I don't care how far you go, I just care how you get there

I had the opportunity to spend the weekend with one of my absolute favorite gurus in the physical therapy realm: Shirley Sahrmann, PT, PhD, FAPTA.  I was lucky to be able to chat with her at lunch about big career things ahead!  As she said, "I've been running this aging experiment for a while now, and it's not for sissies!"  She has a ton of energy, probably due to the regular exercise she gets despite her "senile sarcopenia" (her jocular moniker for her aging muscles).  She's seen the ups and downs and fads in the movement sciences, and although she's technically retired (yea right!), she's still quite busy lecturing and writing a new edition of her first book.  Although this is not my first rodeo engaging with her material, or taking class from her, every time I come away with tons of new tidbits to digest and wonderful words of wisdom.  She is still learning, and not afraid to speak of how she's "seen the light" in regard to things she used to teach but no longer agrees with.  Shirley speaks of how to move our profession forward rather than recite a litany of her great many accomplishments and hot shot friends.  She believes physical therapists have an identity as movement diagnostic and prescriptive experts and belong as birth to death practitioners - just like the dentist - doing annual neuromusculoskeletal screens to catch things before they become big problems.  She is also hilarious, a joy to be around, and believes in the power of smart women.  In case you can't tell, I think she's fantastic and I hope to have an ounce of her wisdom and spunk when I myself have run the aging experiment a good while longer.

My pen never stopped moving all weekend, so it'd be impossible to share all the great takeaways, but I wanted to share a few more general ones:

• "Muscles don't take kinesiology.  They violate the rules because they don't know the rules."
• "Neuromuscular control and performance is more important than muscle strength."
• "Just because you're wearing a muscle doesn't mean you're using it."

• "Find the muscle and use it.  If you can't use it under controlled circumstances, using it functionally requires a lot of luck."
  
• "Doing things easily uses the little guys.  Doing things big will use the big guys." (speaking of intrinsic vs large multi-joint muscles)
• "You get what you train."
• "There's no magic in an exercise unless you see what you want to happen happening."
• On mindful movement: "When a patient asks 'when can I stop doing these exercises?' I tell them when you stop taking a bath and brushing your teeth because you obviously don't care anymore."
• "If the patient doesn't take responsibility, we part company - there's no point."
• "I can't emphasize enough the importance of alignment with gravity."
• "What I had attributed many years to shortness, I don't believe any more is shortness.  It's a relative stiffness problem - not fixed by stretching, but fixed by stiffening what's relatively flexible."
  
• "I firmly believe there are signs before symptoms."  Followed by examples such as you don't wait 'till you have a stroke to get your blood pressure checked.
• "Identifying a pathoanatomic problem doesn't do anything to help you solve the problem."
• "If they taught med students like we teach PTs today, they'd say 'today we're covering cardiology. We've got beta blockers, transplants and antibiotics.  Now you figure out who to use them on.  We wouldn't want to tell you what we learned when we were old 'cause we don't want to stifle you're creativity'." with a hint of sarcasm ;-)
• "Evidence changes.  We need to understand the underlying mechanisms."
• "I don't care how far you go, I just care how you get there."

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