you slammed your finger into a door, you would know the door caused your pain.  Continuing to slam your finger in the door will cause the finger pain to remain. In contrast, an invisible trigger is not as clear as slamming your finger in a door. Patients have an easier time eliminating obvious triggers. This does not happen with invisible triggers. An example would be low back pain triggered by an interaction between two activities: running followed by a bout of sitting. When we investigate running by itself, there is no problem. We repeat

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The 6 Functional Exercises Tested During a Movement Assessment

Craig Smith May 2, 2023

A mistake in exercise programming that our team encounters is a heavy emphasis on variety in exercise, instead of movement pattern mastery. Our team does not focus on an endless array of exercises. The focus is on building depth in foundational movement patterns. These patterns make up every movement you perform when lifting. If these foundational movements are missing, advanced exercises will be wasted on poor form. You need to own the basic movements first. During the movement assessment, the 6 foundational movement patterns are assessed with 6 functional exercises from each movement pattern category. The movement assessment is where our strength coaches determine what may cause issues in your program: accountability, rehab standard, location/time, coaching need, and comfort level. The 6 functional exercises help our coaches determine your coaching need, if you have a tissue capacity issue (rehab standard), your comfort level with free weights, and what is the

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The 8 Reasons All HHP Clients Go Through a Movement Assessment

Craig Smith April 12, 2023

The Smith Performance Center team wants to be the best in the world at helping clients who want to maintain an active lifestyle. If you search the internet, this seems like a simple problem to solve. Just do this exercise or make sure to have protein after a workout. Problem solved.  This has not been our experience.  There is an entire area of research devoted to what behaviors keep people moving and what makes them stop. Keeping people active is not simple and there are numerous reasons why a person will stop. The purpose of the movement assessment is to figure out issues that will stop you from moving. There are clues in your history, how you move, how you hurt, and how you think that will help guide us. Here are the 8 reasons we do the movement assessment: Figure out what may lead to failure Determine the right

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Smith Performance Center Tucson

Tuck Jump Assessment for Physical Therapy

Craig Smith September 25, 2017

A review of our publications and the impact on physical therapy, injury screening, and protocol In the last few months, some of our research efforts in physical therapy, strength training, and injury screening have been published by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research and the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy along with a commentary in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine. The publications were focused on jumping test performance and the underlying methods. These tests are useful in a full rehabilitation program to determine readiness for activity, however, even the best tests have limitations that need to be understood. There is no such thing as a perfect test but we can use a variety of tests to gain a more complete perspective.  After a publication, it’s fun to look back at the results and figure out how to use them to improve the outcomes at Smith Performance

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Craig Smith