The Movement Brainery

08/15/2026

07/08/2026

This course is 100% therapeutic exercise. Every minute is designed to ensure maximal clinical impact. Throughout the course, clinical reasoning concepts will be woven through to ensure that you not only have a war chest of new exercises to implement, but you understand when, why, and how to do so.

You will be taken through a progression of facilitation of mobility, control, and then functional application. This will start with common clinical presentations in the lumbar spine and cervical spine, branching out to include common movement patterns in the hip and shoulder. Topics will include the use of verbal and manual cues, external versus internal focus, intensity, breath, and other concepts.

(LINK IN BIO)

06/03/2026

Intentional Exercise

August 15-16th, 2026
AT Still University
Mesa, AZ

As always, I’m pretty psyched about this.

In almost every course I’ve ever been to, exercise is shoved in at the last minute. I kind of understand why: there is a lot of other stuff to work on.

A few years ago, we came to the realization that exercise needs to get its due, and the only way to do that was through a stand-alone course.

Tim and I put our heads together to come up with a course that introduced concepts from verbal cuing, manually resisted exercise, focus, breathing, and other concepts all driven toward getting the patient back to activities as fast as possible.

On August 15-16th, we have a course coming to Phoenix that is 100% exercise. No fluff. No sitting in a chair with a pencil and pontificating about theory that doesn’t actually change your practice. You will probably sweat, be tired, and you will walk away with a war chest of exercises and a new way of seeing exercise in the clinic.

Sign up below

https://themovementbrainery.thinkific.com/courses/intentional-exercise

04/29/2026

POSTERIOR KNEE PAIN:

I think this is a common place to trip up in ortho PT. I often hear people go down rabbit holes with posterior knee pain or patients who have seen a PT who has diagnosed them with a popliteus strain or something like that...

In this paper from 2016, posterior knee pain was the third-most common region for people with knee osteoarthritis (37%) to experience pain, behind the medial joint line (75%) and patellar tendon (38%) (which again, may be a referral or fat pad irritation).

Most people had diffuse pain that moved around, but it’s helpful to recognize that posterior knee pain is common for intra-articular knee issues.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1063458416010050

04/23/2026

PATIENT PREFERENCES. We all know they’re valuable. The question is, if we’re being honest, how do you really solicit them?

04/15/2026

20 years or 10? Or 5? 🤷‍♂️

Either way, it’s coming.

Guys, this shouldn’t be mind-blowing, but the future of healthcare is going to come down to two groups of people. It’s those that can adapt to emerging technology, or the people that differentiate themselves from it. So if you’re the type of clinic that you have patients come in and you watch them do exercises and you count reps, you’re going to go out of business in 20 years. You have to adapt to technology. Maybe you see the person less often. Maybe you use that artificial intelligence that the patient’s insurance company is prescribing to them, but you do it in tandem with these intermittent face-to-face visits. So you have kind of a hybrid model. And then there’s almost like this in-person luxury model that you can develop your practice around. I think 20 years from now, it’s going to be one of those two options. You got to decide which one you’re going to do. And then we as physical therapists need to step up and deliver on that, or else the patients they’re going to leave.

DigitalHealth MedicalInnovation PatientCare ClinicTechnology HealthcareAdaptation

03/26/2026

The pain scale isn’t perfect, especially when you see it used in research. Is a 6/10 twice what a 3/10 is? Not necessarily. In fact, it’s not always a sure thing that the higher number equals a worse experience.

It also ignores control over pain, which is a concept in psychology literature rarely talked about in PT. This is one of the things we often discuss in PT.

Do you know what makes your pain worse? If you do, can you do something to make it better?

If the answer is no to both of those questions, control over pain might be low, and that is a bad place to be.

03/11/2026

There is a longstanding clash between visions for what the physical therapist does: those who envision the PT as the “administrator” of care, doing the high-level diagnostic thinking and evaluation and having their schedule be mostly evaluations while the assistive personnel execute on the plan they create. In contrast, there are those “purist” PTs who enjoy tailoring the daily evaluation and interventions.

I actually think, if both are done well, they can each be viable models for the profession. They each cope with payment cuts in different ways. One by revving up volume, the other by trying to rev up perceived value, hopefully seeing more patients that would pay cash.
There are also many weaknesses with both models, which you probably know well. Besides inherent weaknesses, the other thing to consider is that the APTA only thinks PTAs should be assisting the PT with physical therapy services and AAOMPT and APTA agree joint mobilization (if that’s a part of care) should only be done by PTs.

But something I don’t see a lot of discussion about: are we TRAINING our physical therapists to practice in these two very different models of care?

The first model of care is often justified as “PTs should be using their highest/most valuable skills” such as diagnosis, triage, developing a plan of care, etc. But how well do we train our PTs for that role? At graduation, are PTs well-equipped to be managing 2-3 assistive personnel while doing laser-focused evaluations and developing achievable POCs?

I actually don’t think so.

Conversely, are PTs being trained to be great at efficiency and effectiveness in care, and marketing those services to the public? I also think the answer is no.

I think it’s possible this longstanding conflict between these two delivery models of PT sort of paralyzes educators, where PTs get trained a little bit in each, without being fully ready to execute on either.

02/24/2026

Arizona PTs: Our own Seth Peterson will be headlining the state conference this spring along with Cheri Hodges, who has co-taught our Mindful Management courses! Check them out!

Register: https://www.aptaaz.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=2003018&group=