How can the CLA be used in Basketball Physio? With Daniel Muntz

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Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Delighted to have Daniel Munz on the show today. Daniel is the sports physio at ProForm in Sydney, and he's also the head physio for an NBL Division One side, the Hills Hornets, and. Daniel, I've had the pleasure of connecting with you recently and just really enjoyed our conversation.

So thanks so much for coming on.

Of course.

Thank you for having me.

So it was a mutual friend of both of ours, Adam Omiecinski, who obviously connected us. So another assist from Adam there. And, you know, I've been just really captivated by your work applying an ecological approach in the physio space and obviously combined with your basketball background and obviously the work you're doing there.

It's— I had to get you on the show. So yeah, first question, I guess, Daniel, you know, when, when I talk about the dominant approach to coaching, let's say a lot of drills, decomposed practice, 5-on-0, very rigid patterns, would there be an equivalent to, I guess, a traditional approach within the physio world, specifically in basketball?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think this is probably where strength and conditioning and physio kind of blend into one another. And I'm a huge believer that the two have to work hand in hand. If we're looking at a, let's call it a traditional approach to physiotherapy, I think at the heart of it, people usually come to physios because there's an injury.

And I think one thing that I want to try doing in this industry is changing the framework of that. I'm a huge believer that things are preventable to a certain degree. So if we could somehow shift it from being more of a reactive thing to it being a pre-active thing, if you can use that word, I really do think that that's where I would love to see physiotherapy go.

So, I mean, if we think about it in the context of an ankle injury, I think something that most basketball players can kind of resonate with, I'm trying to ask the question of what can this person do instead of what can't this person do.

Yeah.

this person do at the moment? And when we're talking about things like the constraint-led approach, I mean, you're looking at the task environment and the individual. There are lots of things about the individual that are constrained in a situation like that, but there are so many other things that we can still address from a physiotherapy point of view, from a rehab point of view.

I think the notion is typically someone comes in with an ankle injury, maybe physios will say, all right, give it 2 weeks of doing absolutely nothing, rest it.

Yeah.

And then let's see where, where we are after that. Ice it, compress it, elevate it, I think is the traditional approach to something like that. Whereas I kind of see that as an opportunity of, all right, what other skills can this person do that doesn't involve putting too much through the ankle?

And this is obviously prefacing it with, is there a fracture? What grade is it? To what extent can they actually bear weight on it? Is it suitable for them to be in a boot because there is a fracture? And we were having this chat a couple weeks ago over the phone where I tend to not put basketball players especially in a boot if it's just, let's say, an ATFL/CFL sprain, which tends to be the 2 most common ones in basketball.

But instead, I, I see, can this person weight bear on a single leg? Can they do dribbling drills? Can they do passing drills? Can they go from side to side a little bit? Or is that too much for them in the really acute stage?

So I think going away from this rest, let's see what happens and then we'll go. I think that's so much missed time. I think especially in the context of a season, 2 weeks is huge. 2 weeks for some people can make or break, do I get a college scholarship or do I not?

So if there are ways that we can keep other parts of the game going without completely removing them from it, I think this is where the profession has to go. And I feel like this is a bad start for me. Like, I don't think that I'm this rogue physiotherapist that has no regard for like the healing process.

I absolutely do. But I think there are ways that we can challenge the, the current framework of how we approach an injury.

I mean, it aligns everything I've been speaking about, Daniel, just from the CLA in terms of, you know, developing antifragile performers. And then just, I've spoken about the system degrees of freedom on previous episodes. I think what you're talking about is Restoring that after an injury and just helping players become more adaptable versus, you know, this traditional approach of keeping them away from it.

Or if they do do some rehab, they're doing very repetitive exercises. I'd say it's not Bernstein's concept of rep without rep, but it's repetition after rep, right? Where players will maybe get an ankle sprain and they're told to do the exact same kind of, I guess, routines.

Mm-hmm.

To get over it, right?

And I, yeah, I love that you said that. And the whole Bernstein principle as well, right? There is, I mean, it's stuck around for a reason. At the same time though, we, we want to make sure that what they're doing for rehab looks as much like their sport as possible, right?

So I mean, I think the maybe traditional things are like restoring range of motion. So ankle dorsiflexion with knee driving over toe, something that I do use.

Yeah.

But at the same time, if we can get them challenging, let's say, single leg stability, and this is where things like swing leg retraction, hip lock, and these are probably a little bit more Franz Boschi terms that I'm using here, but those sorts of things almost double as ankle rehab.

But at the same time, we can get hammies, glutes, things which a lot of basketball players that I've seen— swing leg retraction is probably one of the most shocking things that I see in basketball players because it's so It's so anterior dominant, foremost, not all.

And so it's a great opportunity to use an ankle sprain as a way to then train things like swing leg, train things like hip loss, trunk stability, um, upper body first and like moving. So all those sorts of things are, it's almost an avenue to address things which they haven't before.

This, I'm really glad you actually brought that up because I'm going to get onto some of the Frans Bosch stuff very shortly on this podcast. But just for the listeners, because they want to have heard those terms before, hip lock. I know this is a— this could take us down a whole path.

I don't know, would you be able to maybe just kind of give an overview maybe for coaches as to what these are?

Yeah, so if we're— there's a system called the Franz Bosch system, and I will leave someone else to go into the nitty-gritty of all of this, but Essentially, when I'm using words like hip lock, swing leg retraction, ankle stiffness, these are all attractors, right?

And maybe simply put, attractors are stable positions in movement dependent on the sport. And so these different attractors are different per sport, and there are some main ones that we see in basketball. And because this is a basketball podcast, I tend to geared more towards those.

So things like ankle stiffness, if you're thinking about someone taking something off the dribble in triple threat and they want to push off, ankle stiffness is an athlete's ability to not have the back of their heel slap the ground when they're about to push off, because there's a lot of force lost in something like that.

So if you look at Achilles tendon ruptures, you're thinking Klay Thompson, KD, and if you rewatch those videos, it's a lack of ankle stiffness in that situation that can result in that.

Right?

So these different attractors that force this one, which is called ankle stiffness, are different moments in a total movement that we're looking at, seeing how well does this athlete do that. Things like the hip lock. If you're thinking about going up for a dunk or you're going up for a layup, it's one's ability to get kind of hip, knee, and ankle.

I'm going to use the word triple extension here because I think most S&Cs kind of—

Okay. Yeah.

Understand it as that, but it's one's ability to kind of lock at the hip to create stability through the hip in that movement.

That was amazingly well done. Yeah. 'Cause that was not easy. And actually part of the reason I've been putting off the BOSCH stuff on this is just because I haven't figured out yet how to describe it in a coherent way for coaches. And it's just—

And I'm still learning.

If you, if we do this in about 6 months' time, I'll probably give you a better—

You can do it, man.

Amazing.

Amazing.

I want to go down the concept of siloed thinking because that's a key theme of the book that I've been working on. You know, the traditional approach, I think it goes hand in hand with the different elements of an organization at all levels very much working in these silos.

And what I've seen in the past, even at the highest level of our sport, all the way down to grassroots, is, you know, if coaches are lucky enough to have an athletic performance trainer, they maybe do a warm-up. They, you know, they do stretches, routine-based stuff.

Then they're done, they're out, they're just chilling for the rest of the practice. Then the head coach comes on, does his thing, and then if there's an injury, then the physio will do something, but they're just waiting kind of, you know, on the side.

The athletic performance practice is done, everyone goes home, and it's just the same. And we've been speaking a lot about our vision for the future of a much more integrated approach. Where do you think a physio— and we started there, but I just wanted to go a bit deeper into it— like, how do you think physio fits into this, and what type of conversations specifically would they need to be having with coaches, athletic performance staff, et cetera?

Great question. This is definitely something that we're trying to still figure out with us working with Hills Hornets because there's— it's looked a certain way for such a long time. It's tough to go against the grain with that sometimes, but I think the great thing about Hills is that they're really receptive and open to changing things up.

What does it look like if there has to be communication between coach, athletic performance, physios, EPs? And I guess this is very different dependent, dependent on the level that you're playing at. If we're thinking high school basketball with maybe not a whole lot of funding, and then we're talking about NBL, NBA, that sort of range.

I mean, the— it's chalk and cheese between what you can and can't do. But I think where physio can really come in is Speak with the coach and say, hey, what is it that you want out of your athletes? Let's say in this block or in the preseason versus when we're in season.

If it's, I want them to be more agile, I want them to be quicker off their first step. And this is going to be very dependent on bigs versus guards, right? And it looks very different from a warm-up point of view. So in the warm-up that we do with, or that we provided 4 hills where we try actually incorporating a lot of this ankle stiffness, hip lock, swing leg retraction sort of work to prep them for the warmups that they do where it's a little bit more live.

With small-sided games and basketball integrated, right?

Correct. Yeah. So a lot of the movements that we're trying to prep them for, we want it to look like what they're about to do in game. I agree with you in terms of physios are there for kind of the first 10 minutes.

They lead the warmup and just kind of sit off to the side on the bench, like doing that sort of thing. But I think where this can come in is let's say there's a guard-specific warmup that one coach is doing and there's a big warmup that the other's doing.

I think this is where we can almost pull away 3 people at a time and just get them primed, get them primed for what they're about to do. So it might be things where we're working on swing leg. It might be things where we're working on hip lock, doing things that are a little bit more lateral, unstable surfaces with perturbations happening as well.

That sort of stuff, I feel like not only from a physical point of view, but a neurological point of view and just a readiness point of view. Yeah. Can be very beneficial to have them ready because you're right, it's warm up 10 minutes, go to the locker room, cool down, get ready, and then go out into your layup lines, warm up lines, 3-on-3, 4-on-4, and then light.

It's going to be tough to change it, but I guess this is why you and I are having this conversation.

Exactly. And for me, I think it starts with, I think, the shared theoretical framework of the CLA. You know, obviously. I think having an awareness of that, and I was in Sheffield recently for the, for the Skill Acquisition Symposium. They had Martin Roffle there, who's done a lot of the work on department of methodology.

And I think that's what my vision of the future would be, where it's like yourself as a physio, a coach, athletic performance trainer, you know, forming this overall department where you have conversations, like you said, Daniel, very frequently, and you're talking about these things and you're viewing the game through the same lens.

And then figure out how you can integrate just as opposed to working independently. So let's maybe get now to how you're actually using a CLA in, in your field and what this maybe looks like. So the first kind of question, I'm just thinking to make this as practical as possible, Daniel, maybe we could talk about recovering from something like an ankle sprain, just because it's like the most common injury in basketball.

We spoke about at the start in terms of, you know, trying to apply appropriate load, but what would an application of a CLA look like in this context?

Yeah, so let's say someone comes in with a full tear of ATFL, one of the most commonly sprained or torn ligaments in the ankle. The first step of protocol is, okay, is it just an ankle sprain or is there something going else? And I think the question, the overarching question with CLA that I try to use is what else?

And what I mean by that is what else is going on in the injury, but what else can they do as well? Because I think there are lots of people that come in thinking, yeah, I've just resprained my ankle and it's just another, it's just another one.

I'll tape it up, I'll put my guard on and I'll go play again. But there's a lot of research about people not doing rehab, especially the first time around on an ankle sprain, that the recurrence rate increases by about 50%. Making sure that there's some sort of rehab done or something like that is key.

But from a constraint-led approach, I mean, there are things, if I know that the athlete can, or the client can have some sort of capacity to play, let's say it's something like a, do you guys still do Mike and layups or is that long gone?

Obviously with Transforming, we're obviously getting coaches on this tip, but unfortunately we see it all the time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool. Cool. I look at that as something that, yes, they will do it in game. Is it a change in environment in terms of how much load they're putting through the foot? Is it a change in what they're doing from an intensity point of view?

Absolutely. But if you think of something like a Mike and layup, there's a lot going on in that movement as a whole. Like one, they're getting, they're getting touches on the ball. 2, they're getting touches with the hand. They're able to push off of one leg.

They're able to push off the other leg. There's a small land that also applies in that. So there is this plyometric aspect to it as well. And this is very dependent on, can this athlete actually do that or can they not, right? If let's say there's no capacity of doing something like that, then we start doing things where foot's on the ground.

They're still getting ankle stability, but I might get them doing— quite easier to show.

Oh, nice.

So if I go like one foot on the ground, one foot on the wall, and I get them hinging over here, I might get them doing dribbling drills here, going from left to right there. Because so we're still getting stability of hip, knee, and ankle, but it still kind of looks like what they were to do in game.

So I guess the thing that we're trying to change there is, I mean, there's an individual and there's a healing process that happens in the ankle and there's not much that we can change there. However, if we're looking at it from a couple different lenses, this is where things like a nutritionist on a team, an S&C on a team, a coach on a team, even psych on a team, like this is where it all starts coming into play.

And I think at the heart of the constraint-led approach is how we want to try making it as multidisciplinary as possible. And if it— and this is what you alluded to just before as well— is if we have 4 different eyes on one athlete with no communication, that's worse off for the athlete than if you're a task force saying exactly the same thing.

And this is a problem that we run into as physiotherapists as well, because You have physio saying one thing and then you've got coach saying other thing and you might have someone else saying another thing. And that is, even that's a constraint that we have to try working through as well.

So one of the things that we try doing is every time we see someone from NBL 1 or from the Hills Hornets, we shoot the coach a message saying, hey, this is, this is what's going on. This is our recommendation. This is how long it might take.

If you have questions, let's communicate back and forth so that the athlete's getting the same message.

Yeah.

Because more oftentimes than not, if we give the athlete the message and then they relay it, it's Chinese whispers, right? And ends up being like, yeah, I can't play for the next 6 weeks. And that's, that's not it because there is capacity to train.

So the whole thing of what else can we do, I think over— it overarches this constraint-led approach. In kind of our industry, it used to be just the biopsychosocial approach, and that's what they call it, the biological, the psychological, and the social approach.

Kind of the new definition of how we want to be treating is also adding this cultural approach to it. And I think this is probably something that isn't talked about a lot, but different upbringings are going to have different effects on how people even perceive something like pain.

Super complex. And I feel like that's a topic on its own. Even addressing that side of things, that's one of the constraints of the individual as well. So if this is where the multidisciplinary approach, disciplinary approach of having even psych And nutritionist in the game as well.

It's so handy to have. Not a lot of people have access to it, but when they do, I just tend to see that it works so much better. So much better.

Hey coach, I wanted to take a quick break from this episode to let you know that our website is available to you right now if you just go to transformingbball.com. The goal of our site is to present basketball coaches and practitioners with the ultimate resource for applying evidence-based ideas.

It contains a number of free resources such as blogs, practice activity ideas, as well as some of our paid products including clinics, workshops, and courses. The website contains everything you need to take your coaching to the next level. Find the website in our show notes or head to transformingbball.com.

Absolutely. Just thinking on this, Daniel, I think one of the easiest ways to integrate would be maybe through a concept like representative learning design. And we've both talked about how, you know, that would be important, especially for players returning from an injury, regardless of what it is.

You know, obviously got to expose them to the same informational sources which they're going to encounter in the environment versus solely going from a closed environment such as, you know, traditional rehab exercises. To being in— well, even what you see traditionally, I'd say between that, Daniel, is they do like on-air drills with coaches.

Yeah.

And then no bridge at all. So they might do rehab, on-air drills, boom, straight to scrimmaging, 5-on-5 game. Yeah. So I would, you know, I don't know, what would you say to like the importance of just representative learning design within physio?

Yeah, yeah, great question. This is something that I've actually been looking into a lot as of late. Because I guess whenever I, whenever I give someone rehab, let's say it's for this ankle injury that we've been talking about. If I had a whiteboard, if you're imagining, let's say this whole screen here is my whiteboard.

You have these movements here, which are, I'm going to use the word total movement pattern. And this is a little bit more of a Fran Bosch term as well. You have total movement patterns here. You have closed skills and you have open skills and you have simple and then you have complex.

So it's almost like this continuum that we're seeing from kind of top left down to top right. In the early stages of rehab, there may be a place for us to kind of be here. So simple, some closed movements that we're doing up in this edge here.

But where we want to get them sooner than later is down here. So this is kind of the, the open movements as well as complex. Traditional physiotherapy, in my opinion, we tend to start here, and I'm— I was guilty of this as well.

It's like, all right, this person's in pain. There is a time and place for this, but I kind of want to be here, here, here. And this is where, this is where I was sitting from very early on. But that's a very reductionist way of thinking because there's still all of this that they can do.

And I think most physiotherapy is really good at this and this. But not so great here, right? And I think that's the case because this is where it starts bleeding into— this is now a basketball skill coach slash S&C, right? And what I mean by that is I think a lot of physiotherapists maybe don't have the ability to see, all right, this is what the full movement needs to look like.

This is how complex it needs to be. This here is my safe zone. So I'm gonna stay right here. And this is where the communication has to happen between S&C, skills development, and physio. Because we, from here, it might be, all right, now I want you to go with your coach or whoever it may be and do things that you do in game.

And this is now your rehab. So it's not a 3 by 10, it's not a 3 by 12, it's not 30 seconds of you doing stuff up here, but rather it's, all right, let's, let's start playing and let's see how you respond to it.

And it's, it's very transient between these different spots as well.

Love it. And I guess that's where you could just be informing me as the coach, maybe, you know, what is it like a player development, like, and not just, I guess, for a player coming back from rehab, but even like we spoke about the ankle stiffness, you know, maybe that's been identified as a rate limiter on someone's player dev plan.

And then, you know, CLA, we could work together to design some type of activity targeting that.

Yeah. Yep. 100%. That's exactly right.

So ankle sprains, Daniel, we spoke about it a lot. You know, the traditional approach, ice, use ice in every injury, and then, you know, maybe we stick a brace on it or rest and boom, straight back to it. So, you know, whether it's an NBA physical therapist listening to this or high school coach, people working all levels, you know, what could a contemporary approach to dealing with something like an ankle sprain look like?

Yeah, great question. So Let's start from day 1. So let's say someone comes in really swollen, very bruised, but it's just an ankle sprain. They walk into the clinic and you see, okay, this person can actually bear weight on this thing at the moment.

Swelling is something that we have to respect because it also results in muscle inhibition, right? If you think about you trying to— let's say you knocked your knee against something, it swells up, it feels stiff to do things. Because of the swelling in there.

And it's much the same with the ankle. I don't ice athletes because I believe that in the early stages, the body actually wants to go through this inflammatory process. And if we're looking at the use of ice, I do think it's another one of those cultural things that are going to be very hard to change because it's almost second nature to say slap some ice on it, right?

It's like spot shooting in basketball. It's the equivalent.

Yeah, no, exactly. Synonymous.

The slightest things too, Daniel, you see, we, we stopped icing at college last year and it was amazing actually seeing how the return to play was so much quicker. But then even at the pro level, you see the slightest thing like aches, it's ice straight away.

It's crazy because the research is saying not to do that.

Yeah, correct. And the same guy that came out with the Rice Principle, as you know, came out saying that it wasn't completely true. It's ingrained in all sports. This isn't just basketball, any, any sport out there. But bracing as well, if they can get around without a brace in the early days, I've actually found return to play quicker by not bracing someone.

And I think this comes down to just awareness around the foot as well as not having something external support them. It's like having crutches as well, or if When someone comes off of crutches after doing, let's say, a full ACL rupture post-surgery, getting rid of those crutches are really tough for them because it's a huge mental battle.

Because they've been so dependent on it, it almost takes them like a week or 2, I'd like to say, is what I've observed, longer to actually get them believing that their knee can handle what it can handle. And it's much the same with the ankle as well.

But for once we get a hold of the swelling, I still use compression. I do. And usually in the early stages, I, I use this method called the U-foam taping method where you pretty much put a, almost like a horseshoe foam pad around the outside of that ankle.

And I do a basket weave around the foot because it kind of contains it into one spot. The bruising is hectic on something like that though. And I always warn people, hey, when you take this off, the bruising's gonna look like it's in the shape of a U and that's completely normal, right?

So. Yeah. Compression is definitely still part of my treatment protocol, loading it as tolerable. So if they can get set shots on day one, I'm getting them doing set shots on day one. It might even be free throws on day one, right? Because you're still getting movement through that.

But if we find that that's stirring up the swelling too much, I might pull them off of it. This is where like seated shots can come in, like that infamous Kobe photo where he's broken his one arm and he's sitting on a chair shooting with his left arm.

That sort of stuff that I'm trying to get them to do. And this comes down to always asking the question of what else? And there is so much that can be done.

So much. We actually got last year, I mean, we did a lot of barefoot stuff and then just, we actually had a mini trampoline in the gym and I don't know if it's useful, but obviously it's after an ankle sprain. It was just obviously, you know, the guys got on that and just tried to restore degrees of freedom.

things on that. And yeah, let's do it on the side during a practice.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I do believe that there's still so much that someone can do in a practice that doesn't require them running, changing directions. And on this, on the portions where they can, they're off to the side doing their rehab. So they're still making most, most of their time, but it just, it looks a little bit different.

Exactly. So easy to just do variable shooting, just take a step back. We did obviously a lot of differential learning, and a lot of times guys would just shoot off one leg. You know, it's not— that's defeating the object of— and I know talking about the rehab, but just to your point, there's still so much you could do.

They don't just have to be sitting down on a chair for the whole 2 hours.

Wow. Correct.

I agree. So it's the time of the season where you see, you know, a lot of teams when they started their kind of preseasons, I was seeing all of these screening programs on social media where, you know, they're doing all these tests and I guess they're, you know, trying to identify, I guess, weaknesses and, you know, et cetera, in, in every player.

How does an ecological outlook kind of approach how we view things like screening within—

Yeah, great question. So we had the same conversation with my colleagues at ProForm and we did a screening for the Hills Hornets at the beginning of last year. But I think we also saw a gap in what was currently being done. These are things like lane agility tests, counter movement jumps, like the standard, the standard basketball screenings.

And the question we asked was, what are we doing with that information? What is it actually telling us? And how is that informing us in how we need to improve them? Things like counter movement jump hop test. I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, but there are metrics and there are things that that shows us.

However, I think most I think most programs probably don't look at movement enough, and so I think what our what our screening address. I'll actually run you through it. So the first bit of it was a musculoskeletal. Examination. So we had things like ankle range of motion, single leg long lever, glute bridge for hamstring strength/endurance.

We had the countermovement jump on force plates. We had ankle, we had hip range, we had is there any lower back pain, is there any knee pain. The first, I'd say, 10 minutes or so of it was a standard musculoskeletal and Kind of like performance test.

I think there was a portion of it where if, if you're introducing something like this to, let's say, an NBL 1 team, and they, they're coming in with it with the preconception of this is what a basketball screening is, you almost have to give them a little bit of it for them to have a bit of buy-in.

Imagine doing something like that where there was absolutely no jumping. They'd be like, what the heck is going on here? So we, we did integrate a bit of that into it, and there are lots of different values and ankle range and knee pain on countermovement jumps and reactivity on that.

That tells us a lot of information of things like, is there potential for jumper's knee? Is there potential for Achilles tendinopathy? Anything in the hip, anything in the back? So that gave us some information. But the latter part of it, it was actually like, let's see how you move in real time.

So it's, it's a big setup because we had, we had about, I think it was 4 cameramen on In 4 different angles. And so the first one was, all right, it's one-on-one live, start from the top of the key, how do you get to the basket?

That's awesome. Okay.

And then we, yeah, right. And then another one was from an inbounds off the catch. What do you do off the catch? What are your natural movement tendencies in this? And then we got them running a fast break. So outlet pass is coming from back left at half court and they were running the right wing.

And then we throw— we threw a lob pass over a defender here to see, all right, what does your body do when you have to catch and land in space? And then how do you land from that?

Yeah.

And then we did things like change of direction. So straight line sprint, how do you go from side to side? And then with that, we took that information. And then after the whole screening, we had about 4 or 5 guys on our team actually sit down and analyze that movement.

And this is where a lot of the Franz Blaschke actually came into play. So when we're looking at things like catching off a pass, is there ankle stiffness? Do you collapse at the trunk when you change direction? What is your knee doing? And then from there, we curated a rehab program to address the, let's call it the movement deficiencies, if I could use that, in that particular athlete so that that wouldn't be something that would Possibly lead to injury later down the track.

And I think that's where it needs to go. I, I think this cookie cutter approach of, all right, like if you're looking at NFL, like how many times can you bench 225? Um, like how fast can you run here? All great metrics, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it looks like it, it looks at the athlete in game-like situations.

And I think that's where a lot of the screenings need to actually get to.

That's it, you know, cuz those action capabilities mean nothing if you're not attuned to your environment. I think exactly. That was enormous value what you just shared, Daniel, because I personally haven't heard of anything like that being done in the highest levels of our sport, whether it's NBA, nothing.

And I think that's just a great example as to why the theory matters, because it's— yeah, information you would gain from that is of such value because it's representative data. It's not, you know, done in isolation. And that's, that's awesome. I guess as we wrap up here, Daniel, for I guess to the coaches, athletic performance, you know, we got physios, practitioners in all fields who listen to this podcast.

What advice would you have them if they're really interested in exploring an ecological approach and trying to apply this, you know, throughout an organization so they're no longer working in silos? Is there any advice you'd have for them?

Yeah, there are some really good resources out there. I am a bit biased to Frans Vos' Systems Approach. It's a lot to take in, but if applied well, it's a very powerful tool, a very, very powerful tool. And I am still trying to wrap my head around it.

I think most people that are trying to understand the Frank Zvosh system will say the same. However, it looks at movement and it looks at rehab a completely different way. And I do think that that's where sports will eventually head. And I think this is kind of the heart behind this podcast as well, is to, is to bring more like-minded people together.

The best thing that I did, especially when I was really early on in this constraint-led approach, was, was talk with other team members about how do we actually implement this. It's more of a conversation than it is, all right, my way is the way, that's the right way, because there are still portions of let's call it the traditional approach, that it still works, right?

It still works. And there's a reason why it's, it's still working in the NBA, because it's, it's been tested for years. And I think where the pushback with the constraint-led approach is, is there isn't much data for it, and it's really hard to quantify it as well because there are so many different variables to it.

So best piece of advice that I could give is, one, look at the research out there. There's a lot that you kind of have to weed through. I'm happy for people listening to this to reach out to me. I'm more than happy to chat as well.

And it's a very much so evolving framework. And I think the more people we have conversing, the stronger this is going to get as well.

That's basically the whole reason I started this, Daniel, to show how these ideas aren't just confined to coaching. If anything, it's to really reap the full benefits of an ecological approach is in the CLA. I think for me it has to be done in every field of an organization, you know.

Yeah, agreed.

Otherwise it's just, it makes little sense if there's one coach in an organization who's doing this. And that's unfortunately, you know, you got to start there. And that's, you know, we're not even there yet, I'd say, in many instances. But I think it makes so much sense, you know, why not work where we're all sharing the same theoretical framework And work towards these ideas.

Yeah, agreed.

So Daniel, I just wanna say a big thanks for, for coming on the podcast. I guess the best way for coaches to get ahold of you is probably just your Instagram @danielphysio, right?

Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. Or if they, people wanna email, if they're not on Instagram, it's daniel@proformphysiotherapy.com.au.

Amazing. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, man.

No, thanks for having me, Alex.

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