“Sometimes, They Just Need to Get Stronger!”

-Unknown

I recently had a great interaction with the Reconditioning Plus+ community we created about six months ago. It’s a great group of critical thinkers and, more importantly, really good human beings.

We were sharing case challenges and insights loosely around the subject of shoulder pathologies. We’ve been going deep on different areas of the body that often become problematic, or injuries that have a tendency to recur. Our belief in Reconditioning is that pain problems or injuries that aren’t directly traumatic in nature usually have background stories. The current complaint is often just the output expression of something deeper.

We tackle areas of the body and recurrent injuries because they give us a starting point. That is, after all, the typical nature of our practices. Someone comes in to see us because something is bothering them enough to seek our counsel. It’s bad enough that they are willing to dedicate some of their precious time to having us help them.

But part of our job is to clarify what their problem actually is, while never losing sight of the fact that the problem they came to us with matters to them.

Pain is usually their problem. Some form or variation of it, anyway. Something is gnarly enough to have their attention. It’s preventing them from living comfortably, doing something that matters to them, or performing at a level that matters to them.

So our first responsibility is to understand them. What is their problem? What do they believe contributed to it? What has changed in their life?

They need to be heard.

Being heard is something every human seeks, and not every human receives. But while we’re hearing them, we also need to recognize that their interpretation is only one part of the story. We need to see some of the things they don’t see. We need to uncover things they don’t even know might matter.

Unfortunately, many of the issues our clients suffer from aren’t precipitated by the one thing they believe is the problem. They’re often a confluence of elements, each potentially contributing something to the painful output that has now become their greatest concern.

They may not recognize that the stress they’ve been dealing with at work over the last six weeks coincides almost perfectly with the emergence of their symptoms. They may not consider that working six hours a day on a laptop, staring down at a screen, has dramatically changed the positions and movement variability their body experiences every day.

They may not recognize that doing the same things over and over again, even doing them really well, can make the body incredibly good at solving one particular movement problem while leaving it less prepared for novel ones.

Their decision to play pickleball after work on Fridays seemed completely sensible. It was an outlet for stress, an opportunity for community and, finally, a chance to move. But five days spent predominantly sitting at a desk may not have prepared them particularly well for accelerating, stopping, reaching, rotating, reacting and changing direction while simultaneously tracking and hitting a ball.

Or maybe they are active. Running has been their jam. They can run forever, and the movement is beautifully grooved. But running forward repeatedly is a very different physical problem from moving forward, backward and sideways, changing direction and reacting to something outside their control.

None of those things necessarily caused their pain. That’s an important distinction. But they’re all pieces of information worth considering as we try to understand the person standing in front of us.

There can be many interesting contributors to the caustic output this person is now complaining about. Some acute. Some cumulative. Some physical. Some contextual. Our responsibility is to explore them rather than simply matching the painful body part to our favourite intervention.

Which brings me back to the conversation we were having in Reconditioning Plus+.

One of the things we ended up discussing was something incredibly basic, and something I think treatment practitioners sometimes overlook.

Is this person actually strong enough?

Yep. That’s it.

Can they produce the forces they need to produce to do the things they want to do every day?

Beyond that, do they have enough muscular capacity to support themselves, repeatedly? Enough physical reserve that normal life doesn’t constantly push them toward the edge of what they’re capable of tolerating?

Those of us who have spent our lives in exercise, sport and performance environments can develop a pretty distorted perception of what “normal” physical activity looks like. We tend to surround ourselves with people who train. We work with people who exercise. Our social media feeds are filled with people lifting, running, cycling, skiing and competing.

We can start believing everyone is like us.

They’re not.

The latest Statistics Canada data make that abundantly clear. From 2022 to 2024, only about 46% of Canadian adults aged 18 to 79 accumulated the recommended 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week.

Think about that.

One hundred and fifty minutes.

Two and a half hours out of 168 hours in a week.

More than half of Canadian adults don’t reach it.

Canadian adults also averaged 9.3 hours of sedentary time every day, with only 42% meeting the recommended sedentary-time threshold.

Perhaps even more troubling is what we’re seeing in young people. Only about 21% of Canadian youth aged 12 to 17 met the recommendation of 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity per day. Among adolescent girls, that number was just 8%.

Eight percent.

That begins to tell a much bigger story than simply whether people “exercise enough.” It raises questions about physical literacy, exposure to load, physical capacity, resilience and, ultimately, our relationship with movement across the lifespan.

Which brings us back to the people walking into our practices.

The matter-of-fact reality is that some of our clients need basic capacity building more than they need fancy exercise strategies.

We need to understand complexity. We need to be capable of recognizing neurological, mechanical, physiological, psychological, and contextual contributors to the problems people bring us.

But we also need to recognize simplicity when it’s standing directly in front of us.

Sometimes people simply need to become stronger.

Sometimes they need to discover that ten or fifteen minutes of appropriately selected strength work each day is achievable. Maybe that becomes the doorway to reducing some of the everyday aches and limitations that have prevented them from even contemplating a larger fitness objective.

In Reconditioning, we like to think about movement through two interacting ideas: capability and capacity.

Capability is how someone moves.

Capacity is how much of it they can do: under load, at speed, repeatedly, or under whatever demands their life or sport requires.

There isn’t an absolute rule about which one comes first because they are symbiotic moving targets. Some basic capabilities require a minimum level of capacity simply to execute them. As the demands of the task increase, greater capacity may be necessary to preserve that capability.

Think about stepping onto a 12-inch step.

For many of us, it barely registers as a physical task. Put your foot on the step, organize your body over it, produce enough force through one leg, and lift yourself.

It looks like a simple capability.

But what if you don’t possess enough force to lift your own body weight onto the step?

Suddenly, a movement problem is a strength problem.

For someone else, doing it once is easy. The question becomes whether they can do it twenty times. Can they do it carrying groceries? Can they do it with a backpack? Can they do it quickly if they suddenly have to run up a flight of stairs?

Same movement.

Different capacity.

This is why taking care of the issues our clients report requires us to understand what the real problem is rather than simply applying our therapeutic intervention of choice.

The intervention is the last thing we choose. Observation is where we begin.

Sometimes what we discover will be complicated.

Sometimes it will be surprisingly simple.

And sometimes the most sophisticated thing we can do is recognize that someone just needs to get stronger.

Then our job is to make that solution tangible, achievable, and meaningful enough that they’ll actually do it.

Think about it…..

Reference

Statistics Canada. (2025). Canadian Health Measures Survey: Activity monitor data, 2022 to 2024. The Daily, October 17, 2025.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

-Mark Twain

The butterflies that come with not knowing.

That uneasy feeling in your gut when you are about to step into something unfamiliar.

That moment when part of you wants to move forward and another part would be perfectly happy to turn around and go home.

There is something useful in that feeling.

Public speaking is often cited as one of our most common fears, and I understand why.

I can still remember the first time I had to give a speech in class. I was in Grade 4, and the assignment was simple enough: prepare something and present it to your classmates.

I have absolutely no recollection of what I spoke about.

But I remember the feeling.

I was incredibly nervous. I was afraid of standing there, afraid of making a mistake, and probably most afraid of what everyone else would think of me.

That feeling stuck with me for years.

Then, during my final year of university, I took a course that once again required us to present in front of our classmates.

The feeling returned.

But something was different this time.

Instead of moving away from it, I moved toward it.

I prepared.

I invested myself in the subject matter. I decided that if I was going to stand in front of that room, I wanted to know what I was talking about.

My subject was running shoes.

I wanted everyone in the room to understand how running shoes were made, where the technology came from, the history of the running shoe and its anatomy. EVA foam. Last design. Anti-pronation posts. Construction. Materials. All of it.

I started knowing almost nothing about running shoes.

By the time I stood in front of that class, I knew more about my subject than anyone else in the room, even my professor.

And something happened to me.

The nervousness didn’t disappear. It became fuel.

That feeling mesmerized me.

Somewhere in the process, I went from podium coward to mic drop.

Even now, simply remembering that presentation gives me goosebumps because I recognize it as one of those moments in life when you get a glimpse of yourself.

Not who you have been.

Who you might become.

Something that had frightened me suddenly revealed something that was already living inside me.

That performance anxiety had been turned into motivation. I had flipped it onto its back and used it to propel me toward something instead of away from it.

I’ve come to believe that performance anxiety is a messenger.

When we feel it, our instinct is often to make it go away. We interpret those butterflies as a warning that perhaps we shouldn’t be doing whatever it is we’re about to do.

But maybe they are telling us exactly the opposite.

Maybe that feeling is telling us that something matters.

Maybe it is telling us that we are about to expose a part of ourselves that hasn’t been tested yet.

And maybe the answer isn’t to quiet the feeling, but to become curious about where it is trying to take us.

Because when we continually move away from that feeling, we never get to discover what might be waiting on the other side of it.

I really believe performance anxiety can be a precursor to mastery.

If you want to become good at something, find something you care about that scares you a little, then give yourself permission to experience everything that comes with doing it.

Will it always work out?

Of course not.

Sometimes the presentation won’t land. Sometimes the performance won’t be what we hoped it would be. Sometimes we’ll walk away disappointed.

But even then, we have learned something incredibly important.

We did it.

We experienced the discomfort and discovered that we were safe on the other side.

That matters because the next time the butterflies arrive, they carry a slightly different message.

You’ve been here before.

And so we reach again.

Years after that “Shoe Dog” presentation (an ode to Nike founder Phil Knight’s book), presenting has become one of my favourite things to do.

There is almost nothing I enjoy more than standing in front of a room full of smart, curious people, holding their attention for a while and hopefully giving them a few light bulb moments.

Not every presentation feels that way.

Some rooms are better than others. Some days I’m better than others. Some ideas land and others don’t.

Maybe we need those experiences too, if only to help us appreciate the special ones when they happen.

Because when everything connects, there is a feeling of fulfillment that is difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it.

I imagine it must be a little like playing music for a crowd that bought tickets to hear you play.

They want to be there.

You want to be there.

And for a little while, the music holds the room.

My music is my experience distilled onto slides and brought to life through my words.

And every once in a while, standing there in front of a room, I still remember that frightened Grade 4 kid who wanted nothing more than for the whole thing to be over.

Now I get to do this.

What a gift.

Performance anxiety rocks!

So, what are the butterflies trying to tell you?

What will you do next?

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing’.”

-Mark Z. Danielewski

I had a conversation this past week with my old friend Gerry Ramogida for the Leave Your Mark podcast. Gerry and I have known each other for a long time, and between the two of us, we have spent the better part of sixty years working with human beings trying to help them heal, move, perform, and sometimes simply find their way back to doing something that matters to them.

You would think that after all that time we might have figured some things out.

And I suppose we have.

But somewhere during our conversation, Gerry said something that stayed with me. After nearly thirty years of doing this work, he said, the only thing he has really learned is that certainty does not exist. The only certainty is uncertainty.

I laughed when he said it because I knew exactly what he meant.

There is an interesting paradox that comes with experience. When you are young and beginning a career, you don’t know very much, but you desperately want to know. You search for answers. You take courses. You read books and papers. You listen to people who seem to know more than you do. You learn systems and methodologies and techniques, and each new piece of knowledge feels like another piece of the puzzle clicking into place.

There is comfort in that.

If this happens, do that. If you see this presentation, use this intervention. If this tissue is injured, follow this protocol. If this movement looks like that, correct it this way.

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Certainty feels a lot like competence when you’re starting.

The problem is that human beings eventually ruin the simplicity of all those rules.

You encounter the person who should respond to the intervention but doesn’t. The athlete whose imaging looks terrible but performs beautifully. The person whose imaging looks perfectly acceptable but can’t function without pain. You meet two people with seemingly identical diagnoses who respond completely differently to the same treatment. You follow the evidence, apply the protocol, check all the boxes, and still something doesn’t make sense.

If you stay curious long enough, those experiences begin to change you.

You slowly discover that expertise may not be the accumulation of certainty we imagined it would be. In fact, it may be almost the opposite.

Experience gives us more information from which to make decisions, but it also exposes us to enough exceptions that we become increasingly reluctant to believe there is only one explanation for what we see.

That doesn’t mean knowledge becomes less important. Quite the contrary. Gerry made this point beautifully in our conversation. If you don’t understand anatomy, biomechanics, physiology, the demands of the activity, and what the person in front of you is actually trying to accomplish, you don’t have a meaningful starting point. We need foundations. We need knowledge. We need enough understanding to develop an intelligent hypothesis.

But a hypothesis is not an answer.

It is an invitation to explore.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

When someone comes to us with a problem, there is an enormous temptation to identify the thing that is wrong. We have built much of healthcare around this idea. Diagnose the pathology, identify the impaired structure, name the dysfunction, and then apply the appropriate solution.

There is obvious value in diagnosis. There are things we absolutely need to know.

But the danger comes when the diagnosis becomes the person.

During our conversation, Gerry talked about how easily we can become so focused on the small percentage of the individual represented by the pathology that we forget about everything else. Sometimes when we begin working with the rest of the human being, improving capacities, changing movement options, altering inputs, exposing them to different environments and giving the system new ways to solve the problem, the thing we were so worried about becomes considerably less important.

Not because it disappeared.

Because its significance changed.

This is where uncertainty becomes uncomfortable, because it asks something different of the practitioner. Instead of simply knowing what to do, we have to become good at paying attention.

We observe.

We develop a hypothesis.

We intervene.

Then we look again.

Did something change?

If it did, what changed? If it didn’t, what else might be contributing? Where else should we look? What assumption are we holding onto simply because it is familiar to us?

Gerry described a phrase he has heard repeatedly from another experienced practitioner: “What else? Where else?”

I love that.

There is humility embedded in those questions.

They don’t mean we know nothing. They mean we recognize that what we know may not yet be enough to explain what is happening in front of us.

That is a very different relationship with expertise.

I think when I was younger I believed the best practitioners had the most answers. After nearly forty years in this profession, I am increasingly convinced that the best practitioners may simply have better questions.

They notice more.

They listen longer.

They understand context.

They recognize patterns without becoming imprisoned by them. They are willing to act on their experience while remaining prepared to change direction when the person in front of them tells them, through their response, that their original idea was wrong.

There is a confidence in that, but it isn’t the confidence of certainty.

It is the confidence of adaptability.

Maybe that is one of the great transitions of a career. Early on, we build confidence by accumulating tools. Later, if we’re paying attention, we begin to build confidence in our ability to navigate without knowing exactly where the road will take us.

I find myself increasingly comfortable living there.

It doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions. I have plenty of them. It doesn’t mean I don’t make decisions or that four decades of experience haven’t given me instincts I trust. They have. Experience matters enormously.

But I have become less attached to needing my first idea to be right.

If I apply an input and nothing changes, that is information.

If someone responds in a way I didn’t expect, that is information.

If the intervention that worked beautifully yesterday does nothing today, that is information too.

The goal isn’t to defend the methodology. The goal is to understand the person.

Maybe that is why uncertainty becomes easier to tolerate with experience. You eventually realize that uncertainty isn’t evidence that you don’t know what you’re doing. It is simply the environment in which this work has always existed.

Human beings are complex. They adapt. They compensate. They learn. They protect themselves. They respond to previous experiences, current environments, expectations, fears, capacities, relationships, and countless other variables we may never completely understand.

We aren’t going to solve that complexity by pretending it isn’t there.

Perhaps our responsibility is something different.

To know as much as we can.

To pay attention to what is actually happening.

To make the best decision available to us with the information we have.

To observe what happens next.

And to remain humble enough to change our minds.

Maybe wisdom isn’t finally arriving at certainty.

Maybe wisdom is becoming comfortable enough with uncertainty that we can keep exploring anyway.

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

-George Bernard Shaw

I think, or maybe I wonder sometimes, that people think I am a little crazy. I have never been particularly predictable, and yet, strangely enough, I think I have been remarkably steady. My dad used to refer to me as a turtle. Slow and steady wins the race. I suppose there was some truth in that, although my path through life has rarely followed the direction most people might have expected.

Each time I have found myself in a position that people in my industry might consider to be “the one,” I have eventually changed direction. It has never been a change simply for the sake of change, nor have I been particularly concerned with what the change might look like from the outside. I think I have simply been motivated by the possibility that there might be something else to see, another perspective to explore, another version of myself that I had not yet met.

That tendency has not been limited to my professional life.

I have been married three times and divorced twice. Not because I wanted change for the sake of it, but because I eventually came to understand that I did not want to remain in a relationship that was no longer right, either for my partner or for me. I found the right person, finally, although I have also come to understand that finding the right person is hardly the end of the story. Jaime wants to grow as much as I do, and perhaps that has been one of the secrets of our life together. We have made a deliberate effort to keep becoming, and somehow to do that together rather than slowly growing apart.

That is not easy. Relationships are not easy, because at some point you have to stop thinking only about what you want and begin thinking about what the two of you need. When children enter the picture, that equation becomes exponentially more complicated. You cannot simply do what you want anymore. You try to understand what everyone needs, including yourself, and then somehow make decisions that allow all of those people to continue becoming who they are. That is a difficult thing to do well.

Perhaps that same instinct has followed me throughout my professional life.

I left Concordia University because I had reached a ceiling of possibility. It was a nice job, filled with good people, and there were plenty of reasons to stay. But I could no longer create the experience I wanted to create there. The environment had become stagnant for me, and I was not.

I left the New York Islanders because the environment was messy and disjointed, and I could not find a meaningful way to serve within it. It was an organization with an incredibly rich history that, at the time, seemed to have lost its direction. I could feel myself becoming part of the dysfunction rather than someone capable of changing it, and eventually I knew I needed to move.

I did not have a choice about leaving the New York Rangers. That decision was made for me. Truthfully, though, in the middle of my second divorce and another period of significant personal change, I suspect I would eventually have found my way toward the door anyway. I could not build what I wanted to build there either. Professional sport can be a remarkably stimulating environment, but it can also be constrained by narrow thinking, fear of failure, politics and the understandable desire to protect what already exists.

Montreal was different. In Montreal, I discovered that I could build something. Perhaps not everything I imagined, but enough to begin creating a different way of working. We built something unique and, for a while, something powerful. I was challenged, stimulated, and surrounded by problems worth solving. Eventually, though, I began to feel that familiar restlessness again. When you work within a professional sport organization, your ability to continue growing often depends upon whether the people and the organization around you want to keep growing too. What many people would have considered the job of a lifetime eventually stopped allowing me to explore the person and practitioner I was trying to become.

B2ten opened that door again. It allowed me to become curious in ways I had never experienced before and to explore possibilities without many of the traditional constraints. For quite a while, it pushed me into places I did not even realize I was capable of going, and it unquestionably made me a better practitioner. Working with those incredible athletes left me professionally exposed. There was nowhere to hide. They had enormous dreams and expectations, and I had accepted the responsibility of helping them solve problems that stood between where they were and where they wanted to go. I had to find solutions. I had to become better. I had to step into the expectation that somehow I could help them move closer to the promise of an Olympic medal. That pressure squeezed growth out of me, and for a long time it satisfied that internal itch for expansion.

Eventually, where I wanted to go no longer aligned with where the organization wanted to go. Once again, I found myself standing in front of a choice. I could continue because it was comfortable. After all, it was successful, or simply because everyone expected that I would, or I could change direction again.

So Jaime and I decided to make a go of private education.

I became a teacher, mentor, business owner, content creator and, whether I was prepared for it or not, a digital entrepreneur. I dove headfirst into a universe I barely understood. I explored so many corners of that space that I am not even sure I could list them all anymore. Every time I thought I understood what I was doing, the rules changed, the software evolved, the algorithm shifted, and the thing I had finally figured out became the thing I needed to relearn. It was frustrating, fascinating, exhausting and incredibly educational. When I look back at everything we have experienced over these past twelve years, I find it difficult to believe how much we have learned, created, failed at, rebuilt and discovered along the way. It has been truly profound.

There is a cost to living this way, though, and I do not want to romanticize it. Changing direction means surrendering certainty. Sometimes it means walking away from status, financial security, familiarity, or an identity you worked very hard to create. Sometimes the people around you do not understand why you cannot simply be satisfied with what you have. There have certainly been decisions I questioned, mistakes I made and moments when I wondered whether staying put would have been easier. Almost certainly it would have been. But I am not convinced easier would have been better.

Then, almost as though the timing had been arranged for us, I looked at Jaime and told her I thought it was time to revisit our lives. The place we had once imagined ourselves living forever had gradually begun to feel like a waiting room for retirement. There was nothing wrong with it. In fact, there was almost everything right with it. But something inside me knew I was not ready to settle into the final version of my story.

I did not want to retire. I did not want to wind things down. I wanted another opportunity to revise the story, to explore another corner of myself and, in doing so, perhaps discover another corner of us.

So here we are again.

I have never been afraid of changing direction. Apparently, it is simply something I do. Not because change itself fulfills me, and certainly not because every change has worked out exactly as I imagined it would. What fulfills me is the revision. It is the possibility contained within another iteration. It is discovering that the story is not finished simply because the chapter you are currently living happens to be a good one.

Maybe my dad was right about the turtle after all. I have been slow and steady, just perhaps not in the way he imagined. The steadiness was never about staying in one place. It was about continuing to move toward whatever seemed capable of showing me something I had not yet discovered about my work, the world, the people I love, or myself.

The next iteration has almost always been the most interesting one.

And at 62, I am enormously grateful that I still want to know what happens next.

“Perhaps the hardest part of believing in something isn’t building it. Perhaps it’s continuing to believe in it during the long periods when the world hasn’t yet caught up to what you already know to be true.”

-SL

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether there is ever a right time to let go of something you believe in.

Jaime and I have spent the past twelve years building an educational company dedicated to helping human performance professionals solve difficult problems. It wasn’t a business we stumbled into or a market opportunity we happened to notice. It grew out of a question that followed us throughout our careers.

“What course did you take to learn how to do what you do?”

Sometimes the wording changed.

“How did you get to think this way?”

Different questions perhaps, but born from the same curiosity. People had watched us work with elite athletes, or heard us speak at conferences, or spent time with us in a course, and they were trying to understand where this way of thinking had come from.

The irony was that we never had a simple answer.

There wasn’t one course. There wasn’t one mentor. There wasn’t one certification that unlocked everything else. There were decades of experiences layered on top of one another: seasons in professional sport, failures that taught more than successes, conversations with remarkable people, thousands of athletes, endless reading, relentless curiosity, and an unwillingness to accept easy answers to difficult problems.

Eventually we realized that perhaps what people were really asking wasn’t where we had learned it. They were asking whether there was a way to shorten that journey.

That realization became the foundation for everything we have built.

Last weekend I was reminded of that question once again while speaking at the Professional Hockey Chiropractors Society Conference in Minneapolis. I spent two and a half hours walking practitioners through the management of low back problems in hockey, beginning not with treatment techniques but with the game itself. Hockey players routinely ask their spines to tolerate positions and forces that most people never experience. Their movement world is unlike that of almost any other athlete, and yet we often insist on evaluating and treating them as though they were simply another person with back pain.

The problem has never been that we don’t know healthy movement exists. Of course it does. The problem is assuming that human performance begins with health. It doesn’t. It begins with the demands of the task. Athletes don’t wake up wondering how to preserve the perfect spine. They wake up asking how to make the team, stay in the lineup, or win the championship. Our responsibility isn’t to convince them that the demands of their sport are somehow wrong. Our responsibility is to understand those demands and prepare the person in front of us to meet them.

Everything else follows from there.

As I worked through the presentation, I found myself returning to a principle that has quietly guided much of my career. The brain runs the show. If we fail to consider how it is receiving, interpreting, and integrating information, we inevitably end up chasing the outputs it creates rather than understanding why they exist in the first place.

Pain, movement, coordination, confidence, protection, none of these emerge in isolation. They are the consequence of a remarkably complex interaction between the information entering the nervous system, the experiences that shape its interpretation, and the objectives it is trying to accomplish. Two athletes can be exposed to the same environment, the same injury, and the same rehabilitation program, yet emerge with entirely different outcomes because their brains have interpreted those experiences differently.

That is why understanding the person must always precede understanding the problem.

Halfway through the presentation I found myself saying something I hadn’t planned to emphasize quite so strongly.

“Begin with the person… and end with the problem.”

The room became noticeably quieter.

From there I walked everyone through the case of a young NHL player whose career appeared to be ending before it had really begun. A first-round draft pick only two years earlier, he had become trapped in a cycle of pain, failed return-to-play attempts, medication, frustration, and diminishing hope. Eventually I received a phone call from his organization asking whether I would be willing to have a look.

Did eleven years working in the National Hockey League help? Certainly. But not because they gave me secret techniques. They taught me to notice the things that mattered.

At one point during the session I asked the audience how many people were familiar with skate profiling. Three hands went up in a room of roughly seventy practitioners.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, skate profiling changes the geometry of the blade beneath the athlete’s foot, subtly altering where the body’s centre of mass lives over the skate. Those seemingly small adjustments influence posture, force production, loading patterns, and ultimately the stresses experienced throughout the kinetic chain, including the lumbar spine. I’ve watched players develop back pain after changing nothing more than their skates and blade profile, simply because no one had appreciated the consequences of those changes.

The point wasn’t really about skate profiling. It was about context.

Every activity creates its own movement realities. Every sport asks different questions of the human body. If we don’t understand those questions, how can we possibly know whether someone possesses the movement options necessary to answer them?

When I finally assessed that player, I wasn’t looking for pathology first. I was looking for missing options. I already understood what hockey would demand of him. The assessment simply revealed what his nervous system no longer felt comfortable accessing.

Your brain will not consistently access movement that it either doesn’t know exists or no longer perceives as safe. Pain changes everything. It serves as a warning output, but it also quietly reshapes the movement solutions available to us. The movements we stop using gradually become less represented within our internal maps, and as those maps lose clarity the nervous system becomes increasingly reluctant to revisit them. The result is a vicious cycle in which protection limits movement, reduced movement limits experience, and diminished experience reinforces protection.

As I explained this process, I could see the room beginning to understand that solving a movement problem is rarely about correcting the visible output alone. It requires understanding the quality of the inputs and the way the nervous system is processing them. If all we ever do is chase the outputs, we will continue to miss much of the problem sitting quietly beneath them.

The final third of the presentation focused on restoring those movement options, making them safe again, and then building enough capacity for the athlete to express them under speed, load, fatigue, and competitive pressure. Without that final step, we haven’t really solved anything. We’ve simply created temporary relief.

When I finished, I sensed that something meaningful had happened. People stayed behind asking questions. Others thanked me for making them think differently. Over the following two days I listened as subsequent presenters referred back to ideas we had discussed together, weaving those concepts into their own talks.

One conversation in particular has stayed with me.

A Canadian chiropractor who had built a tremendously successful practice and life in Northern California came over after his presentation. We spoke for quite a while about the remarkable overlap between our philosophies and approaches to human performance. Eventually he looked at me and said, “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of you before this weekend.”

I smiled because I honestly didn’t know what to say.

I told him that Jaime and I sometimes feel a little like The Tragically Hip. In Canada, many people know our work. South of the border, despite years of teaching, writing, podcasting, travelling, speaking, and trying to contribute to this profession, it often feels as though we simply don’t exist.

That conversation has stayed with me all week, because it touches something much deeper than recognition.

For twelve years we’ve been trying to answer the very question people kept asking us. How do I learn to think this way? How do I develop this approach to problem solving? How do I shorten the decades it took you to put all these pieces together?

We built what we wished someone could have offered us thirty years ago.

And yet here we are.

Our newest Complete Reconditioning Experience cohort hasn’t attracted enough registrations to justify running it. After months of preparation, refinement, and sharing what we genuinely believe is valuable, we find ourselves wondering whether we have failed to communicate that value, whether we’ve been speaking to the wrong audience, or whether some ideas simply take longer to find the people who need them.

I don’t honestly know.

What I do know is that the work itself still feels true. Every athlete I’ve worked with, every practitioner I’ve mentored, every difficult case that has reinforced these principles reminds me why we started this journey in the first place. The evidence isn’t found in marketing metrics. It’s found in human beings who now see problems differently than they once did.

Perhaps that’s why I’m struggling with the question.

Not because I’m ready to let go, but because I care deeply about the possibility that people who are asking the very question we built our lives around answering may never discover that the answer exists.

Maybe that’s simply part of building anything worthwhile. Maybe every meaningful idea spends part of its life waiting patiently to be discovered. Or perhaps there are still lessons for Jaime and me about how to tell this story more clearly than we have so far.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that every meaningful chapter of my career has required living with uncertainty long before clarity arrived. This chapter, it seems, is asking the same thing of me.

So tomorrow I’ll probably get up, keep teaching, keep writing, keep learning, and keep trying to help people think differently.

Perhaps that’s not giving in at all.

Perhaps that’s simply what belief looks like.