Course series

The Female Athlete - Level 1

PT/OT CEUs

  • 21.5 hours
  • PT/OT CEUs applied for in all 50 states.
  • Click below for specifics for each state.

Access

  • Immediate access
  • Unlimited access
  • All online
  • Self-paced

Audience

  • PTs/OTs and healthcare professionals looking for more information and practical knowledge on how to treat female athletes.
  • Coaches/trainers & fitpros who wish to learn how to confidently support their clients back to higher level activity and sports.
  • No prerequisites




This course is approved for 20 CEU's by CrossFit
(My PT Education - The Female Athlete Level 1)

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Are we holding back our female patients?

The Female Athlete with Antony Lo offers a new kind of online course.

Have you ever felt that you could be doing better for your female clients? As a health or fitness professional, you have a lot of the pelvic health knowledge you need to help your clients but they just don’t seem to be responding or achieving their dream goals. Sure, their symptoms have improved a bit but they still can’t run, jump, lift heavy weights or take part in what they want to do. They might be ante-natal, post-natal or never been pregnant – they may have incontinence, pelvic-organ prolapse, and/or diastasis. You might have been taught that these high impact, high load exercises and activities are “bad” things to do, and certainly, not everyone can go back to doing these things……
Yet, what if we were taught things that aren’t quite true, that the evidence doesn’t seem to support?

     

What people are saying:

I just thought it was pretty remarkable how well it translated to a zoom format - much better than I anticipated!
My whole career has been making sure that patients were doing things the "correct way". Now I know that each person may have their own "correct way". Thanks for teaching me how to think outside the box, let alone, outside the textbook.  
Antony's goal in The Female Athlete is to allow the student to learn without being told how to learn. The ultimate result is a very powerful and empowered learning experience! I have a renewed passion and drive to continue to help my clients and continue my personal journey to health. This course provides hope!

What you will learn:

 At the completion of this course, participants will be able to: 

  • Critique their own thinking, models, biases, and beliefs and then challenge them
  • Recognize a framework from which they can approach the acquisition of knowledge, assessment and management of Female Athletes to fully participate in their social and leisure activities of choice. 
  • Develop a basic understanding of high intensity training (using CrossFit as a base model but including bootcamp, HIIT, Tabata, etc) for female athletes/participants
  • Identify tools used to communicate, educate, observe, and treat high intensity training athletes more specifically
  • Recognize and manage ante-natal and postnatal exercise considerations in high intensity exercise so that they may be able to participate in social and leisure activities. 
  • Modify impact exercises and relatively heavy lifting exercises in regards to Pelvic Floor Dysfunction 
  • Utilize “core stability” principles with a test-retest model using performance as a measure of effectiveness
  • Recognize the common body weight and loaded movements involving the lumbopelvic-hip complex, evidence-based technique guidelines and appropriate modifications
  • Recognize the balance between the biological and the psychosocial aspects in managing the high intensity training athlete, their Coaches and the expectations of all involved
  • Use the concepts of #tensiontotask, #spreadtheload, #variabilityiskey and the #BulletproofPFRoutine for the purpose of educating patients/clients on memorable and effective strategies for high-impact exercise
Antony teaching a live course, getting people to think differently. 

     

More accolades:

The Female Athlete Level 1 course was definitely surprising different than I anticipated! It really made me question why I have been practicing the way I have for 12 years. I realize I have probably been assuming way too much as my patient starts to tell their story, and during my evaluation I'm trying to approve what I assume, especially as an Orthopedic Physical Therapist that has transitioned into Pelvic Health after becoming a mother. I didn't want to sign off the course online because I feel like I could talk like this forever with fellow clinicians. Phenomenal course!! 
As a pelvic floor therapist, I was in a rut of being "stuck in the pelvic floor". I wanted to get out of the pelvic floor and into more movement, and this class definitely brought me back to that. I did orthopedic therapy before getting into pelvic floor therapy, and have always try to incorporate exercise when appropriate during my sessions, but fear that if I don't work on specific pelvic floor issues that their symptoms won't completely resolve. This course challenged that belief and made me realize that symptoms can resolve just from "doing things different". Super fun to make a mental switch! I definitely recommend this course!
I am a rule follower by nature and this course really made me expand my though process and my variability. I loved going back during the week and just "trying" with people. I loved being challenged to get outside my box and to really assess my own thoughts and biases and try to just see them as they were...personal biases but not necessarily rules. Despite generally needing in-person courses to keep me engaged, this one really allowed me to be more engaged than I thought I'd be with the Mentimeter app and practical portions of the course too. Loved hearing from Fit pros and from other PTs. Loved hearing from the various TA's and their backgrounds. Only thing that would have made it better was to take a pic with Antony and the group in person :)
So many from around the globe have joined Antony in his mission! 

A participatory deep dive into clinical reasoning

This course is created to be participatory and has a list of equipment needed for each section of video. To get the most out of this experience, it's highly recommend that you have space, have on workout clothes, have the equipment ready, have a partner available (someone who has also purchased the course on their own, or someone who is NOT a health or fitness professional) who is willing to let you assess them for some of the practical sessions. This course was recorded live-online as a fully interactive online course with lots of Q&A over 4 days. Each of the four videos is approximately 5 hours long and was recorded during that live-online experience.  

How can we think differently to help our clients more?

Dear Esteemed Colleague,

As a health or fitness professional, you have a lot of the pelvic health knowledge you need to help your clients but they just don’t seem to be responding or achieving their dream goals. Sure, their symptoms have improved a bit but they still can’t run, jump, lift heavy weights or take part in what they want to do. They might be ante-natal, post-natal or never been pregnant – they may have incontinence, pelvic-organ prolapse, and/or diastasis. You might have been taught that these high impact, high load exercises and activities are “bad” things to do, and certainly, not everyone can go back to doing these things……

Yet, what if we were taught things that aren’t quite true, that the evidence doesn’t seem to support?
I have found that it took a major rethink of my whole approach to Physiotherapy to help my clients achieve their dream goals, within minutes, not weeks. I started challenging what I believed and was taught, examined the evidence, and listened to my clients. In short, I had to change the model I was working with because too many clients weren’t getting truly better.

Research actually tells us this is true – systematic reviews have shown that the things we thought were useful aren’t actually doing what we thought – they don’t work for the reasons we thought! We know that “modalities” – all of them for back pain – don‘t really work better than anything else, but all are better than doing nothing. Some might be better in combinations but there’s not enough evidence for that yet.

Not only that, but the evidence on how much pressure is exerted on the pelvic floor (Intra-abdominal Pressure or IAP) is not what we were traditionally led to believe. Things like crunches are less pressure on average on the pelvic floor than simply standing out of a chair! 

Since 40% of women will have pelvic organ prolapse, around 50% of women who exercise suffer from incontinence, and 1 in 7 to 1 in 3 women will suffer from pelvic pain during their lifetime, don’t you think they deserve to have a fighting chance at doing the things they truly want to do?

Let me tell you about Vicki, an attendee of The Female Athlete Course, just like this one you are going to sign up for. Vicki is a fitness professional who developed pelvic organ prolapse and suffered from the symptoms quite terribly. She had been doing everything she could to try to educate herself and help herself and her clients. She was unable to even lift up 16kg (35lbs) without feeling the symptoms. She felt quite hopeless and that her exercise, an outlet for her, was unable to be done again like she used to, like she needed to.

During the consult, Vicki disclosed many things which were quite upsetting for her. Listening to her story in full was so important for her – she needed to be heard. By demonstrating to her that she could lift 16kg (35lbs) without symptoms in less than a minute gave her hope and encouragement. By showing her throughout the course that she can do things she didn’t think was possible, she was able to finish the weekend with a deadlift of 70kg (155lbs) without any symptoms at all.

It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. It happens all the time and I get emails and messages from previous attendees all the time, telling me how they have been using what they learned on the course and how it has been changing lives.

You are already a good therapist or fitness professional. You already change people’s lives. I genuinely want to acknowledge that. But you want to be better. You want to help more people. You want to learn more about how to do the things I did with Vicki.

That’s what this course does.

This course has lots of experiential learning and practical application…

What this course is not is more “tools in the toolbox”. No! This course is about radically challenging your beliefs, simplifying the model we use, and then applying it to our clients. You might not actually change the things you do, but I hope you change the reasons why you do them! I have a mission to change the world of health and fitness, especially for access to quality assessment and management for pelvic health conditions.
To do that, I need help – I need health and fitness professionals to join with me to make this a reality.

Will you join me on this mission to change the world? I would love to have you on the team!

Warm regards,
Antony Lo
Meet the instructor

Antony Lo

Antony Lo is a physiotherapist from Australia and runs The Physio Detective service and My PT Education. He earned his degree from the University of Sydney and has been in practice since 1997 (old enough to see old things come back as new things!). He completed his post-graduate Master in Manual Therapy (Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy) from the University of Western Australia and commenced his Specialization training in Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy. He has been working at the junction of Musculoskeletal, Sports Rehab and Performance, and Women’s Health for his whole career. He has experience participating and coaching a range of sports and has been a consultant for a number of different types of elite sports athletes of all ages.
Antony’s passion is working in a way that combines his experience in coaching, education, and being a Physiotherapist, combining the knowledge from the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Business, Psychology, and the Arts and Sciences. He has developed a model of treatment that utilises the best from Sports Science, Musculoskeletal/Sports Physiotherapy, Pain Science, and Women’s Health research to provide a practical, realistic holistic model of care.  This model balances the biopsychosocial model of healthcare with the best of historical assessment and management approaches. Antony has a wife and 3 beautiful children in the best city in the world – Sydney, Australia! 
Patrick Jones - Course author