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271 | You Don't Fail Your Strength Test - You Learn From It · The ACL Athlete Podcast

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome everyone to the ACL Athlete Podcast.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is the podcast where we talk about everything related to the ACL, whether that's the injury itself, the rehab process, return to sport, and more.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Robbie Patel, performance physical therapist and coach.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Between myself and fellow guests and experts, you'll learn through the lens of the patient, the healthcare professional, and the coach.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: The goal of this podcast is to equip you, the athlete, with the education to make the best informed decision about your care and your ACL journey.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's dive into today's episode.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: What is up, team, and welcome back to another episode on the ACL Athlete Podcast.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So today we are talking about testing, specifically what testing actually is, what it's for, and why approaching it as a pass or fail situation is one of the worst things you can do to yourself mentally and honestly to your rehab.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get into it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: First, let me be clear about what I mean when I say testing, because I don't want your brain to immediately jump to one specific image of a machine or a single appointment.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Testing in ACL rehab is broad.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: It can be a strength assessment, which is where most people's heads go first.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: That might be isokinetic testing, which is the gold standard, where your leg is fixed in a machine and you're sitting in this big contraption, and it measures the torque output of your quads and hamstrings on each side, essentially assessing how strong they are.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it can also be isometric testing using a handheld dynamometer.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: This also can be called an inline dynamometer.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: We use a strength gauge.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, what this is is that you're going to have this handheld device that usually is connected to either chains or straps and is going to be anchored to your ankle.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where you kick into it, but it doesn't move.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you're able to essentially get a number that tells you how much your quad or hamstring kicks out or pulls based on this device.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now it might be on the device itself, it might be on the screen of a phone or some technology.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: But this thing has a load cell in it that is able to gauge how much is the weight of this or the force.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the same thing as like a weight scale.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same thing as what people use when they hold up their luggage and they have like a luggage crane scale.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is essentially measuring the weight of that.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what this is.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is more common to see in your typical physical therapy clinics.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's not as common to see the isokinetic machines, which can be called a HUMAC norm, a Cybex, or a Biodex.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the brand names, if you will.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Kincom, if you want an OG name and some archaic machines, which is what I used in PT school when we did ACL research testing for strength tests.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: But this is something that is not often accessible unless it's a surgeon's clinic, it's a hospital system, a big performance lab where they have the money and the space because this equipment is super expensive.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's like$50,000,$60,000 for people to have and purchase.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And many clinics are just not going to purchase this because of the expense.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's something where the inline dynamometers or the isometric testing gives us a great proxy of this.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the isokinetic is still the gold standard.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that would be the ideal pursuit.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't get that, then inline dynamometry or this isometric testing.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if that's not available, then maybe it's something that we're looking at from a gym-based perspective of a leg extension, leg curl, leg press, where you're looking at a three-rep max, a five rep max, and understanding where your strength actually lands relative to side to side.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the involved versus the uninvolved side and the symmetry.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if we're using isometric or isokinetic, then we can use it relative to your body weight because those are ways we can essentially do the math and measure it correctly.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just one area of testing that people can look at, which is commonly the thing we're referring to because it's probably one of the heaviest weighted because of strength being so important in this process, but is not often measured correctly.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: But testing can also be range of motion.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: It could be symptom profile tracking, looking at your swelling and pain, for example.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: It could be movement quality.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: There can be some subjective or some qualitative analysis on this.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Positions that you're looking to get into or can't get into, how you're loading through them.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: There could be areas of capacity work or endurance tests to see across different muscle groups and different movement patterns, such as a single leg squat to box, a calf raise, a single leg glute hamstring bridge, if you will.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: There are aspects of looking at rate of force development within specific muscle groups, power development as muscle groups or as a total movement.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's hop testing.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what I'm gonna say here is not the typical horizontal hop testing you will typically see because that's just honestly outdated stuff.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: We know that it doesn't necessarily tell us as much of the function of the knee and the contributions based on Katsufaki's research.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is something where jump testing looking more from a vertical perspective that allows us to see equal contribution of the hip, knee, and ankle.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so that is something that we are looking at throughout the process.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Agility, change of direction, deceleration, cutting, different assessments for these.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And these are all depending on where you are in the process, testing is going to look different.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not necessarily going to do this stuff at the beginning, but there might be some of the stuff you do at the end that you might not necessarily hit at the beginning.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to break down each one of these tests today.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the point of today.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: The point is that testing is not a single moment, it is a tool that runs through your entire rehab, and we need to talk about how you're relating to it.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And a quick side note here: if you are three or more months into your ACL rehab and nobody has put you on a single objective test in front of you, especially testing your hamstring or quad strength and putting a number to it besides kicking into their hand, that is a problem.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Might be time to have a real conversation with your physical therapist or find a new one.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just something, just some food for thought.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna digress here.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing I see over and over.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: I want to acknowledge it before I try to fix it here, because I think a lot of athletes deserve to have someone just say this out loud.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Testing feels heavy, it feels like a verdict, it's a pass, and you move forward, a fail, and you're sh stuck, right?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Or you're set back, or your timeline blows up, or you didn't do enough.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um that comes up that we talk through the expectations of that prior to.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: But honestly, this all makes complete sense of you know, this feeling of pass or fail, especially if you don't hit this X thing that we maybe have been setting our eyes on, then it feels like a failure, right?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like taking that step back or your timeline.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: You just kind of see the things you want to do getting further in the distance.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: By the time a major test day comes around, you have put in, you know, the months of work into this, typically weeks, especially.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: You have grinded through early post-op when nothing felt right.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: You've done the boring stuff, the painful stuff, the frustrating stuff, the stuff that people often don't see.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: You've shown up consistently.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, of course, when someone says we're going to test you or we're gonna assess this thing, your brain goes to what happens if I don't hit the number.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: The weight is real, and I am not going to dismiss that whatsoever.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: But here's where it comes from.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is an important context.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of athletes have come through a system, the traditional insurance-based, volume-driven physical therapy model, and you might be in it, where the only decision that really mattered was the discharge, the timeline.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the discharge was often not tied to readiness, it was tied to how many visits your insurance covered or how many weeks had passed.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: So athletes get conditioned without anyone even meaning to to think in binary terms.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: You graduate or you don't, you're cleared or you're not pass or fail, right?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this is also something that we're just kind of used to in school, too.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like we anticipate the bad score on the test.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's pass or fail, we move on, right?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: But in reality, a lot of these tests are rarely ever just this one pass or fail.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a whole host of tests and assessments.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, these all kind of weigh together over the course of a semester or a year or whatever that may look like.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very rarely like a licensing test or you know, a particular test that we would take that makes such a massive astronomical certification or licensing, if you will, to do X, Y, and Z.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, yes, there are certain time points like return to performance where we are looking at do you hit the proper criteria in many different aspects.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: But majority of the time in this process, that is not what we are looking at.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that this is important to understand that it's not just these pass or fail situations, it's just a system that has kind of trained you to think this way.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it's also not your fault that you walked into this with that framework already in your head.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the piece that most people don't talk about the psychological weight going into a test doesn't just affect how you interpret the result, it actually can impact the result itself.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: An athlete who walks into a testing session carrying that much anxiety may not give full effort or may physically underperform because of what they're carrying mentally before they even start.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: The pass or fail mindset isn't just emotionally expensive, it can make the data less accurate, which means we're making decisions off of incomplete information.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this is really important because I know a lot of athletes who, you know, it might be their first isokinetic or isometric test.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as they hear the word test, you know, it kind of triggers some anxiety or like pass fail feel.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: We try to, you know, talk through these as assessments versus testing, and the semantics are important for us as a team.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think in this process, as much as maybe people don't give weight to it, but then also knowing that there's a learning curve, it's a skill in and of itself, just knowing that, especially the first few times you do it, it might not be fully accurate.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: We also have to take into context you coming into that day, how you felt, the sleep, all the different kind of factors that can influence performance, especially in a in an assessment like this, right?
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: But let me give you two quick scenarios that show you why the binary doesn't hold up either way.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: ACLRA hits the threshold on their strength test.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Technically, they passed, but their last four retests have all been essentially flat.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: No real forward momentum, they just happen to land on the number.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Athlete B doesn't hit the threshold, but every single retest has shown improvement.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: The trend is clear and is going in the right direction.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Which athlete is actually doing better, right?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say pass the test in athlete A, they might have hit a certain threshold, but they're not all the way there, right?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: They're not cleared for everything.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Then you'd be like, yeah, they're cleared.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if they're flat at the best possible level, then that doesn't matter.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: But in reality, this is more so like, let's say they hit a certain threshold to be able to start running, but we're not necessarily back to a certain place where they could start doing on field or on court stuff.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if they're just kind of falling flat and they're not improving, then that's a challenge, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Even though their threshold might be a little higher compared to athlete B that is progressively improving every single test, right?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe most tests are improving, maybe not all of them, but they're seeing a positive trend in the right direction.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: The data tells a much more complete story, however, than a single number on a single day.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the whole point here.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: One athlete just kind of goes flat, the line doesn't go anywhere, and athlete B, ACLRB, ends up going in a positive direction, and we see that through the trend of the data points.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what testing actually is, and what we are actually doing when we put athletes through it.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: We are collecting objective information so we can steer your rehab with precision, being surgical in our approach, and that is it.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Testing has two jobs.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: The first is the audit, it tells us whether what we've been doing is working.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is the programming on track?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Does something need to change?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Have we been hammering quad work and the numbers still aren't moving?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or have the last eight weeks of focused progressive overload paid off?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: The test tells us this, it allows us to remove the feelings of yes, I got stronger, or asking the athlete, do you feel stronger?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or the PT or who your coach is of, yeah, I think you got stronger.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's less of that.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's purely objective, and we're able to anchor that to actual numbers.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it allows us to audit what we've been doing and where we're going.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: The second job is decision support.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, testing absolutely informs when you return to running, when you return to performance training, when you return to sport.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: That is real.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: But informing a decision is completely different from issuing a verdict.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: The data gives us the clearest possible picture so we can make the smartest possible call.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're after.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: I say this to athletes all the time.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: We do not want to throw things at the wall and hope something sticks.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: ACEL rehab is so complex, y'all.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's so complex, which is also why you shouldn't do it yourself.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: We are rebuilding a lot.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: We're rebuilding strength, power, tissue capacity, movement quality, confidence.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about dynamic activities of running, jumping, cutting, reacting to things.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much that has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: It breaks the body down before it really does have to be built back up.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: The only way to do this with any real precision is to actually know where you are not guessing.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: You guys have probably heard it.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not testing, you're guessing, right?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that is true.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very true in this process.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you ask someone who runs finances and the financial side of things, if you ask someone who does marketing and they are looking at different numbers, if if they weren't looking at numbers and they were just like, yeah, like our marketing reach is higher or we're getting more leads, or you know, yeah, we made more gross profit last month, um, and we made more just overall revenue.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: But then if you don't have numbers to back it up in these different departments, you'd be called crazy.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like they'd be like, Show me the statistics, the numbers, what do all these things look like?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's going to be really important to be able to know, okay, this is how you back up you saying you feel stronger or we're getting more money or we're getting more leads into the company.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like it has to make sense, right?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have to connect that feeling subjectively to the objective, which is really, really important.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a concrete example: an athlete is six months out from surgery, quad symmetry comes back at let's say 71% on the quad retest for their quadricep strength.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a failing grade.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: That number tells us exactly what the next training block needs to prioritize, however.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Without that number, we're guessing.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: With it, we're precise.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that athlete now has a clear target and a clear plan, which is a lot better than sitting in uncertainty.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: It allows us to see, like, okay, we still have more to go in the quads, but then therefore we could also maybe start to introduce some running based on their whole movement profile of looking at other things.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it is also being able to open up some on-field stuff depending on where they are.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of things that we could do, but let's say that this came in at 50%.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: We might have to hold off on some stuff.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that sucks, but at the same time, we'd rather you be safe, do it right, not compensate, and then do it right.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing that is going to help us be so precise in this versus going based on feel.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because a lot of people would look at six months in the process and be like, I'm probably good to start doing some of this stuff.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: But if your quad strength doesn't test out, for example, and you're at 50%, I'm sorry to say, but you're not.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not going to keep up with the demand of what you need to do for running and other things.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: One test result in a one frame of a film.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what this is.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: The whole film is what matters in this process.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: One bad frame doesn't ruin the movie.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: We need the whole picture.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Do you like what I did here?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if you need another way to think about this, one that might actually stick, let's think about the stock market.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Stock market has been wild as of this recording, just super crazy kind of place we're in with the market.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Another passion of mine, something that I geek out on, is finances and the market, and it's just yeah, interesting time.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: But let's get to the point here.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every single day the market goes up and down.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Some days are great, some days are ugly.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has nobody who has a healthy long-term portfolio panics and sells everything because of one bad Tuesday.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: What matters is the trend over time, the direction, not a single data point.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not any single data point.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: ACL rehab works the same way.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Not every retest is going to show improvement across every metric.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: That is normal.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Especially if you are testing very consistently, like let's say it's every two weeks, every three weeks, even four weeks, that's serial testing.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say that every single time it's going to improve because the more frequently you do it, the likelihood there's going to be more variability in that because there's less time to improve.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you do it over the course of six weeks, eight weeks, twelve weeks, you're likely going to see changes because those are just longer times to impact the goals that we're after in those objective metrics.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: But that's normal, that's to be expected.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: The body doesn't move in a perfectly straight upward line, and neither does your data.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's important here.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's variability built into this process, and that's not a sign of something is wrong.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: What we need to see is that the trend is going in the right direction over time within healthy ranges, anchored to what the research actually tells us about readiness.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's what actually does get our attention: not one flat result, not one test where the numbers didn't move.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: What triggers real concern is a plateau across multiple data points or metric moving in the wrong direction across several consecutive assessments.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: That is the signal that is when we need to look hard at what's going on and make a change.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that is exactly why consistent testing, serial testing matters.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Without it, we don't see the trend, we don't catch the plateau early, we don't have the information we need to actually help you.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is, is that we have had so many people come work with us across a spectrum of time.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: They could be months out, they could be years out, and they come in and they're like, my knee extension looks great.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, they are saying that they have uh strength at a certain percentage, or this is where they feel it's at.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, I'm I feel pretty strong.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then we actually assess things and it's not even close to what they're saying.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're saying they got full extension and they still have a few degrees of bend in their knee.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: They say that they have 75% quadricep strength, and we find that it's like 40 or 50 percent.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this has happened with people who are nine months out, 12 months out.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's crazy the spectrum we've seen of what people perceive of what they think their strength is or where they are, but the reality of what testing actually shows, and they just never got tested.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, if I had to put a statistic on it, when we actually talk about assessments and testing and truly being tested based on the research, especially for quad strength, I would still say 90% of physical therapy clinics are not doing it.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not happening.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you see on social media, the kind of echo chamber of like physical therapists, the ones who are strength testing, those are in the probably five percent.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: 10% of PTs out there.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Most clinics are still not doing it.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that needs to just still be understood as the reality of currently where we're at.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Has it improved?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: But we still have a long way to go for that to be the standard.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just not there yet.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: So practically, here's what this means for you as the athlete walking into a testing session.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Your job is simple.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Show up, give your honest best effort.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is the whole job.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to perform for the test.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to hit a number to prove something.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: You need to perform honestly so that the data is real and actually useful.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you hold back because you're scared of the number, or if you push so hard, you're not giving a true representation of where you are, the data suffers, and we can't help you as well as we should be able to.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: We are not grading you on this.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: We are building a map of where you are right now so we know exactly where to take you next, how that aligns with the short and long-term goals that you have set.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: That is a completely different thing.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: The more consistent and honest your test is throughout the process, the more precise your programming becomes.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the less guessing there is in your rehab.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to come back to the weight of it for a second because I don't want to just logic my way past that.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: It makes complete sense that testing feels like a big deal.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: You've worked hard to get here, the effort you put in is real, and the stakes feel real because they are real.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: I get that.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the goal of everything I've said today is to give you permission to release some of that weight because the test is on your side.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: It is a working tool for you.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a judge ruling on you.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Athletes who get tested regularly and honestly throughout the process start to build something that a timeline-based rehab never gives them.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: They actually start to trust their progress.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Not because someone told them they should, but because the numbers show them.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: Over time, across multiple tests, the trend becomes undeniable.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: The data becomes their proof.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't tell you how much people are like, oh my gosh, when we show them their numbers, when we visually show them their KPIs, when we show them what their strength test shows relative to what we're aiming for, they feel like they can anchor themselves.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: They feel like they can put their feet into the path that they have, knowing exactly where they are on this roadmap.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: We have this GPS being able to be built out based on what we know about the research, the data, to show what is needed for certain milestones in this process and for your particular goals.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: But that is so important in this is that we need to be able to showcase that objectively, but just knowing that this is a data point.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: It is not something that is pass or fail.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the biggest thing I want you to take away from this, because I don't want to take away from the weight of what this test is, but I want you to shift how you perceive this in terms of going into doing something like this, because I know it can be daunting.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: But that is how I'm gonna wrap things up for today.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a short one, uh, but I hope it landed.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in the middle of your ACL rehab and this reframe was useful, please share it with someone who needs to hear it.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to work with a team that builds your entire process around objective testing, criteria, a plan that actually makes sense for where you are, and also just feeling like you have clarity and structure in the process, then please reach out to us.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: We are here to help.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: We work with people all over the world.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're also happy to point you in a different direction, one that maybe is not necessarily remote, but we are here to help because we want to make sure you find the best care so you can get back to what you love.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if this podcast is helpful at any point to you, please leave a review.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us to reach more and more ACLers and help them to find this show so that they can feel empowered in this process.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'll talk to you next time.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is your host, Robbie Patel, signing off.