Quadriceps Strength and Biomechanics After ACL Reconstruction with Dan Cobian - Episode 5

It's well established that persistent quadriceps strength deficits are common after ACL reconstruction. Despite a lot of attention, we still continue to struggle in restoring quadriceps strength after surgery.

As important as quad strength is after ACL surgery, recent research is showing that strength doesn't always correlate to biomechanical changes, which is an extremely important concept to understand.

In this week's episode of The Sports Physical Therapy Podcast, I talk with Dan Cobian about this and his research on lower extremity neuromuscular biomechanics after knee injury and surgery.

Full Show  Notes: https://mikereinold.com/quadriceps-strength-and-biomechanics-after-acl-reconstruction-with-dan-cobian/

_____
Save $200 Off Our Online Knee Course
Learn how to evaluate and treat the knee with my online knee course with Lenny Macrina.  Click here to learn more and save $200 off the course this week only.

Click Here to View My Online Courses
Want to learn more from me? I have a variety of online courses on my website!

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Introduction: 0:34

On this episode of the sports physical therapy podcast. I am joined by Dan Cobian. Dan is the assistant professor in the department of orthopedics and rehabilitation at the university of Wisconsin, Madison. He's a faculty member in their DPT program and a research scientist with a Badger athletic performance lab. So he has access to a ton of athletes. One of the things that he's focused, a lot of his work on his lower extremity, neuromuscular biomechanics after knee injury. So for this episode, I wanted to talk a bunch about quadricep strength. Performance in some ways that we can really maximize outcomes after ACL reconstruction.

Mike Reinold: 1:21

Hey Dan, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for, uh, for joining us here. It's an honor to have you here to, to share some of your knowledge bombs with us today.

Dan Cobian: 1:28

Yeah, no, thanks so much for having me here this morning. Very glad to be here. Glad to share with you.

Mike Reinold: 1:33

Dan to me is, um, he's one of those guys that I think, um, obviously we've we've you probably followed him online. You're seeing some of his work and the sports academy, you know, a bunch of stuff that he's producing out in Wisconsin. It's just really neat stuff, correct me if I'm wrong, Dan. But I feel like we're about to get like an absolute avalanche of Dan Cobian articles coming out soon. Right? Am I, am I wrong with that?

Dan Cobian: 1:55

So that's certainly the hope. Um, you know, we've had a lot of, let's say kind of like smaller projects over the last few years, a lot of abstracts and things like that? It takes us a lot of time to get the numbers that we want for publication kind of due to our division one athlete population. Um, but we're getting closer and closer on a lot of things. And, um, yes, I have a long list of papers to write.

Mike Reinold: 2:15

It's funny. It's, it's almost like how, you know, you're working on so many projects in tandem, right. And they're accumulating, accumulating, accumulating, then all of a sudden, like, boom, you have six publications in a three month period. And it's, it's people don't realize that that is three years of your life, right?

Dan Cobian: 2:30

Absolutely. Yeah. And in many of these cases, you know, maybe, maybe six years for some of these, some of these data sets, which seems crazy. Right. But that's, uh, that's sometimes the time you need to, again, like accumulate the volume of data to make sure you're not putting something out there that you're going to regret,

Mike Reinold: 2:45

Right. Yeah, that's it. That's a good point. Like you don't want to just add to the vagueness of our profession. You actually want to answer some clinical questions. So, um, that's a great way of saying it. So well, one big area that I know you've been looking at with some of your, your research up there in Wisconsin, that you've done well. And I've seen you speak on this a little bit that I really wanted to talk about, because I think this would be very. Clinically relevant for everybody, but it's a concept like quad strength and some of the things behind it after an injury or a surgery and returned to activity, that type of thing, but like quad Frank we know is like a huge, important factor for ACL rehab. Something that everybody's talking about, everybody focused on everybody is just harping. This is so important. So important. So important. The research continues to show that we have this persistent loss of quad strength. Like, what are we doing wrong? Like, what do you thinks? Like, what do you think is our fault here? Because we're, hyper-focused on it and still not doing a good, good job.

Dan Cobian: 3:37

Yeah, right. It's a very interesting point. Um, as you said, there's, there's no shortage of, of publications in this area, right? Not necessarily a unique research area to be in. Um, but we're trying to expand on that a little bit and maybe kind of expand the, let's say the definition of, of quadriceps. Strength or performance. That's kind of the way that we describe it as quadriceps performance. And we try to measure things that let's say are kind of beyond strength, you know, strength that some of the activation metrics and then, And then rapid, uh, force capacity. So kind of trying to look at the whole picture as to just specific to quad strength, right? It's certainly a frustration. I'm sure that you've experienced. Like we've all been through this clinically where you have a patient that, you know, you feel like we're doing all the right things in terms of dosing, the types of exercises. And they're just not gaining strength for a lot of these patients. What we're seeing, especially kind of these, these later stage. People right where they just can't get it all back. You know, there's still enough inhibition. There's still significant problems within the neuromuscular system that can prevent those strength gains. And a lot of times we think of those things to me is only occurring early on, right? Like the first few months you can't fire your quad. Now I see you can do a quad set. Okay. We're good. You know, like now you can move on to just voluntary strengthening and that's certainly not the case. Um, you know, we're finding that people have these. Activation or these, these inhibition type deficits much later on. And that's really, uh, uh, you know, uh, makes it very difficult to recover quad strength with voluntary strengthening exercise.

Mike Reinold: 5:09

And do you think, like, is that a, is that something that the cumulative from the beginning? So meaning like they got behind from the beginning and they're just behind or do they hit a plateau or is there even some regression at some point in the process or does it vary it like, is that those all within the realm of post.

Dan Cobian: 5:25

I think those are all within the realm of possibility. I've certainly seen, you know, kind of all of those examples. Um, for a lot of these individuals, the process starts after the initial initial. And, you know, my view is we could probably do a little bit better job of treating people after the initial injury to already start, to try to recover these deficits. You know, if we think of like the initial injury and kind of like your overall as, especially an athlete, right? Like athletes, a trained individual, right? Like they have a they're in a train state. So if you just remove the training load, they're already kind of dropping down. So they need, you know, training load, gun injury. But then if you don't do anything before the surgery to kind of work back up now your surgery you're just dropping further down. So that's kind of the way I think about it is it's just so far to kind of work back from, from that point. Um, it can really take a lot of time, um, as in regards to people dropping off, the best example I can think of of a bat is when people are in that late stage rehab. And sometimes it's kind of like, okay, Back to sport and you kind of just forget all the rehab stuff, Right. Like it's kinda like, okay, great. I'm done with that. I'm so sick of that. I'm done with it. I'm back to my sport. And then we do notice that people come back in and they have these kind of lower strength values, or these lower quad performance values, which is really interesting. So I do think you need to maintain at a lower frequency, but maintain a lot of these exercises kind of much later on, even after returning to sport.

Mike Reinold: 6:48

Yeah, I can see that. And I can say a lot of people get into that jam, especially in the physical therapy world. If you're not in the collegiate or the pro setting and your patients disappear. Out of insurance. Right. And, and they just go to their skill coaches or they go to the gym, or even if they go and work with a good strength coach, you know, still it's sometimes it's, it's a little bit off. So, I mean, that's, that's a bigger problem. If it takes nine months to come back from an ACL now and w what we're recommending, and we only get 12 visits, like, it's just, there's, there's a, there's a huge, there's a huge gap right there. So, um, awesome. So strengthening. Super important. And we kind of talked about that, but one thing I've learned from you that I thought was super interesting. I've seen you present on this before, but is you've presented some data that shows that quad strength doesn't necessarily necessarily translate to kinematic changes. So I assume that means like running, jumping, cutting those types of things. Like, yeah, I thought that was really fascinating too, because I think a simpleton like myself, what we tend to think is that essentially strength is like the. Right. And if you're strong, theoretically, you're running, we'll just in and of itself just become better. But it sounds like that's not the case. And I think you alluded to this going back to the neuromuscular things, but before we get to the why, because obviously I think the why is super important and I feel like that's going to be like the punchline for this podcast. Right. Everyone's excited for tell T tell us a little bit, like, what are these kinematic changes that you're seeing post to ACL? Like what, what does somebody look like? And then what is somebody that's doing well versus doing poor look like in your mind?

Dan Cobian: 8:15

Absolutely. So, and just to clarify what we do in our lab, you know, we assess three-dimensional kinematics and kinetics of, uh, our university of Wisconsin athletes when they are running on a treadmill in the lab and then jumping. So doing, um, you know, bilateral counter movement jump or a single leg, vertical hop, um, and the things that we're looking at, and I'll just say the pattern that you see across everyone, if we're looking at sagittal plane, Motion is you see a lack of, from a kinematic standpoint, you see a lack of knee flection. So people are in a more extended knee position. When you'll see this during running is, is basically it's just stance phase, right? It's right at the initiation of stance phase. So as soon as you get, get foot contact and then, and then the knee begins to flex. Both the total excursion. So the amount of flection that the knee goes through and the peak knee flection angles are substantially reduced. Um, as a result of that, you get changes in the hip and ankle angles as well. So you get a, uh, a less Dorsey flex ankle position or a more extended hip position, but really it's driven by the changes at the knee. And you'll see that same pattern for jumping, but it's just more pronounced for, for running or just single leg tasks.

Mike Reinold: 9:27

Right. And w when we've looked at bilateral jumping to, if, if that the more significant that is the more they tend to favor the other side too, which is, you know, another obvious factor too, with the, with the asymmetry of it. But, um, but, but super interesting. Again, my brain goes right to though, well, yeah, I mean, that's quite avoidance, their strengths, not their it's it's so they're, they're avoiding it. They're trying to not use that quad and it changes like their upright positions and stuff like that. But you're saying sometimes quad strength doesn't necessarily correlate to that. What do you mean by that?

Dan Cobian: 9:57

So we do see a relationship, right? There's some relationship there. The way I would describe it as like, definitely doesn't explain all of the differences in a movement kinematics or the movement mechanics, let's say.

Mike Reinold: 10:09

That's awesome. I'm glad you said that because you know, I created this podcast to confirm all my biases and this is the worst episode ever for that now.

Dan Cobian: 10:16

That's nice. Yeah. I mean, we've seen, you know, it's not just our group. Right. You know, seeing published research, you know, there's been certainly a fair amount from the Delaware group And and, and others who've looked at that relationship. And there, there, again, there is a relationship there, but we've also seen a fair amount of evidence that suggests that even when people have. Good, you know, like 90% or better quad Ella size plot strength LSIs that they still move abnormally. So that was kind of, and this is actually almost going back to like, my, my dissertation work at Iowa was like, that was kind of like the initial question is like, all right. So if that's the case, like why? Right? Like what else are we missing? Something like, what else could be explaining that?

Mike Reinold: 11:20

Right. And if you think about it to this, maybe this is the secret. Maybe this is this. Maybe this is what we're missing out. When we have people that, um, just they, maybe their, their psychological readiness scores are poor. Right. But their strengths. Good. And you're wondering why you're like, well, you know, I feel like there's, like you said, there's a strong association, but it doesn't completely correlate to everything. And there's always going to be uniqueness everyone's in their own individual. So, uh, so, so interesting. So I mean the million dollar question is what do you think is going on? If it's not strength, what do you think is causing these kinematic changes?

Dan Cobian: 11:52

So, and I'll say, cause you brought up the psychological aspect, it's always multifactorial, right? Like obviously we're never going to have one variable that explains like a hundred percent of the variants or whatever, but what we've noticed kind of across the group is that when. Quite, especially in athletes, let's say when we quantify not just the ability to produce a lot of force, but the ability to produce force quickly, we noticed some pretty significant differences. So it's not unusual for us to have an athlete. Let's say they're in that like six to nine month range. And let's say their quad strength is, is good. You know, 85, 90%, I think. Great. Okay. That's pretty good for that, you know, that range or where we'd like to be in at that point in time, but we still see like, uh, a 10 or 12 degree, you know, knee flection, angle asymmetry, all that's way outside of the normal between LeMay symmetry of plus or minus three degrees. So, okay. Like they're clearly not moving normally what's going on. It wouldn't be unusual at all for us to try to ask that athlete to produce, uh, quadriceps, uh, force quickly and to see like a 50% deficit in their ability to produce force quickly.

Mike Reinold: 12:52

So not necessarily their peak force at that time, but just their, their rate of force development. It takes them, it takes them twice as long to get to peak. Is that what you're saying?

Dan Cobian: 13:00

Yeah, basically, right. There's a, there's a, there's a much larger deficit or much greater impairment in the ability to produce force quickly. Um, and really this, this largely goes back to the neuromuscular changes, right? So if we look at the differences in your quad activation patterns, That's what we see, right? The ability to activate your quadriceps muscles quickly is what's very limited. So kind of across our group, if we're looking at people at, you know, 4, 6, 9, whatever intervals we want to look at, what we see is that the power tends to lag the strength by maybe like say 15 to 20% in terms of those LSS. And what we found is that that power measurement, we call it, sorry, I don't want to confuse terms. We often call it power just for ease of describing it when we're talking about it with the athletic training staff or kind of the athletes, but to be very clear it's it's rate of force or rate of torque development. Um, but what we've found is that those measures are much more closely correlated with the knee kinetics and kinematics than the peak strength measures.

Mike Reinold: 14:03

Right. And, and, and once you say it, it's you almost think like, well, that makes perfect sense. Like, why didn't we think of this earlier? And, and you wonder why. You know, we've gotten better at building strength, but perhaps we're not doing it as best as we can. Maybe there's more variables. Maybe it's not just how strong you are. It's how fast you can present for us. Maybe we're not working at fast enough speeds. Right? Cause I, I know what we're trying to progress to at, at champion. And even some of the teams that we can sell with is, is this rate of force development and velocity based training and getting people to move. Quicker. What we've noticed with some of these athletes is that when you start working in a little bit more of a velocity spectrum and, and helping them, not just lift weights slowly, but actually help them to work on some of that spectrum to develop toric as fast as they can. Then what happens is they have like, Big uptick and improvement that happens fairly rapidly. I don't want to say it's completely rapidly. Right. But it's not like what you would think. Like it takes six months to come back. Sometimes all of a sudden their numbers can pop and just like four to eight weeks, for example. Is it, are you, are you finding that or am I crazy?

Dan Cobian: 15:05

No, this is a great point because it has to do with like what's driving the changes. Okay. So if, if you have good strength, if, if we're talking about like the theoretical patient, right. That has that like 85 to 90% strength, but it deficit and the ability to produce force quickly, or we know they can produce a higher force. So what's driving those differences. Well, it's not going to be structural differences or at least not like, you know, muscle, muscle, mass, uh, or hypertrophy. It's going to be the ability to activate quickly. Because those are almost entirely, you know, the neurological aspects that we're talking about or that's going to drive the vast majority. You can make those changes relatively quickly. That's not unusual at all for us to see some significant improvements in the rate components in a few months time, if people are really starting to change how they're training.

Mike Reinold: 15:49

That, that that's awesome. And I think it just goes down into, as we continue to evolve our thoughts and we understand these things. We not only have to get strong, but we also have to work on our ability to develop that. Quickly and be powerful. And that is such an important thing for people to understand. It's not just about their baseline strength. And that's probably that next evolution that I think in rehab, we're probably going to understand better, but like, what's the point of working on this if you're weak anyway. Right. So. Yeah, you have to be strong to be able to then focus on rate of force development. So I think even as our profession, you could argue we've taken the correct path to get here and people like yourself are helping us identify that. So I think that's, that's awesome. So, um, question for you here. And this is the million dollar question again, although I've already used that reference that that's getting old, but, uh, you know, for, for me, I wonder though, like how does a normal clinician measure this? Is there any way that they can do this without having to send them to Wisconsin to come see you?

Dan Cobian: 16:44

So this is the million dollar question because it is the question that, you know, obviously people always ask at the end of any of these talks and, and it's, it's a hard one because I wish I had a better answer for people or a more satisfying answer. Right. Um, the reality is. It is difficult to measure these things accurately because they occur in such short windows of time. So you're talking about equipment that can sample at high rates that is, uh, has a certain amount of stiffness in the system. So you're accurately capturing what you're, what you think you're capturing. It's challenging. So this is some of the things that we're currently working on. So I, in our sports residency, residents are involved in research and one of our, our current residences is working on two projects to kind of compare sampling rates for some of our rate of torque development measurements, and then ISO kinetic assessment versus isometric assessment to try to see like, From a clinical standpoint, are you getting the same things? If you have data that's at a lower sampling rate, or if you have data that was connected, uh, excuse me, collected ISO kinetically. My, my early indication is even with a relatively low sampling rates. Like your Biodex, um, default sampling rate is a hundred Hertz, right? We sample at 2000 Hertz when we're collecting our torque data. So it's much different, but even at a hundred Hertz, You can get an accurate assessment of some of our more meaningful rate of torque development measures, not all of them, but most of the more meaningful ones on the, on the converse side, ISO kinetically, we have not seen that. That is unlikely to be, um, Meaningful in the same way or unlikely to really represent what we get when we assess this isometrically. There's too many things going on. There's there's, you know, the movement that occurs and the way the system measures it is probably not going to give you an accurate rate based measure. Um, yeah. Sorry.

Mike Reinold: 18:34

you think, do you think like my handheld dynamometer that we use, right? It gives me a reading for rate of force development. Do you think that's fair enough to use? Is it, of course it's not perfect. Is it good enough to make clinical disease?

Dan Cobian: 18:48

So this is the next point, right? Like, so now, okay. If we can sample at a lower rate, can we use something like that accurately? And that's kind of the next step. Now, people like Terry Grindstaff has published on this, you know, I've published on what you get. If you assess rate with a, with a handheld dynamometer and, and again, there's some evidence there, especially for kind of these longer window sizes that you could do that accurately Scott Morrison, as you know, from, from the sports performance, SIG is very interested in this type of thing and, you know, has used a number of different, um, kind of, um, Uh, devices for this. Um, and, and the, the main thing I would say is you gotta have a good setup, right? So it's gotta be very secure. The patient has to be secure and the angle has to be consistent. So it's doable, but it's not as easy as just busting it out and doing it. Like you might need to have a. You know, uh, uh, whatever, a structure or a chair or something set up where you have it, it's like a testing piece of equipment. Right. And you put the secure, the dynamometer or whatever else it is on it. I think that can work, but not in the, like, break it out and do the strength measurement way that we normally

Mike Reinold: 19:53

Yeah, like with your hand. And so, yeah, I agree with that, but you know what I'm hearing though, Dan is that these are solvable problems, right? Meaning like you, you can do it, you may not want to, but you can do it. And I think that's the part that's, that's really neat. Um, the other thing we're doing, we're using force plates. Commercial base, I guess, versus your lab ones. But we have like the vault forest decks, for example. And we use like isometric midnight pole, w w we want to get a, like an isometric belt squat kind of set up, going to, to kinda like give us a little bit of a parallel information. Especially we have a lot of gripping athletes with us, but, um, uh, you know, for me, they have some, some slightly better, you know, uh, things, again, it's not your lab, but are those valid.

Dan Cobian: 20:34

Yeah. So the force plate data is, you know, that's, that's good data, right? From most of those, those types of force plates, um, and the, you know, the way that we sample and what we've used before as well, you know, we've definitely used some force plates that are more of the commercial type. Um, I would say this it's just different data. So with the force plate, like you said, especially made by pole jump. You can look at, at rate based measures there that would be different than a quad. You know, specific rate-based measure because once again, someone has the potential to compensate, right. And, and generate that force with, um, with a different strategy, right. Then with only using the quad or whatever.

Mike Reinold: 21:14

what I'm going through right now is what we really need to do is have an equation where we have to do isolated quad rate of force development, and then rate of force development with like an isometric isometric, mid thigh, PL and then rate of force development with a counter movement job. And you look at those ratios and now all of a sudden you can say is, is, you know, does that specificity of the quad then relate to their functional, capable?

Dan Cobian: 21:36

Right, right. And it's just like what we've always seen. Right? Like the hop, you know, we seen a lot of these articles recently too, like the hot tests, right? Like you can have a symmetrical hop test, but an asymmetrical quad shrank measurement or whatever it is. Right. So obviously there's, there's something going on. Obviously people are able to, to accomplish the task, using a different strategy or avoiding, you know, um, magnifying that quad deficit.

Mike Reinold: 21:58

That's awesome. Awesome. Right. So, uh, I think, you know, super impactful conversation here for me, Dan, I think this was, this was huge because it's not all about strength. Of course you need strength, you know, to have power in the. Developed for us quickly, but I think as rehab specialists, we need to figure out better ways to focus on this rate of force development and make sure that we're incorporating that. And then hopefully we'll see both the qualitative and the quantitative changes in how people move. And it's not just it's, it's not just looking at numbers, but we're actually looking at the quality of their movement too. So that would be, that would be really neat, so awesome stuff. So I like to end the podcast with a little segment. I call the. Right. Five quick questions, five quick answers, but it tells me a lot about you and, and lots of valuable information that we get from your mind like this. But first one, what, what, what are you currently doing? Dan? What are you currently reading or working on yourself for your own con ed? Because you're producing so much for us. What are you doing for you?

Dan Cobian: 22:53

Sure. So, I mean, obviously I'm, I'm, I keep up with ACL literature or with any of the quad neuromuscular literature and try to keep up with the collegiate and pro athlete literature, as you know, that's all those three things mean means a volume that is, that is really challenging, but I

Mike Reinold: 23:08

a, that's a full-time job.

Dan Cobian: 23:10

Right. Um, real quick, just because, you know, interesting things I've recently read, I just read a muscle strain injury article and Aja ASM. Um, I don't know if you saw that one. It was about heavy resistance training and potential structural effects after muscle strain injury, which I found fascinating because basically it showed very little structural change. Um, and I, I guess I was always, you know, thinking, Hey. No, we just got to dose these things, right? Like a strain injury. You can remodel that tissue if you just use the right combination of, and yeah. Like you see things like that and you're going, dang it, you know, like, okay, like, you know, you can improve strength with the training, but it was basically saying that, you know, there may be things there that are, I don't wanna say permanent, you know, but what do we need biologics? Like, what else do you do you do to change that? So I'm interested in all aspects of muscle performance.

Mike Reinold: 23:59

ma maybe that's why we keep having recurring hamstring strains with everybody.

Dan Cobian: 24:04

For sure. Yeah.

Mike Reinold: 24:05

interesting. Cause that's a, that's a big topic now, too, so. Awesome. All right. So this may lead into that a little bit, but next question is what have you recently changed your mind on, or kind of evolve your thought process on other than that, maybe.

Dan Cobian: 24:17

How get messenger? No, I'm okay. I'll say it for this one. Uh, how I treat. the cartilage lesions, particularly patella Memorial, if it's oh, it's microfracture even just chondroplasty. Um, I have, I have evolved the way that I approached that. Um, I'll say this, my. My initial approach was all right. These people have the same types of quad deficits that ACL is have, right? Like they have a significant, you know, any knee injury or surgery is going to have that neuromuscular dysfunction of the quads. And obviously like my background is saying, okay, that's very meaningful and we need to address. And saying, well, based on the location of the lesion, right? Like I'll read the op report. I'll look at the, you know, we'll figure out the specific location. We'll design an exercise that doesn't play stress on that area of the patellofemoral joint. And no matter what I do, it's, they're just exercises that flare those people's. And I can't, I I've taken a different approach. Um, I have, I have not tried to continue to, um, to, to treat them in that way and feel like I'm just taking them through this kind of, you know, up and down rollercoaster.

Mike Reinold: 25:30

love it, but you know, w what's what's your pros, you got to tell us like, what's up, like, what's your, I mean, that was too good to not like to leave us with a cliffhanger.

Dan Cobian: 25:38

I just, I, there are, instead of like an ACL, you know, approach where it's like, okay, the way we might, you know, do this exercise, selection, isolate the quad, things like that. There are certain exercises, certain movement patterns for those certain individuals, when you find those patterns, I just absolutely avoid those, you know, I'll I'll, I will not explore that. I will not try to do an isometric hold in certain, like, let's say it's a lunge, right? There's some people that squat great lunge, bad, you know, I just can't, we can't work it out. Okay. I've spent all this time. Let's do a nice symmetric hole. Let's do this angle. Let's do it. You know, with your rear foot elevated, let's change the weight distribution. I've just kind of, okay. We're not doing that. Like we need.

Mike Reinold: 26:17

there's so many other things you can do, right. So.

Dan Cobian: 26:19

Like, I've just, so I have changed the way I've, I've kind of tried to make those things work and just saying, look, I think we're just going to cause other problems we're we just need to, we just need to not, not mess with that anymore and move on.

Mike Reinold: 26:35

Right. And that's some clinical judgment that you only get with a little experience. Right. And that's impressive. So, awesome. Next question. What's your single best piece of advice for a young professional or a student writing?

Dan Cobian: 26:46

Sure. I'll say, uh, get involved there's many opportunities, um, and things like the sections, you know, mobilize platform make it pretty easy, right. To kind of have connections to people. Um, that's, that's the great thing about, about things like that, right? I mean, it's, I I'd say. Whatever and our error rate, or you were just kinda like emailing or calling people or trying to know someone to get us to someplace, but you definitely have a little bit more maybe access to people at this point. So there's, there's definitely opportunities out there. Um, and it's kind of figuring out what you want and then, and then pursuing it, I guess I would say, and if you don't know what you want, try a few different things. Um, but, uh, but reach out and ask for abilities to be in or opportunities to be involved.

Mike Reinold: 27:30

Yeah. And, and, you know, one of the big things we're working on with the sports academy now of, of the APA, like Dan alluded to is, is the, the ability to connect with people, easier, the ability to find, you know, answers to the questions, but mentorship, that sort of stuff. So, um, I, I, yeah, that's, that's the future, right? The world is so connected now. Right. Dan and I aren't even in the same room, we would have never been able to do this at this interview in the past. And now I love to see people start taking it. I like it. Awesome. All right, next question then what's coming up next for you, Dan.

Dan Cobian: 27:57

So this Friday I'll be grading exams tonight. So, um, I I'll, I'll say, you know, there's obviously a lot of, a lot of ongoing projects that I, that I'm excited about. Some of the, you know, data that I mentioned that I need to dig into a little deeper. Uh, one of the things I'll be, I'll be working on over the next few weeks is getting the research component of the annual meeting and scientific conference. Uh, ready. So trying to figure out what we can do this year, maybe what, what things we can offer, um, in the second year of that conference.

Mike Reinold: 28:26

That's good. That's great. Yeah. And, and Dan's just taking a more active role, um, uh, in preparing us for that annual meeting for the, for the sports academy. So appreciate your efforts on all that sort of stuff. So thank you for that. And then last, and I think this is the big one because, um, you know, you're, you're a bright guy that has a lot to share and you have a lot of. Of stuff coming out in the pipeline soon. How do people find out more about you and like, do you have social media or website or where can people learn more and kind of continue to experience this Dan experience that we're all having

Dan Cobian: 28:57

Sure. So, so probably the best fan experience.

Mike Reinold: 29:00

the D the Dan experience

Dan Cobian: 29:03

I should just start, uh,

Mike Reinold: 29:04

that that's a podcast, right? The Dan Dan Cobian experience,

Dan Cobian: 29:08

All right. Doesn't that always, is that the jury? Okay, well, we'll go off of

Mike Reinold: 29:11

we probably shouldn't. We shouldn't emulate that, but yeah.

Dan Cobian: 29:14

Um, so I will say.

Mike Reinold: 29:15

Yeah.

Dan Cobian: 29:16

Um, the better our lab, right? Better athletic performance as a, a Twitter page. I think it's just UWA, Badger, AP. Um, and that's probably the best place to keep up with with our current work. And obviously just want to be clear, right? Like anybody in my position, everything we do is a, is a team effort. I got a lot of, you know, we got a lot of awesome people in our lab. Obviously Brian Hydroshot, the lab director, um, you know, been very well known in the sports community and it really put together a cool group of people. Um, so we're working on a lot of. It's a lot of different things at all times. That's probably the best place. Um, a lot of different publications coming out, you know, whether in review right now. And then, um, we, uh, frequently share our work at CSM HPSM and ASB.

Mike Reinold: 29:59

Right. And that's great if you're attending any of these meetings, like they're coming up. Be sure if you see Dan's name on the speaking agenda or any, any of his, uh, abstracts in, in, in any of the platforms, be sure to check them out because some great research coming out. So Dan, thanks so much for joining us and coming on here and sharing some of your experiences. We really appreciate it, man. Thank you.

Dan Cobian: 30:19

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm like