Mindset
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
-George Bernard Shaw
After nearly forty years working in human performance, I have a great deal of respect for people who remain willing to examine what they do. Experience gives us observations, patterns, and sometimes a strong sense that something matters. It also gives us a responsibility to question our explanations.
My friends Stu McMillan and Gerry Ramogida have been doing that work around Performance Therapy. Their recent paper, The Transient Window, puts words to questions that have occupied practitioners for years: What are we influencing when we provide therapeutic input? How does that influence the movement that follows? And what makes the change useful?
I came to know each man in a different way.
Stu and I crossed paths in the Canadian sports system during the 2000s, working around athletes whose ambitions demanded a great deal from their bodies. We wanted to keep those athletes moving toward their goals, with the care they needed and enough continuity in training to keep progressing. Anyone who has worked in that environment knows how challenging that balance can be.
Stu came to those questions as a coach with a particular bent toward speed. His pursuit of faster athletes led him to explore how therapeutic inputs might influence performance outputs. The boundaries between coaching and therapy became a place to investigate.
One of his important influences was Dan Pfaff, a man whose contribution to coaching has reached many of us, myself included. Dan’s experience required him to wear several hats, and his approach reflected the practical demands of helping athletes prepare and perform. When something interfered, the question was how to address it while preserving as much useful training as possible. That willingness to work across boundaries helped shape the conversations that Stu and others would continue around Performance Therapy.
My introduction to Gerry was more circuitous. Friends first put some of his writing in front of me. Later came encounters at Fortius in Vancouver and trackside at ALTIS in Phoenix. I gradually got to know the person behind the ideas.
Gerry is a chiropractor by profession, but that title alone tells you little about the depth of his work with athletes. What has stayed with me most is his desire to serve and share. He has spent years working through the practical questions that arise when someone’s ability to perform matters deeply to them. Despite all that experience, he remains curious about what might help and generous with what he has learned.
Stu and Gerry arrived from different professional directions, but their work brought them toward a shared question: how might the knowledge and skills we associate with therapy contribute to someone who is already able to train and compete?
Their paper takes that question seriously. It also gives me an opportunity to explain where their thinking connects with what Jaime and I teach through Reconditioning, and why Gerry and I are considering bringing these perspectives together in a shared practice initiative next year.
Another encounter helped me articulate my own position.
About ten years ago, I met Bill Knowles at a sports medicine and performance summit hosted by the Philadelphia 76ers. We were both speaking, and the evening before the main event we had an opportunity to share ideas with a smaller group of practitioners. As Bill spoke, I recognized a set of beliefs that felt very familiar.
I had begun using the word Reconditioning in the 1990s to describe the integration of my work as an Athletic Therapist and strength and conditioning coach. Bill and I had been travelling along similar paths without knowing one another. Meeting him felt like finding a kindred soul.
The next day, he used a car analogy that has stayed with me. As I remember it, an elite athlete was a Porsche Carrera that had broken down. The opportunity was to address the injury while also examining what else could be improved, with the ambition of delivering a Ferrari when the work was complete.
We could spend an afternoon debating the merits of Porsche and Ferrari, but his point was about the intention behind the process. An injury creates a need for rehabilitation. It may also create time and opportunity to address qualities that had previously been overlooked. The ambition is a person who returns well prepared for what comes next. That possibility resonated with how I had come to practise.
Years later, I was with Stu in Grand Cayman at a camp convened by ALTIS. He asked me on camera how I would distinguish Reconditioning from Performance Therapy. Perhaps Bill’s story was still somewhere in my head, because I reached for another car analogy.
Think about Formula One. A car’s performance reflects the interaction of its design, preparation, driver, and the conditions on the track. Across a season, the team develops its capabilities. During a race weekend, planned adjustments and responses to feedback can help it perform more effectively. Damage requires repair, and returning to the track demands preparation for the forces and conditions it will encounter.
Performance Therapy, in that picture, resembles the purposeful adjustments made to influence what happens on the next outing. They may be planned before the car runs, or informed by what the driver and team notice along the way. Reconditioning resembles the integrated process of addressing a problem while continuing to develop readiness for performance, including the work between outings when nothing is broken.
Of course, people perceive, learn, adapt, and make choices. An athlete’s movement emerges through an interaction with the task and environment that no car analogy can fully explain. The analogy helps describe the intention and organization of the work. It has limits as an explanation of how people change.
That brings me back to Stu and Gerry’s paper.
They make a useful distinction: the purpose of an intervention, together with the state of the person receiving it, helps define the work. Similar manual or movement techniques might support recovery from training, rehabilitation following injury, or the expression of performance. Watching the technique alone tells us too little. We need to know what the practitioner hopes to influence and why it matters at that moment.
For this paper, they focus Performance Therapy on someone who has no injury to resolve and no damage to repair, with the intention of improving the task that follows. They acknowledge that the same methodology is also used in rehabilitation and return to play. Their paper examines a particular context within that larger practice.
The transient window is their proposed explanation for an opportunity that may follow an intervention. Manual input might temporarily alter the conditions under which someone organizes movement, making a useful option easier to access. The activity performed afterward may influence whether that opportunity is used.
There is something familiar in that proposition for anyone who has seen an athlete get off a treatment table feeling different, then wondered what should happen next. Should they rest? Return to training? Explore a particular movement? Has something changed that matters to the task ahead?
Stu and Gerry are clear that their explanation remains a hypothesis. Evidence of a temporary physiological response does not establish improved performance. A change within a session does not establish lasting learning. Their effort to separate those questions is one of the qualities I appreciate most in the paper. Experience can give us a reason to investigate. We still have to test the explanation.
There is a strong connection here with Reconditioning. We examine the relationship between the inputs a person receives, how those inputs are integrated, and the movement that emerges. Neurological and mechanical perspectives inform the work together.
For example, someone may gain ankle range during a session and continue to use essentially the same strategy when stepping, running, or landing. The paper describes research illustrating that distinction between range available and range expressed. In our teaching, it connects with the relationship between capacity and coordination. We need to understand what is available, what the task requires, and how the person organizes themselves to meet it.
Reconditioning gives those decisions a structure across the project. Our rubric begins with a question: What state is the client in? We then ask what they do with their body and how well they move, both generally and within the activities that matter to them. The answers help us decide where to begin, what to investigate, and when to change direction. They apply to someone in crisis, someone managing a recurring problem, and someone seeking another level of performance.
We give explicit attention to visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive inputs, alongside mechanical limitations, loading history, capacity, and coordination. A threat lens helps guide our inquiry into the person’s response, while a change in movement remains information to interpret rather than proof of a single mechanism. Reassessment helps us decide whether to continue. Progress toward meaningful milestones helps us judge the larger direction.
That is where I see a useful distinction. Stu and Gerry’s paper investigates a particular opportunity for change and whether the activity that follows makes it useful. Reconditioning organizes how we identify priorities, select and sequence our work, and develop the person’s ability to meet their demands over time.
The practices overlap. Performance Therapy includes active movement, and Reconditioning can include manual intervention. Timing, intention, and response matter in both. Their respective value becomes clearer when we explain how each perspective informs decisions, while recognizing that the paper’s scope cannot describe everything Stu and Gerry do.
This is part of what interests me about the shared practice initiative Gerry and I are exploring for next year. We see an opportunity to bring our perspectives into the same setting: to examine a person’s needs together, consider how therapeutic input and movement work might complement one another, and follow the response through a purposeful progression.
The details are still taking shape. What attracts me is the opportunity to work alongside someone I respect, learn through the decisions we make together, and explore how the strengths of each approach might serve the person in front of us.
For now, I encourage practitioners to engage with Stu and Gerry’s work. They are making an effort to clarify what Performance Therapy means, articulate where its value might lie, and put an explanation forward that can be tested.
I have been fortunate to learn from people who keep asking questions long after they have earned the right to feel comfortable with their answers. Stu, Gerry, Dan, and Bill are part of that story for me. I look forward to seeing where this next conversation takes us.
