The Sports Physical Therapy Podcast

The Acute Effect of Pitching with Steve Thomas - Episode 2

April 02, 2022 Mike Reinold
The Sports Physical Therapy Podcast
The Acute Effect of Pitching with Steve Thomas - Episode 2
Show Notes Transcript

Baseball pitching has been shown to have both acute and chronic changes to both the mobility and strength of the arm.  But until recently, we didn't fully understand why.

In this week's podcast, I'm joined by Steve Thomas to discuss his recent publication on The Acute Effect of Pitching on Range of Motion, Strength, and Muscle Architecture, which may shed some light on the mechanism of these changes.

For full show notes, please visit: https://mikereinold.com/the-acute-effect-of-pitching-with-steve-thomas/

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Introduction:

On this episode of the sports physical therapy podcast. I am joined by Steve Thomas. Steve is the chair of the department of exercise science at Thomas Jefferson university in Philadelphia, and is really doing a bunch of great research at his facility. So I'm excited to have him on. In this episode, we're going to talk about one of his recent articles in AIG. On the acute effect of pitching on range of motion, strength, and muscle architecture, really excited about this one.

Mike Reinold:

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with Steve Thomas. And to be honest with you, I. You know, I, I hope I don't say this every episode, but he's one of my favorite researchers because he just keeps pumping out so much great research that has clinical implications Hey Steve, how's it going? Welcome to the.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah, I might. Thanks. And thanks for the invitation it's yeah, it's really an honor to be here and chat with you about the article. And I appreciate us, very nice things.

Mike Reinold:

Steve, to me again, just keeps churning out amazing research, but. The article that I wanted to talk about in this episode was just recently published in 2022 in AJS ism, but it's called the acute effect of pitching on range of motion, strength, and muscle architecture. And. I personally was the second I saw this article, like all of us, a champion, we were sending it through our slack channels because we wanted to start talking about this because obviously this is a topic that we care about a ton. Um, and, and it's almost like an evolution of, of our original research article that we did almost like 15 years ago. But really great article that essentially showed that, pitching changes things. in the body, changes your motion, your strength, and probably some of the inside stuff with your muscle too. So I really wanted to get you on the show today to talk about this, Steve. so why don't we start with this, like, you know, let's talk about the article specifically and what made you actually want to research.

Steve Thomas:

Like you said, like your, your study, um, that was one of the first ones to really look at this acute response. Right. So, you know, we know there's a lot of chronic changes, but acutely after pitching, you're the first one that really showed that we see this big loss of interpretation. Um, and it, and you know, you found that I think it was after a whole day, it was still. Um, I think Dr. Kibler did the next kind of step of that. He looked at for three days, still not back to baseline. So for, you know, for us, our first study before this, we were like, well, we want to find out how long does it take. Right. So let's really look at them. So, you know, we had a study published in, uh, JFCS a couple of years ago and looked at that and we found that it takes four days. To come back. Um, and you know, you could accelerate it with stretching, which we all kind of know clinically, um, or, you know, soft tissue or whatever you're going to do. But, um, so once we found that, we said, well, We want to get to the underlying mechanism. Right? Cause having an underlying mechanism in a sense, it's kind of like an equation, you know, we don't have to play a guessing game. We could know exactly what's why is this also emotion? Uh, what's responsible and we can kind of target it more specifically. So, you know, we, we likely think it's muscle because of how acute it is. Uh, Yeah, but we don't know which one's right. Is it the infer? Is it Harry's? Is it both? Yeah, one more than other. So we wanted to try to pin down this underlying mechanism and really trying to understand what's going on at more of the tissue.

Mike Reinold:

Yeah. And, and what I loved about it is you answered a bunch of great questions in one study. And I mean, that's always our goal, right. As researchers is like, let's get as much bang for our buck in one study. But, um, but yeah, I mean, w we, we know, and we always say this, we try to break down a little bit simple, but, you know, throwing a baseball is bad. That's just that's kind of how we explain it to our athletes. Right. But, um, you know, w w we kind of hypothesized that the centric contractions, because the muscle groups that we saw that had a loss of motion were where the east centric groups we showed that, you know, those were the ones that lost range of motion. Right. But, you know, to see your study, build on that, and then build. The Malaney study that talked about the loss of strength and actually show this over time was, was very needed because I'll be honest with our study. We actually did follow the guys for five days. Right. But we didn't publish it right. For the same reason. Why? And you know, why you put it in your, you put it in this article, in the, uh, the limitations, but. Um, these are real athletes in the middle of a season and they were throwing every day and we were treating them every day. So we didn't want to ruin the data, but, uh, you know, I completely agree. Um, you know, we, we saw that as well. So, um, so great stuff. And then, you know, tell us a little bit, you did range of motion. You did strength obviously, but how did you look at muscle architecture? What'd you do to, to actually check that out in these.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah. I just want to say that, you know, Nick bear Vito, he was a, my graduate student. This was his master's project. So he did all this and you know, I got to give him a top-notch credit there because this was really dissertation level work. Um, we, you know, and he had to get trained on ultrasound. So he took almost like a full year of getting trained in that he did his own reliability study and made sure he was reliable. So yeah, I have to give him credit there.

Mike Reinold:

Yeah. I mean, I mean, kudos to Nick, hopefully, you know, he sees us and stuff, but, and to the people out there, again, like there. is a lot of effort that goes into these, these studies and that, that, that's, that's amazing. But, but again, like to, to look at the shoulder and look at it through ultrasound, this is awesome research. So, so kudos to Nick as well, you know, and, and you obviously for being part of it, but, but great.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah. So to answer your question, um, so with the ultrasound to look at the architecture, uh, you know, we, we did some previous work and when you look at. The muscle itself, uh, under ultrasound, if you stretch somebody, uh, the patient angle will get smaller. So essentially a lines in the direction of loading. So if I pull the tendon right, and I pass. It will kind of align. So the angle will get smaller. If you had asked somebody to contract the muscle definition, I go, we'll get big. So the tensions in the sarcomere, it will pull the central tendon in create motion and get bigger. So, you know, I think a lot of times when we study conation angle, at least through like, you know, undergrad and graduate work, we think of it as a fixed thing, right? Like, oh, Over time, you get stronger, you're positioning and it gets bigger and you have more force output, that type of thing. But it's very dynamic and I, uh, yeah, kind of think of it like a pivot joint. So we thought this would be a good indication on, you know, where is the tension coming from? Cause we know, like you said, it's tension, right? It's a loss of motion. So we thought if we could measure the patient Agon, if we could see change than it truly is from that muscle. And we could kind of, um, get to the underlying or where's the tension coming from? Is it in the sarcomere or is it in the tendon itself? To try to get a better understanding about really what's going on. So that was our, our, our metric for measuring at least, uh, the infraspinatus and teres minor, uh, kind of intramuscular tension. Right. It takes a little bit of skill from an ultrasound perspective and. Yeah, we have to do some kind of enhancements on, uh, from a software perspective to see the fascicles sometimes. Um, but you know, we've done these reliability studies. Uh, we have really good reliability, you know, we do see the fast goals and it's not too difficult of a measure to make.

Mike Reinold:

Right. That makes sense. So tell us a little bit then what did, what did we find? So essentially again, going through the methods again, what you did was you had, you had some, some baseball pitchers, they through a simulator. Which I liked a 60 pitch simulated game, which I think is great. I think that's a, you know, a really good sample size to see what these changes are. You measured shoulder range of motion, strength, and then again, ultrasound to look at, look at the muscle architecture. What were the big findings from this study?

Steve Thomas:

So yeah. What we expected to find, uh, we, we did, which is always great. Right? You do one study. You want to.

Mike Reinold:

Yeah.

Steve Thomas:

Replication. So we did find that the range of motion decreased, I, you know, peaks at 24 hours and then it starts to climb back. Um, we found strength to drop, which we kind of expected, but you know, there's not much, uh, data out there too that demonstrated that. Right. So, you know, that was interesting. And it does come back, um, statistically, but if you look at the value. Even after we stopped measuring it was still below baseline. Um, so

Mike Reinold:

going to bring that up.

Steve Thomas:

yeah, that's something to us that is like, we still have to look in and dig into this a little bit deeper of why, you know, why is strength still kind of lagging, uh, there,

Mike Reinold:

For sure. You know, if you look at the numbers too, just to give some context for the listeners too. I mean, I thought this was really neat. Internal rotation of the shoulder went down 17%, right after pitching, like. That's a good percentage. That's not, that's not small. And of course it was statistically significant. That's what you showed in the study. But the next day, day one after pitching, it actually went down another 5%. So, you know, it actually, it peaked at day one, which I think every baseball pitcher would probably agree with. Right. They, they know that that's the peak of them, you know, feeling the worst. But again tells us that day. One's our day to probably get our hands on these athletes to really work with them for range of motion. um, for strength though, I, again, I was gonna bring this up, but you went down 12% immediately after, Right. And then the next day it was still down about 14% and it kind of fluctuated in that range the whole time. It never really went up. Um, w why do you think that is? Why do you think strength stay down it? D do you think it's, do you think that that happens with everybody? Do you think there were some control issues with. The subjects or, you know, the other thing we could talk about too is, you know, these subjects where they were non varsity college players and I, what made me wonder about them was where they trained, like where they, you know, did they actually perform like a, like a shoulder program with these athletes, but you know, any of those answers.

Steve Thomas:

I, you know, I'm not sure what's going on with strike, to be honest, it's just that maybe, you know, it's not fully recovered. We know. Uh, during an ecentric contraction, right? The, you know, what's happening is that you have, you know, you're acting to mice and bind it up, you know, so you reverse pivot the myosin head and then you're literally ripping apart those bonds you're creating damage. Right? So that damage has to kind of heal itself, recover and go through that normal kind of injury, response and process. And, you know, it may be that. In some athletes too. There's more damage that occurs during those Essenture contractions probably depends on a lot of things like how fast their arms moving, how, how much, uh, how many Actinomyces insights are actually linked up. Right? How much, how many pictures you through, because as some rip than the other ones have to fill in and they'll get ripped too. So yeah, I think there's a lot going on there. Um, so I'm not sure. I, I think it's something we have to look at more and other researchers. Yeah. Consider looking at more. us as athletic trainers, physical therapists, you know, our role is really more in the recovery process than it is controlling how much they do on the mound. I mean that, you know, they're going to throw as much as they need to. We need to be able to control the backend of that. And how do we, how do we. Optimize this recovery process. And if they're still weak and they go by and throw again, we know where they're going to slowly keep going down the stairs there, you know, so, and you know how that is during the season, right? Like it's inevitable. They're gonna get weak. Yeah.

Mike Reinold:

the, the downward spiral. And we always say this, but it's cumulative. Right. And if, if you don't address it, it, it, that cumulative factor kind of takes, takes, you know, uh, even shorter amount of time to really start adding up. So, you know, I, you know, one of the big things I got from this in terms of the strength was that wow. Strengthen and necessarily recover, but with no treatment over five days, I think that's, I think that's the part is you guys really controlled. So again, it tells us that, Hey, we need to try to mitigate some of these changes with our interventions. Um, and, and to me, I thought that was, I thought that was really neat. So great. Um, so what did you find on the inside? Tell us about ultrasound findings with the muscle architecture. What, what were the exact results that.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah. So we, you know, we found that the patient and, you know, it gets bigger. And so we also did patient angle measurements with a max contract. So isometric max contraction, Nick ultrasound at them and measured the patient angle there. So we wanted that almost as a baseline of like, well, what, what is their patient angle when they have a max contraction? And we see that the patient got bigger. All right. So that, to me, that tells me that the tensions in the sarcomere ended approached, I think it was around 80% of the max contraction the day after. So it follow the same path as internal rotation did over time. And we showed that with the stepwise linear regression, those, those variables entered in to explain that the interpretation. Um, but you know, to me, that's interesting that you're, you know, at rest at the day after you're around 80% of what your position ag would change to during the Mexican traction. So, and it kind of makes sense like clinically, right? So when, you know, when you ask these guys. They feel like tensed up. They always, you know, they always point to the back of their show. Uh, it's tight back here, right. Where the Terry's minor is. And, you know, in that kind of little triangle area. And it seems like it's just, you know, it's this really like, kind of resting tone and we'll get, we can get into, uh, you know, the underlying mechanism and what we really think is happening. But yeah, that's, uh, I think that. You know, what we found was that, that, you know, there's this underlying tension, right. They really approach a contracted state.

Mike Reinold:

And again, anecdotally working with these athletes for, you know, over two decades now that's exactly what they feel. It's good to not just hypothesize these things, but actually to have some research on this. I, I, to me, that's the part that I think is really. So, um, so Yeah. I mean, I hate to do this to you, Steve, but I mean, you alluded to it, like, yeah. I want you to expand on that. Tell us more.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah. So, you know, we can't, we can't definitively say it one way or the other, but, you know, just kind of going back to like muscle physiology, uh, to try to understand maybe what is going on. Um, and it's kind of, you know, kind of like a temporary rigor mortis, if you will. Right. So if you look at the basic science research, um, when you have ecentric contractions, what you have is disruption. You know, of all of the intro cellular pieces there you're ripping things apart there's damage. So what happens is that calcium gets released intra and inter most of your calcium. And if we go back to, you know, basic physiology, we know that calcium will bind and open up the binding site for the actin myosin head on active. That's a passive thing, right? No ATP required. All you need is calcium to have that happen. And then myosin will attach. What we need ATP for is to release that head. Re-pivot it. And get ready to attach again. The other thing you see during an east center, uh, about of contraction is that you would get mitochondria dysfunction, mitochondria on our factories for ourselves, right? So they're the ones mainly producing ATP. So if you have dysfunction, you're not producing ATP and you have calcium that got all these mice and attach them. We think that's, what's kind of going on. Um, and then over time, you're, you know, as you're healing things, calcium will get pulled out. ATP will come in as the mitochondria start to come back online. And then things will start releasing. And I think that's, that's slow progression back to a baseline range of motion over four days. I think, you know, that's what we think is happening. You know, we can't prove that it would be really hard to prove it cause to take biopsies of these guys. Uh, that's never going to happen, but, uh,

Mike Reinold:

I it's it, but to be honest, it's not it's, it's not just an educated guess. I mean, that is a very scientific hypothesis, I think, you know, you're right. That, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. Do you think that's, that's part of issues where, you know, again, we talk about other muscle groups, like the biceps, for example, is that part of why we see some changes in range of motion elsewhere in different types of muscles as well?

Steve Thomas:

Yeah. So, I mean, Dr. Killer talked about this one day and you know, he's, he's digging in a little bit more on the bicep and seeing some major issues with, uh, you know, right in the middle of the game, those guys describing bicep tightness. Um, and you know, the interesting thing is if it is the same mechanism, right, that's a parallel. So you actually have, uh, if you have this, this, uh, kind of phenomenon going on, where Actinomyces are binding up, you have the potential of larger link chain. Instead of a penny and a muscle, you're getting a fraction of that angle, right. Of a, of a displacement, but in the bicep, it goes fully from distal to proximal. So you could get potential, big link changes. Um, and I think, you know, that that is kind of what he's seeing clinically. It matches up with your study as well. Um, and, and that's, that's another muscle, I think. We kind of neglect sometimes in baseball players, it's all, it's always about the cough. It's about these other areas, but I think the bicep is, is, uh, you know, majorly impactful. We know it is from a bicep tendon standpoint. Um, but you know, the, the bicep, the tricep as well could be undergoing some of these things too. I see a lot. Tricep tightness that kind of get, gets missed a lot of times. And so, yeah, a lot of these other muscles, I think it could happen in them too. And maybe we have to apply this, this theory to, to all those, you know,

Mike Reinold:

Right. For sure. And I think the part of the problem is, is it's probably a mechanical thing. It's probably a body type thing and how you throw even maybe even pitch selection. Right. But everybody's a little bit different. So that's why some people feel it in some areas. People feel it in other areas. And that's why it's really hard to say, like there's, there's only one thing that happens to a baseball pitcher is there's so many different, like ways to throw a baseball that I think that's why, like, you can't just apply one thing. Somebody may have more, more biceps, loss of motion or elbow flection, loss of motion, then their shoulder based on their mechanics, for example, just, you know, throwing that out there.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah.

Mike Reinold:

So question for you about the going back to the methods and the subjects a little bit. So again, um, I, I love what you did is in and how you phrased it in a scientific journalist, non varsity college baseball players. You know, so essentially club players, which is good because you could, could control them. Right? You could actually control like what you do in between, uh, test sessions, which is fantastic. Do you happen to know off the top of your. What their velocity was during these, these, uh, simulated sessions. Was that something you guys tracked?

Steve Thomas:

Uh, we didn't record that. Um, you know, we do have info on like the, you know, the number of years they played baseball and that type of stuff. So they were, uh, you know, long duration baseball player, you know, just like any guy you would see down to spring training, uh, how long. Uh, four or five years old, you know, like, so they've been playing their whole lives. And to be quite honest, this team, uh, was at temple university and it, so temple got rid of their division one club baseball team a number of years ago. And, uh, I, I honestly believe this team would probably compete with, you know, at that level. So, you know, a lot of the kids on the, on the team are high-level players. Um, and so it wasn't really just a. Yeah, come to college, like, Hey, you guys want to play baseball? You know, they, they were a little on the higher level, you know, I know some of the, some of the pictures, at least. So one was a, is it a student of mine, you know, used, thrown in like low to mid eighties. Um, so, you know, they're decent level pitchers for.

Mike Reinold:

Right. That's great. And, and the reason why I asked was I was curious about velocity is, you know, obviously, you know, the harder you throw, I, you know, I wonder if. Changes would have been even more dramatic, for example. Um, and you alluded to it earlier too, but you know, we did 60 pitches, which I think is a great sample size, but heck somebody that, that threw a hundred pitches, you know, would we, would we see these changes even more? So I think we can, we can only guess, but again, use well educated guesses at what we would probably find in those cases. So, you know, again, I think that that shows that your findings are even more impactful for. me is that, you know, if you throw harder or more pitches, we're probably gonna see it even more.

Steve Thomas:

Right. Yeah. We, you know, we don't know specifically, but you would assume, right. And in 60 in the literature, and just when you talk to these guys, that seems to be. The, the, the pitch count where you really see some of these changes, right? Like, like when guys throw like a 20 pitch bullpen, they, they don't really feel that bad the next day. You know? So I think, I think sixties really, that kind of cut off and it, it depends, right. If you're closer, 60 is like way out of your realm, you know?

Mike Reinold:

right.

Steve Thomas:

But, you know, for most of these starters and kind of middle, middle guys, 60 years is where we definitely will see these changes.

Mike Reinold:

Right. It makes sense. And, and if you did more, that would be the world's longest lab session right. Of having these guys through. So it's a, you know, that that's part of the process. So, um, um, I think that's fantastic. So, all right, well, here's the million dollar question. And to be honest with you now, Probably like a$20 million question, right. Because we're going to take care of these really expensive athletes. But so based on your findings, Steve, what do you recommend people do with their athletes in between outings?

Steve Thomas:

Yeah. So, yeah, that is the, you know, 20,$30 million question. You know, what I, what really kind of changed with the results of this and thinking about these hypotheses are. Yeah, and I'm not saying one way or the other, but it's stretching the soft tissue work, really the best thing for us to do. Um, just from this idea that if we have Actinomyces and linked up, if we stretch, or if we do soft tissue, are we ripping them more apart and creating more damage? Um, so. I'm really kind of questioning like, is that the best way, you know, can we do so to bring my sin back online to clear calcium? Honestly, I think the best approach is to increase blood flow. Right. Um, Are there ways on some of these other things, at least initially to get to do that, right. Can we do, you know, lawnmower polls and some of these like body weight type exercise, high repetitions, get blood flowing to those muscles? Is that going to have a better result than just putting them on the table? Stretching? Um, I know ice is obviously controversial, but there's still guys that use it after the. Yeah. To, to, to me thinking about that mechanism, that is completely contra-indicated. So you're going to cut blood flow off. Um, you're really going to slow down that recovery process. So yeah. Uh, ice, I, I, based on this, I don't think I would recommend. And then, yeah, again, the soft tissue stretching. I'm not sure now it has me kind of questioning it, you know?

Mike Reinold:

And you wonder if the best recovery technique on day one is to play light.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah, it could be, yeah. Just getting anything to get blood flow in that area, I think has the potential to speed this up a little bit. Right. It's not going to come back immediately. Um, but who knows, you know, even, maybe right after that outing, get something to get blood flow into that area could help. I know, uh, Nolan Ryan, that was a big thing. He did, you know, like cardio workouts after. Yeah. Um, is there something to that to try to, you know, get some better blood flow in there?

Mike Reinold:

Right. And don't forget to like, you know, it's about reconciling everything, right? This is, this is one potential thing that happens with pitching, but then there's also some, some other things that happened to structures, like, you know, your UCL, your maybe even your rotator cuff tendons, right? Like where we may have inflammatory process that starts, we may have some damage that happens. So. It's about putting that all together. I wish it was as simple as saying there's one way to do it, but again, I think this is where you have to just take every athlete as an individual. And, you know, maybe some people that don't have, you know, certain things going on, maybe they, maybe they do ice. Maybe then they don't ice. Maybe the next person, you know, the next day they'd rest or the other person has to do more activity. Like I think it's about taking each athlete, um, on an individual case by case.

Steve Thomas:

Oh, yeah. I mean, you have to like, you know, there's so many other factors, like you're saying genetics, everything, um, you know, everybody brings up Nolan Ryan, but honestly he, you know, genetically, he was just gifted. Right. He. If you, you know, you're throwing until 46 and still throw 98 miles an hour, that's not normal. So he's, he's a hard person to put next to and say, well, he did this, this is what I should do. Like that's, it's tough. So, um, but yeah, I think, I think just, you know, trying some of these things, these things out on some players and seeing if it works right, do they feel better? Like when you mixed something, I'm going to mix it up a little bit today. Like let's, let's not stretch, let's try this and see how you feel. I mean, that's the only way we're going to really figure out what's optimal. Um, because again, we can't take biopsies. Um, it's going to be really hard to teach a rat how to throw a baseball. Um, so yeah, we're not going to be where we're going to have a hard time doing those specific analyses, you know,

Mike Reinold:

sure. And for higher level players like college pro level players, um, they have to throw again, they have to throw a bullpen in two days, they have to, you know, play in this game. So, you know, the, the luxury of just saying, Hey, let's not do anything and let you heal. Uh, that may not. For everybody, we may have to have some interventions to try to mitigate some of these, these effects, but for the lower level, like the high school, I think, wow. That makes some sense of, of taking some time off. If you're only gonna throw once a week, maybe even college to an extent is, is incorporating more time off and you know, everybody's just go, go. Yeah. Now, you know, just with the nature of the game, but, you know, we have some very real changes, not just changes on the outside that we can see with strength And. range of motion, but changes on the inside. Um, and You know, to me, that's what makes a study like this so important to us in terms of clinical applications is there's lots we can hopefully do to help these athletes kind of get back to, you know, back to their baseline. So that way they can go out and pitch again.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah. And. You may bring up a good point of like that professional side of things, but that's a whole nother podcast, right? Like how you manage an approach that is, is not, you know, how the standard approaches, so yeah. You, you know, putting your hands on them, doing things like that, you know, just the mental effects of like the. Hey, stop. You're doing stuff, you know, this is gonna work. So I think that the management of that is much different, but it's the young age, like keeping these healthy kids healthy so that they can make it to the college and professional level is, is truly important. And, you know, we always use the major league guys as the example, but, you know, we want to keep these kids healthy so that they can keep playing the game that they love, you know?

Mike Reinold:

Right. Well said, that's awesome. Well, Steve, great study. Great article. Thank Nick again for all of us. Um, you know, make sure, you know, he knows that he should be really proud of all this hard work that he did in this project because this came out great. So, uh, you know, kudos for you guys really appreciate it. Uh, one thing I love, to do with this podcast, I'm going to start doing here is I want to do a quick session at the end, what I'm calling the high five, which is probably a little cheesy. I probably need a better name. So if anybody has a better name, let me know, but you know, the high five, five quick questions to learn a little bit more about you, but you know, kind of give, you know? some, some advice to some people. So, Uh, first question real quick is what are you currently reading or working on for your own continuing education? How are you?

Steve Thomas:

Uh, everything.

Mike Reinold:

I wish I, I wish I wish kids knew that. Right.

Steve Thomas:

I mean, yeah. It's yeah. I have, uh, our RSS feeds that pump in a bunch of journals and I'm yeah. I'm scanning article titles and abstracts and, and you know, stuff. That's real interest of me. I'm reading the whole thing and get digging in deeper. Um, yeah, there's so much information coming out. Um, you know, podcasts, your podcast, you know, any, any source of information. Gain more knowledge. I mean, that's, you just got to try to seek it out really.

Mike Reinold:

I love it. Great one. So, um, uh, not Instagram, everyone listening that Instagram is fine for certain things, but actually reading journal articles. That's amazing, Steve. Good job. Um, next one, uh, number two, what's one thing that you've changed recently or evolved your thoughts.

Steve Thomas:

I think it's this what we talked about really, you know, like this, uh, you know, how we manage the recovery. Has we really second guessing some of the things we do and is that the best? So, um, that's probably my best answer for that one.

Mike Reinold:

I love it. No, that's great. Well, I mean, you're doing so much research that your PR your, your thoughts probably aren't the same week to week, let alone year to year. So, um, you know, that that's the nature of being a researcher is you're you're, you're asking. Answering so many questions. It's, it's the part of the job, right?

Steve Thomas:

It's the fun part.

Mike Reinold:

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Awesome. All right. Third question. What is your single best piece of advice for students or, or even early career professionals? What would you say to them?

Steve Thomas:

Um, I think, you know, honestly just create your own opportunities. Yeah. So don't like, they may not exist, but reach out network, you know, try to try to make things happen for yourself that, you know, you have a passion around, so.

Mike Reinold:

I love it. That's a great one. And then for what's coming up next for you, Steve, I mean, I'm sure we're probably going to get another dozen articles published this year, but what else is coming up next for you?

Steve Thomas:

Uh, yeah, a couple of things. So, you know, being the department chair here, it's a young department, so we're growing in that out. Um, so our exercise science undergrad program, and then our graduate athletic training program here at tongues Jefferson. So it's any viewers are interested, feel free to reach out if you're looking at 80 or exercise science, you know, Build build these programs out. Um, and then we just, we're just wrapping up this. Biomechanics book. So I don't know if you've heard of David winter. He was a big bomb, uh, mechanism up in Canada. He's kind of considered the godfather biomechanics. He wrote four additions of this book, bomb, mechanics of motor control of human movement, um, which is kind of considered like the Bible of biomechanics, um, all the details of like how to do a biomechanical, uh, research and testing and. Uh, so me and Joe's any, who's a PT at Rutgers got asked to write the fifth edition, uh, David winter passed away 2012. So they wanted somebody to pick that up. So we actually just submitted, uh, our, our initial draft, uh, this week. So, you know, the publishing process takes a little bit, but you know, that fifth edition will be coming out or, you know, looking forward to having that.

Mike Reinold:

Wow. That's amazing. Yeah, you should be proud. And you know, people think these research articles take a ton of time to put together. Those textbooks are way worse, right?

Steve Thomas:

Uh, it was, it was a year in the making and it was, it was a lot of work.

Mike Reinold:

That's awesome. All right. Awesome. And then finally, how do we learn more about you? I know you have a great website. You're all over social media, but how can people find more about you?

Steve Thomas:

Uh, yeah, just, you know, Thomas Jefferson's page, uh, Twitter, I'm a pretty active on Twitter. Uh, try to. Yeah, share the research we're doing. And some other things. I also, yeah, you could come for the signs, but I also put up a lot of barbecue pictures on there. So if your food, uh, you could catch some of that too. So, um, there's a couple of us around that are always sharing our barbecue pictures. I think Lenny does,

Mike Reinold:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Steve Thomas:

Rob, Mansky. So,

Mike Reinold:

Yeah.

Steve Thomas:

So,

Mike Reinold:

I feel like that was a big COVID pastime that we all, um, you know, we all started smoking, uh, you know, meet in our backyards during all this time. so. for sure. Awesome. Well, Steve, thanks so much for joining us on this podcast and, and not only talking about your research, but even putting all those efforts in. So thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

Steve Thomas:

Yeah. Thanks for having me.