Should Exercises Be Painful In The Management of Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain? A Systematic Review by Scott Buxton (Physiospot)
Perhaps more important than the finding that there seems to be benefit in the short term, I think it is just as important to see that there were no adverse affects in the short or long term. We can help patients become more resilient and learn that pain won’t break them.
Should Your Client Be Deadlifting From The Floor? by Dean Somerset (the PTDC)
This is a really good reminder that you can’t treat every patient with the same protocol (it is also a reminder that to consider the deadlift in rehab).
111 NFL Brains, All But One Had CTE by Joe Ward, Josh Williams, and Sam Manchester (NY Times)
In case you missed it, this was, in my opinion, the most damning study on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) to date. It will be hard to deny the link between football and CTE after this one, but we still have a lot of research to do before we can start giving concrete answers to most of our questions about the safety of football.
How Tattoos Might Affect Your Workout by Gretchen Reynolds (NY Times)
I am only including this in the reading list as an example of how to carefully read an article from a reputable news source. The title of this article makes me think it was intended to go viral among people who don’t bother to read the article. As the article points out, a lot of physically active people have tattoos. This seems like a cheap way to get those people to click on this article. At best there should be a very heavy emphasis on the ‘Might’ in this title. In actuality (as the article alludes to in the end), tattoos likely don’t affect your workout in any significant way. Reynolds, as one would expect, does a good job at making sure we know that this was a very small sample size and that the study did not involve any actually working out. It is on us to make sure that we are looking for these clues on how much weight we should be giving any news report.