23/10/2026
For decades, Gerry Ramogida, Dan Pfaff, Gordon Bosworth and I, along with many others, have brought therapy into the training environment. We were putting treatment tables beside the track long before you’d see one at most sessions, and now they’re everywhere.
To see why a treatment table belongs beside the track at all, it helps to separate the reasons an athlete gets treated.
Regenerative work speeds recovery from the ordinary wear of training. Rehabilitative work helps heal injury. The third, performance therapy, is the one we brought trackside. It works on an athlete with nothing necessarily to repair, to improve how they move in the session that follows, and with it the quality of that session, for both performance and health.
For all the practitioners who use performance therapy and see it work, the evidence that it changes how athletes move is thin. So over the last many many months, Gerry and I sat down and did an exhaustive exploration [we went through well over 3,000 papers] of what we think may be happening when it does work, and why the change so often fades.
The result is a paper, now out as a preprint, and this carousel walks through it.
What we’ve all seen
Anyone who has worked beside a treatment table has seen it. The athlete gets up and moves differently, often better. Sometimes it follows hands-on work, sometimes isolated activation or preparation drills. We’ve relied on that change for a long time. The question is: what is actually happening to elicit that change, and what is it worth?
Three questions
Three questions sit underneath that experience. Is the change what it looks like, or partly what we expect to see? How long does it last once the athlete leaves the treatment table? And when change does stick, what is producing it? The paper takes each one in turn, and so does this carousel.
Is it our bias?
It could be, at least in part. A warm-up, the attention that comes with being treated, testing the same thing several times, or a brief bump that settles back can each produce a short-lived change. None of them rules out what we’re proposing, but each has to be controlled for before anyone can credit a change to the input itself.
