A Conversation With Dr. Quinn Henoch

Transcript taken from Fitness Candor Podcast episode 137

00:01 Eric:Hey, everybody, welcome back to Fitness Candor Podcast. Dr. Quinn Henoch joins us today. Dr. Henoch is an internationally recognized physical therapist, author, presenter, coach, and he is also a member of the Clinical Athlete team, which we’ll dive into later. Dr. Henoch’s philosophy kinda lines up with mine in terms of training philosophy and getting people back to the gym, and even better, onto the playing field, if they’re an athlete. So, Dr. Henoch, thanks for joining us, I appreciate it.

 

00:34 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Eric. It’s an honor, I appreciate you having me.

 

00:37 Eric:Oh, don’t say it’s an honor yet. You haven’t been through this whole thing. Who knows what’s gonna happen? [chuckle] So, I wanted to explain a little bit about Clinical Athlete before we learn more about you. So, Clinical Athlete is kind of a twofold process. So, for the public, it’s a free resource that can guide people to find healthcare providers that will understand their goals related to training, athletic performance, and what they actually need to do instead of going through a mainstream rigamarole. And… Not to say it’s a waste of time, but it’s a little more streamlined. And for the clinician side of things, it’s a platform for athletes to be able to link up and feel comfortable with people walking into the door so they kinda know the person already and they don’t have to jump to like one person… It lessens the referral process, basically, more or less, so… But before we dive into Clinical Athlete, tell us a little bit more about you, what you do, who you are. We kinda can go from there.

 

01:38 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah, so as you mentioned, I’m a physical therapist, I’m based out of Southern California. So I’m in Orange County, California, my office is in Newport Beach, and it’s a physical therapy clinic, it is inside of a barbell gym. So we have a big ol’ weightlifting team and a powerlifting club, and we do adult fitness classes, and these types of things. So there’s people throwing barbells around all over the place, and that’s where my offices is. So it’s a really cool atmosphere and that kind of comprises most of my patients. My population is I define “athlete” as anybody who has athletic endeavors. They’re walking into my door with physical activity goals, whether or not there’re any good at those activities is a different story, so it’s kinda like, how do you define “athlete” at that point? But 99% of people who walk in my door are doing so to get back to something physical, exercise, or that type of thing.

 

02:31 Dr. Quinn Henoch: My background was in strength and conditioning early on, so that’s what I went to school for, and went to school in Indiana so I’m a Midwest guy. Exercise Science was my degree, I… Yeah. I played football at a small V1WA school out there, and then after I graduated, I started working as a strength and conditioning coach at several different facilities and just felt that I had some type of knowledge gap when it came to rehab and injury management and reducing injury risk and these types of things. So, I thought physical therapy would be a nice little bridge to that gap and went back to physical therapy school to the University of Indianapolis in 2010, and that’s also around the time that I started my competitive weightlifting career after my collegiate football career was over. So it was like PT school, barbell sport, and then I’ve kinda molded that blend up until now, so I graduated from PT school in 2013 and started doing a very similar thing to what I’m doing now. All my clinics, I’ve jumped around a little bit, but they’ve all been inside of a gym, and so that’s kinda of been my little niche.

 

03:33 Eric:Nice. I’m interested in more of like the… You said knowledge gap, and I think there’s a… That’s a unique way of putting it because there’s definitely a gap between the medical side and the strength conditioning side or the fit pro side of things. So that was interesting that you saw that there was a gap right away even in your early education.

 

04:00 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah, well, I mean… Well, I’m sure we’ll get into this, but that’s pretty much the reason why we started Clinical Athlete three years ago, was to bridge that gap for both sides. But it’s… We can’t know everything about everything in the amount of time allotted, so, in my strength and conditioning education… And legality is probably the biggest deterrent. It’s like when I was being trained as a strength and conditioning coach, it’s like, “Well, you’re not a doctor so you shouldn’t be treating ‘injuries’,” but yet name any strength and conditioning coach that hasn’t had an athlete walk in the door telling them that they’re hurt.

 

04:35 Eric:Sure.

 

04:37 Dr. Quinn Henoch: It… It’s a daily occurrence multiple times a day. As a coach, you’re managing that all the time, but you don’t really get any of that knowledge in injury management. It doesn’t have to be treating injury, but just managing the person. You don’t really get any of that knowledge. And then in physical therapy school, I had this preconceived notion that I was gonna be like LeBron James as student PT for three years and it was gonna be awesome, up in Oregon at the Nike Center or whatever, but obviously it wasn’t like that, either. And we got very, very little, actually, of athlete management or sports injury-type management, that type of thing, in physical therapy school. And they tell you that straight up, “We train you to be generalists,” so you’re gonna have as much time in the hospital as you’re gonna have in any outpatient clinic, and that outpatient clinic itself may not be sports-oriented.

 

05:25 Dr. Quinn Henoch: So, luckily I have the strength and conditioning gap. Now I learned a ton in PT school, don’t get me wrong, but there’s just more of a divide, and I think then that you get confusion on both sides. You’ll have the athlete in the middle, and there are strength and conditioning coaches telling him, “Uh, we need to do this ’cause we gotta get you back,” and the physical therapist is saying, “Well, maybe we should wait.” And then maybe the physical therapist doesn’t even understand the sport, and maybe the strength and conditioning coach doesn’t actually understand the complexity of the injury. And so, we have this divide. And I did notice that, at least in my… It was my gap in my own mind, and that’s why I went to physical therapy school, and then in physical therapy school, I realized that there was a probably even bigger gap between a physical therapist and their knowledge of strength and conditioning.

 

06:16 Eric:Mm. Interesting.

 

06:17 Dr. Quinn Henoch: If you don’t have a background in strength and conditioning or exercise, you’re not getting that in physical therapy school to a large degree other than the Mount Rushmore of therapeutic exercises like the bird dog and the glute bridge and the side plank, and activate your transverse abdominis, these types of things. Now, some schools are a little different. And I love my school, I always knock it like that, but there is a big gap.

 

06:43 Eric:Yeah. Well, there’s a framework that everybody has to work in. Like you said, the legalities of some things, you have to stay within a certain box and some of those things are really hard to break out of because there’s such a mainstay, and we already know that they’re safe for majority of the people. Doing the bird dog, side planks, things like that, we know that more than likely, the risk of injury doing those exercises are very, very small. And I think… I’m on the personal training side of things and I can attest to that. I don’t like to get out of my lane when it comes to the physical therapy aspects that I know: Very, very minimal things, some thoracic spine things, some shoulder mobility, some hip things that I see on a daily basis, ankle, knee. Other than that, when it comes to… I don’t wanna say… I use the word “prescribe” very loosely, but when it comes to prescribing an exercise or things that people can do, I’m always like, “Look, you can try this on the outside a few times a week, a few times a day. Other than that, if you wanna go beyond this, then you need to go to a professional.”

 

07:54 Eric:And it’s interesting, I just had a podcast last week with a colleague, Simon Shawcross, and we just talked about how there is the gap between the returning to exercise and then the physical therapy side of things. And the best thing that we can do as fitness professionals is get a hold of the other specialist, contact them, let them know what they’re going through. So, that’s interesting that you saw that right away in what you were already starting to tackle. Where in this whole realm… You said Clinical Athlete started about three years ago?

 

08:34 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

 

08:35 Eric:Yeah, so, dive a little bit more into that, and how that came about, and who was involved.

 

08:41 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah. So the idea was in my mind for a long time. In physical therapy school, as we’re talking about this whole gap thing, I was thinking to myself, “Man, it would be cool if there was some type of community of healthcare providers who specialize in the management of athletes and then coaches that they could talk to. We could have this back-and-forth types of thing.” And that was 2011, ’12, ’13, and I didn’t have any resources or wherewithal; I was just trying to pass PT school [09:11] ____.

 

[chuckle]

 

09:13 Dr. Quinn Henoch: A lot going on. So, that was just an idea. And then as I gained some traction in the field, the idea started to materialize in my brain a little bit as to… And I started to make connections and start to know people across the country, that how we could put this thing together. And then in 2015, it was me and a friend of mine who I had pitched the idea, who’s not a clinician, who is actually a patient of mine, he was a professional mixed martial artist like national champion wrestler, but he was a business guy and a logistics guy, and I had pitched the idea to him maybe a year or so before we actually started, probably a year and a half, and kinda he brushed it off. It’s just too much of an undertaking, kind of like a hurting cat’s idea. It was good in theory and concept, but this is not realistic or sustainable. And then as I started to gain traction, became more of a realistic possibility to get a community like this together. And then so in 2015, the summer of 2015, we started making phone calls. And I probably… Man, I don’t know. 200, 300 phone calls that summer of just telling people the idea. If we got enough interest, we’d start a directory and a website and a forum, an educational private forum, for us to actually share ideas and collaborate.

 

10:32 Dr. Quinn Henoch: And in August, September of 2015, we got I think 50 to 60 committed people to be on the map as soon as we launched. And in September 1st of 2015, we launched the website and the directory was born right then and there. And so, you can go on the website and find a Clinical Athlete provider near you. And then on the back end, we have a private forum where the clinicians, strength conditioning coaches, and students of all of those disciplines can collaborate, share videos, share research articles, discuss, all the webinars that we do go in the forum. And so it’s just grown from there. Now we’ve got seminars and online courses and that type of thing. So… Yeah, the premise has always been the same: Connect athletes with providers who they trust, knock down that barrier to entry, and then provide the provider with the type of clientele that they’re most suited for.

 

11:25 Eric:Yeah.

 

11:26 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah.

 

11:27 Eric:So, can you walk us through if you… If you’re an athlete and you’re looking for a certain individual, what is that step, that process, look like for them? And then maybe swing back around and see what the process looks like for the clinician.

 

11:44 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah. Totally. And as an FYI, we’re re-launching a new website…

 

11:49 Eric:Oh, nice.

 

11:50 Dr. Quinn Henoch: And it’s been like two years in the making. And so, whatever I describe right now and a few months, if you go on the website, it may look completely different.

 

11:58 Eric:Okay.

 

11:58 Dr. Quinn Henoch: But the premise will probably be the same.

 

12:00 Eric:Got it.

 

12:00 Dr. Quinn Henoch: But right now it’s… For the athletes, it’s extremely easy. They simply go to clinicalathlete.com, they scroll to the bottom of the page, and right there is the map. It’s a map of the world, and you can see dots on the map, and if you zoom in to your area, you click on the dot, and there is all the contact information and a profile page of a clinician. So you get to read all about their philosophies and their background and how they work with athletes, and then their website and all their social media. So it’s all there and you can, as the athlete, pre-screen that clinician and see which one that you feel is the best fit. Backtrack, those clinicians are screened to even get on the map. I’m obviously horribly biased in this whole thing…

 

[chuckle]

 

12:48 Dr. Quinn Henoch: But I think that we have the most rigorous screening process that I’ve seen of any directory other than, “Hey, you paid a certain membership fee and now you get to be on our map,” that type of thing. So for clinicians to be listed on our directory, they have to apply. So they fill out an application explaining, obviously with their website and that type of thing but more so what their philosophies, their current role working with athletes, their current… Their athletic history themselves, athletes who have some type of “walk the walk” mentality, and then that application is pre-screened. And so, if there are things that we feel may cause confusion in regards to our philosophies of being more evidence-based and questioning old narratives and these types of things, we’ll actually have a correspondence with the person. Then if the application is “passed,” the next step is they have to go into our private forum first. So they actually are required to go into our forum and begin a discussion on a current topic in the literature… Or a current topic in clinic, but based on the current evidence.

 

14:00 Eric:Nice.

 

14:00 Dr. Quinn Henoch: So they have to start a… Yeah. So that they start a new topic, post a research article about it, and actually have a back-and-forth with our forum members. Once they do that, and we’ve had this back-and-forth, then it’s more… It’s another kind of email correspondence, and then they’re on the directory. So there’s the tiered process, there’s a filtering. It’s very time-consuming on our end, and it’s… If we didn’t do it like that, we’d probably have a lot more members because it would be a lot easier and less time-consuming…

 

14:32 Eric:Sure.

 

14:32 Dr. Quinn Henoch: But in order to have… Yeah. In order to have the best quality and filter out. I see it as a natural filtering process, like sometimes people see the fact that there is a forum, “Oh, actually, I have to discuss things with other professionals,” that stops people dead in their tracks sometimes, so… And that’s perfect, that’s what we want. We wanna filter out people who don’t actually wanna progress and just want referrals. ‘Cause the way that I see it, the referrals are just a natural occurrence. We’re trying to progress the field. So the athlete, if they see a Clinical Athlete provider that they can be pretty confident that there’s been a good screening process and it’s much more rigorous than a Google search or something like that.

 

15:11 Dr. Quinn Henoch: And then, for the clinician that is the process to get listed on the directory. The reason that we came out with a better website is so that the website itself could be more interactive, because an athlete could go on to the provider’s profile page on our website and keep going there a hundred times and never contact their clinician. So we’re looking for better ways to have some interaction between clinician and athlete before they come in to the door. So our new website is gonna have… It’s almost gonna be like a Facebook. It’s gonna have profile, interactive profile page, there’s instant messaging, followers and followings, and that type of thing, so it’s gonna be pretty cool. It’s just gonna connect people a little bit better. But that’s pretty much it, it’s pretty simple.

 

15:58 Eric:Yeah. Well, what you said about not just paying… There’s so many other professional organizations that people belong to to get referrals, which… And there’s nothing wrong with most of those… Or some of those? [chuckle] Like a handful? I don’t know. I’m sure once you start getting an athlete or a professional starts getting into those kinda things, you can find out pretty soon who’s just running people through the gauntlet and just taking anybody. And building a practice, I completely get that. Building a business, you wanna get people in, the more people you get to see the more people you get to be in front of. Hopefully, if you do a good job, the more people talk about you. Likewise, you don’t do a good job, you have a lot more people telling the truth about you.

 

16:45 Eric:But when you’re a part of this community… And it’s good to have a system that breaks down and says, “Look, we have expectations. Here are the expectations, you meet those expectations, rise to a different level. You’re trying to improve the entire… Your entire ground working of who you guys are, who you’re trying to work with, and get a better outcome for the people you help.” And so, there’s… I’m sure, some people are like, “Well, I treat… I don’t even know what an outstanding amount of people for a physical therapist would be. I treat the maximum amount.” “That doesn’t mean you’re treating at the highest level. Do you understand… ” Like you said, “Are you still working with the old narratives or are you trying to learn?”, because that happens a lot in all realms of health, wellness, and fitness. You get stuck in one area, it seems to work for some people, so you think it should work for most people, and turns out it doesn’t. So, really good screening process, and I think… I’m sure your athletes are thrilled by it, right?

 

17:51 Dr. Quinn Henoch: We’ve gotten great, great feedback. Yeah, I mean, it’s… And we actually respond to if there’s problems. Not everything is perfect. We’ll have… We’ve gotten feedback where we’ll say, “This clinician doesn’t necessarily… It doesn’t seem like they’re in line with what you guys are about,” or “It’s funny ’cause I just saw you guys post something questioning the narrative of this particular treatment or whatever, and then I saw one of your providers post the exact same thing and touting its efficacy.” And so, there’s always gonna be some of that, but we actually take those things seriously. And it’s not a scare tactic with the clinicians, we’re not… That you have to treat a certain way, but they do have to be open to a conversation. I would like… It’s a requirement to be able to have a rationale for what you do. And I think that’s the biggest thing.

 

18:46 Eric:Yeah.

 

18:47 Dr. Quinn Henoch: If… I am not gonna treat like the PT right down the street, but if we can have a conversation about why we do what we do other than, “Well, it works in my experience, and I’ve done this for 30 years, and so, talk to me when you’re older in the game,” that type of thing. That’s all we’re looking for. So the feedback from the public has been instrumental in this process, and I think it’s really created a strongly-knit community.

 

19:13 Speaker 1:Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, the… Yeah, you guys… Those kind of people who might have 10 research topics that they… Or research articles that they hang on to for 50 or 60 years, you’re like, “Oh, man, this has gotta be broken up somehow,” have the conversation, and then yeah, they give you that, “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, come see me when you’ve got more skin in the game,” and it’s pretty evident that there’s no room for growth there. And I’m sure they’re helping a lot of people, too, but that goes for… That goes both ways. There might be a…

 

19:44 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Totally.

 

19:46 Eric:Yeah. There might be a trainer out there, the exact same thing, who has… I don’t wanna go down the rabbit holes or anything, but do you see that all the time where someone will look at you… Trying a new method or even stepping away from a method that may not be right for most people or for the people that you treat? Like, “Well, why aren’t you doing this anymore?” If you give them an actual reason and they dismiss you, then you know where their head space is. So that goes across the board. But if you can have an open conversation with somebody and just… Asking and getting a reason why from somebody, and not just because… And not to have them just say, “Because I’m the professional and I said so,” because how often do we hear… How often do we see and hear that? “Because you’re coming to me, I’m the professional. End of story.” “Well, give me an actual reason why I’m going to do this. Why is this gonna help me?” And maybe a lot of people don’t even go that far, but I think with things like Clinical Athlete, now you’re starting to open the door and let the athlete or the general population say, “Oh, it’s okay for me to question people because I’m going to seek out help.”

 

21:01 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Exactly. And you’re kind of alluding to the whole title thing…

 

21:06 Eric:Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

 

21:08 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Titles, we go back to the legality, and that’s what largely separates a lot of these things, is just the term, like what are you called, and beyond that, it’s meaningless. And we’ve started, at least in our social media, is we don’t describe our clinicians. We don’t give them their professional title when we tag ’em, we just say “Clinical Athlete Provider so-and-so,” “Clinical Athlete provider Michael Ray,” “Derek Miles with PT,” a chiropractor, whatever, a medical doctor. A human is a human, so if we’re abiding by the laws of physiology and the hypotheses and theories in which we understand the way that the human body works now with pain science and rehab science and these types of things, it shouldn’t really matter what title you are. And then if you’re a coach, okay, you have certain legal boundaries that you have to abide by, but the conversation still needs to be had. ‘Cause you said something earlier on, it was like… For you, it was like, “I wanna stay in my lane. And so, yeah, I’m gonna give you some low-load exercises because those are gonna… You’re not gonna get hurt doing those things.” And I 100% agree. What’s interesting, though, is if we keep people too low-load too long, we are actually increasing the risk of injury later on because of de-adapting, they’re de-conditioning.

 

22:22 Eric:Interesting.

 

22:23 Dr. Quinn Henoch: They’re not being prepared… Yeah, they’re not being prepared for the stressors that they’re going to encounter in life or sports, so, it’s almost malpractice the other way, to keep people low-load too long. And so that’s where we need to start to break down these barriers a little bit and have the conversations between clinicians and coaches so that we can find the middle ground. It’s like, “Yeah, maybe you can’t run through a brick wall like you could before, we gotta slow your roll a little bit… ”

 

[chuckle]

 

22:50 Dr. Quinn Henoch: “But you also don’t need to just lay on your back and diaphragmatically breathe for an hour, because that’s not doing anything for you, either.” So we’ve gotta… Both sides have to be able to find a middle ground and have to understand the why and then have some type of knowledge in both realms, in that first little bit of both realms, so that there is some… We can have a conversation.

 

23:10 Eric:Yeah.

 

23:11 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Otherwise, the athlete is stuck in the middle, their left ear is getting something, their right ear is getting something else, and it’s just… It’s a cluster in a way.

 

23:19 Eric:Yeah. Yeah, there’s no progression. No, that makes total sense. When I think back on the people that I help with… Specifically shoulder injuries, shoulder issues, I see a lot of those, and when someone comes to me, I have… There’s a baseline for me of five different exercises for mobility or for… And this also depends if they’ve gone to see someone to get a diagnosis. And if they have, then it’s much easier for me to be able to progress them along. But if… Again, yeah, you’re right, if someone just comes to me and says, “This is bothering me,” in my mind, I know certain cues and movements that are gonna be good for them over the long term, but yeah, like you said, if there’s no progression, then they’re stuck in like fitness purgatory [chuckle] for so long.

 

24:14 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Exactly.

 

24:15 Eric:So yeah, that makes total sense.

 

24:18 Dr. Quinn Henoch: And we don’t really maintain… Well, as an organism, we’ll maintain a little bit, but we allocate our resources to other things. And so it’s like, if you just say, “Well, I’m hurt right now, I’m just gonna take time completely off from those things and I’m just gonna… I’m gonna maintain a little bit.”

 

24:34 Eric:Sure.

 

24:34 Dr. Quinn Henoch: What you’re actually gonna do is slowly de-condition to those things even more. And then the vicious cycle comes when you’ve waited long enough where the pain perception or the sensitivity has died down, and then in your mind, it’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t hurt anymore. I must be back and I must be ready to jump back into what I was doing months ago when I was prepared for that type of training.” And then you do, and you’re de-conditioned, you’ve leveled down from a conditioning standpoint and the tissue tolerance standpoint, and now you have a recurrence, and you’re in this vicious cycle of, “Woe is me. What’s wrong with me?”, when the question is actually, what’s wrong with your preparation? And that’s why I think that the coaches, the trainers, the strength and conditioning coaches, are so incredibly vital in this thing because they are seeing the athlete more frequently, they are writing… I mean, I think training is rehab, I think exercise is rehab.

 

25:25 Eric:Yes.

 

25:26 Dr. Quinn Henoch: I don’t see it as a dichotomy. I see it as a graded spectrum. You can’t do… You can’t go as intensely or with as much volume as you were doing before? Okay, then your rehab is just doing a little bit less of that and maybe modifying certain things to be able to grade you back to your goal. So, it’s not this dichotomy of PT or [25:49] ____thing; it’s just a spectrum of degrees of how you grade it. So, if the coach isn’t on board, then the person that sees the athlete the most, gives them their actual exercise program, essentially is the route to being 100% back to function, we’re missing that. And the athlete is stuck… Yeah, they’re stuck now as a perpetual patient…

 

26:19 Eric:Yup.

 

26:20 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Just in and out of the door, thinking that they need the physical therapist’s magic hands to put them back together, which never works [chuckle] ’cause it doesn’t work like that. But it’s probably a great business model for the PT ’cause you get this revolving business, like you just… Life-long client. Well, my thing is like, “If I’m doing my job, then my business is gone.” They’re gonna come back, they’re gonna tell their friends, and that’s how I get my business. And they’ll hurt something else ’cause that’s what athletes do. Eight, 10 months down the line, and they’ll be like, “Ah, I jacked up my knee this time,” and then I’m like, “Alright.” And we’ll do some things and then we’ll send ’em back out to their coach or trainer to progress. But that’s… To me, that’s the way it should be and that’s hopefully what we’re trying to foster with Clinical Athlete.

 

27:01 Eric:Yeah. The idea that there needs to be… Well, let me cycle back. My brain goes in thousand different directions, I try to grab on to something as soon as it comes by. So, what you said about, there’s an open door with people who just come in and come out, and I think the biggest thing… For instance, if an athlete hurts themselves, or a person gets hurt, I don’t see a ton of “athletes” in terms of sport-specific, but if you’re an active person anyway and you come in with an injury, and let’s just stick with the shoulder thing, and that person says, “I need to take some time off because of my shoulder.” Well, you think about your shoulder in relationship to the rest of your entire body. Now, we can still train and then you get… You can still train the rest of the body, keep it strong, keep it mobile, keep it… As peak as it possibly can, then we get to educate that person on why keeping all of that actually benefits the injured area and how they’ll come back faster, how they’ll progress even quicker once they’re actually able to handle some load, handle some more stress.

 

28:17 Eric:And a lot of people… A lot of people come in, and I see people walk around in our boot, and my client will even say to me like, “That person shouldn’t be here,” and I’m like, “Oh, actually, here’s why they should be here, and if you ever get injured, this is why you’re not gonna stop training,” and then we get to have that conversation. But I think that… My point is in all of that, that that conversation, that tiny little piece of explaining why training is still important while you’re PT’ing or while you’re injured, that alone can uptick your value as a coach, that can bring in more business for you as a physical therapist or a practitioner of any kind. So, having that open dialogue and giving a little bit of education when it’s actually needed, that goes so far.

 

29:08 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Oh, it’s huge. It’s absolutely huge. And I think it’s hard, but as a coach, finding a healthcare provider who you trust as a referral source who… Like you guys work as a team, a team for the person, not this competing entity that’s playing tug-o’-war with the person, as like, “No, you need to stay in PT a little longer,” and the coach is like “Well, maybe not,” and it’s like there is this power game going on. So like… I mean, that’s… I love that, I love that, if more coaches… And I think that idea is much more in tune naturally with the coaching side of things and the trainer side of things. I think in physical therapy land, we far too often think of people as made of glass and that if they’re perceiving pain in an area, then we need to be very delicate with them, or else something’s gonna snap off the bone, or we’re gonna hurt them more and we’re scared to get sued and all these type of things, and it just… It’s degraded the progression, like you said before.

 

30:11 Eric:Yup.

 

30:12 Dr. Quinn Henoch: And then you mentioned if somebody’s got a jacked-up shoulder, well, we can train… You got three other good limbs. I say that all the time to people, and I would even take it a step further and argue that you could probably train the shoulder, too. We just need to modify the thing.

 

30:23 Eric:Right.

 

30:24 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Sometimes people are like, “Well, my shoulder hurts when I press 90% of my one rep max and up, so I’m just not gonna do anything.”

 

[laughter]

 

30:32 Eric:Just stop.

 

30:34 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Well, yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s like the easiest thing, it’s like, “Okay, we could go lighter, dude.” [30:39] ____the ego a little bit.

 

30:39 Eric:[laughter] “Bro.” [chuckle]

 

30:46 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah, right. [chuckle] Or we could cut that barbell in half and make it a dumbbell and that’s probably a little bit more comfortable, or we could do less reps, or we could go slower tempos, or decrease range of motion a little bit. I mean, there’s so… Go from overhead to landmine press. There’s so many training variables that we could manipulate before complete rest is warranted most of the time.

 

31:05 Eric:Right. Yeah, I think… Well, you’re right, ’cause when a lot of people will say… And I’m guilty, but I’ve said it before, “This hurts, so don’t do that.” And that’s not always the right approach. But again, if I see somebody three times a week, half hour each appointment, or twice a week, half hour each appointment, which is more in tune, sometimes it’s like I wanna get that person the best workout, the safest workout as possible, so I’m gonna take that away maybe for that one workout, and then a week later, seven days go by, I’m gonna say, “Hey, let’s try that thing that bothered you. And then, if it’s still hurting, then maybe we can look at other ways to train it.”

 

31:47 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Oh, yeah, totally. It’s logical to say like, “Stop doing the thing that’s re-creating the exact symptoms that you’re feeling,” like, that’s okay, I get it. And I say that to people all the time, “Okay, stop doing that.” And if you’ve got limited time, I completely understand. They’re not there for shoulder rehab; they’re there to get a workout. We can bank on Mother Nature doing her thing, healing stuff up, making things feel better, and then we can work back into things. That is also where communication… If you wanna then just punt that to a PT in order to get that okay sign-off, where it’s like, “Oh, yeah, we’re just a little bit of a over-reaching injury. They just pushed it a little too hard those couple of days, and give it seven or 10 days, and you can work back into some pressing or something like that,” then you’ve got… Then you’ve got more of a peace of mind as a coach that you can just kind of like build into that ’cause you got the sign-off on that healthcare professional.

 

32:37 Dr. Quinn Henoch: And that’s why for me it’s so important, as soon as the athlete… I make sure I get the athlete’s trainer’s name and email or coach’s name and email, and as soon as they walk out my clinic door, I’m sending an email off to that trainer or coach explaining those exact things, like, “Here’s what we should avoid,” if anything. “Here’s what we can modify, here’s what they can still do. Let me know if you have any questions.” And it just… It’s a nice hand-off. And then that way, the next session, the trainer already can formulate, “Okay, what are we gonna do for the next week or so as in training?”, instead of waiting for the athlete to come in the door and then having to be probably woefully abridged to the session because the athlete is probably not gonna remember half of the shit that I said.

 

33:21 Eric:Right.

 

33:22 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Sorry, cussed.

 

33:23 Speaker 1:No, go for it, it’s fine.

 

[chuckle]

 

33:26 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Okay.

 

33:27 Eric:Okay.

 

33:28 Dr. Quinn Henoch: They’re probably not gonna remember anything that I said. And then so it’s just gonna be this broken summary of our appointment, and then the trainer is gonna have to try to interpret that, and sometimes it’s not gonna be that great of information so they may have to reach out to me anyway.

 

33:41 Eric:Yeah.

 

33:41 Dr. Quinn Henoch: So, yeah, that’s just an important… Something that I think is important is to have a dialogue with the trainer as soon as possible.

 

33:48 Eric:You just came right full circle. That person gets ping-ponged back and forth until somebody opens the door and that ball can be like, “Oh, thank god, somebody’s talking to me, not hit me back and forth.” [chuckle] It just takes that small little inkling. So, well, this is awesome. Quinn, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna finish up with a couple questions I like to ask people sometimes. What is one personal habit that you’d recommend to another fitness professional or a health professional?

 

34:17 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Mm. Okay, one personal habit, healthcare professional, personal, professional. I would try to read one book a month.

 

34:27 Eric:Nice. Good. That actually plays right in to my next question, which is, recommend a book or article that is on your must-read list.

 

34:39 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Woah, well. Okay, do you have a topic?

 

34:41 Eric:No. No, no. Anything that pops into your mind that you know would be a benefit. Go for it.

 

34:47 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Okay. Well, because in this… A general question like this, like what’s universal, and communication is universal. And there’s a couple books. There’s one book called “Crucial Conversations” that I just recently read, or I listened to an audio book; and there’s another one called “Crucial Confrontations.” So, essentially, both books, same author group. They are meant to have… To be able to approach difficult or more difficult conversations; not arguments, the type of conversations that may lead to arguments if one or both parties let their emotions get the best of them.

 

35:34 Eric:Mm, yeah.

 

35:36 Eric:So for a trainer… Yeah, so for a trainer or a coach, having to have a conversation with their athlete in regards to compliance with the exercise program, or just any issue that’s interfering with the progress of the athlete, or the tolerance of the coach, ’cause you gotta have a good fit there. And for the same with the clinician and the client, compliance issues, maybe the athlete has misinterpreted some expectations, which is probably on the client, like those types of things. How to approach conversations and be able to actually move understanding forward so that you end the discussion not in an argument where emotions take over, but in a place where both parties are satisfied with the outcome and can kind of go from there. Those two books have been really, really good for that.

 

36:29 Eric:Awesome.

 

36:30 Dr. Quinn Henoch: So, I just think communication is so important. Yeah.

 

36:32 Eric:Yeah, and I’ll link both of those to the show notes, too, so people check out those. So, Dr. Henoch, before we let you go, where can people, if they have any questions, comments, concerns, where is the best place to get a hold of you?

 

36:46 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah, you can email [email protected], so that’s just kind of a direct… Most direct way. And then any social media avenue on Clinical Athlete, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and then my personal Instagram is quinn.henochdpt. I say it’s a personal page, but it’s still business, it’s still all content, educational stuff, as my Instagram. And then my Facebook, I have two, I have a coach’s page and my personal one, so you can always shoot messages there. Now, I’ll just say right off the bat that email’s better and I’m slower with social media messages, but I get… I get to everyone, but also, if people have very in-depth specific injury questions, I’m not gonna be able to answer those via social media. So I’m probably gonna point you in the direction of Clinical Athlete. So just like, I’ll just keep that in mind as a natural filter, but we’ll try to do the best we can with the questions, but I respond to everyone.

 

37:41 Eric:Awesome. Well, look…

 

37:42 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Yeah, those are probably the best place.

 

37:46 Eric:Awesome, thanks for everything. I think we’ve learned a lot, and I really… I urge people to check out Clinical Athlete. I’ve been a subscriber for definitely over six, seven, eight months, something like that, and I use the material all the time. I try to point to [38:00] ____single article. It’s definitely worth it if you’re a coach; even if you’re not a coach, please check it out. So, Dr. Henoch, I appreciate it, we’ll talk to you very soon.

 

38:10 Dr. Quinn Henoch: Awesome. Thanks, Eric.