all right there we go look at that
uh amazing i did a little time lapse
live from apta csm still on the floor
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Most PTs don't realize how many career
paths actually exist until they meet
someone who took a different one.
Our next guest is a professor, clinician,
author, social media educator.
science communicator,
with over a million followers,
helping people relearn, well,
learn and relearn,
and love learning again.
Live from Anaheim,
Tim Reynolds back on the show.
Tim, welcome to the program.
Jimmy, it's good to be here.
I'm excited.
What made you want to start doing the
Instagrams?
Because, like,
these kids today are always on their
phones and whatever, and...
So four years ago, I had students say,
you should do a TikTok.
And I said, that's a horrible idea.
I should not be on social media.
And they kept pursuing this idea of me
just posting what we're learning in our
anatomy and physiology class.
And I said, sure, I'll humor it.
And I'll just post relevant content in
regards to what we're doing in class.
And then it went viral.
And I said, oh, my gosh,
I think this might actually be a thing
like a niche that I can potentially go
down and teach anatomy, physiology,
contents, medical contents,
physical therapy contents.
The last four years I've been doing
anatomy quizzes and they're great.
And I try to provide educational
opportunities for individuals throughout
the world.
I got to be honest,
sometimes I don't take your quizzes
because I don't want to get it wrong
and be like,
can he see that I got it wrong?
There's no revoking of the doctoral
degree.
I slipped and I pressed that.
I didn't mean to press B.
I meant to press A.
It just shows that, well...
There's a lot of information,
because that's how the internet works.
And some of it is great,
some of it's not great.
And the only way to sort of combat
the not so great or the misinformation is
with good information.
I'm sorry, you can't,
there's no police on the internet.
You can't just say,
take that down because I don't like it.
The only way to sort of combat that
is,
just produce good stuff so do you approach
it like a scientist do you look at
it and say because i've done this before
dude this video is gonna rip it's gonna
kill and you put it out nothing and
then you fling one that you barely put
any effort into and that thing catches
fire you're like why so effort doesn't
always equal outcome sure what's your what
have you taken from this and what have
you learned in doing it in four years
which is not a short amount of time
I mean,
I think we look at the physical therapy
profession and we think about our ability
to problem solve and whether that be
diagnosing an individual with a knee
pathology or something like that.
I've eventually got myself a master's
degree in business and marketing and
social media posting specifically.
So I know what kind of content should
hit.
and or how to adapt content to potentially
not necessarily play the algorithm,
but there is strategy behind understanding
what will make the society of followers
feel the most invested in my content.
If I post stuff that's relevant for
doctoral students in their third year,
no one's going to do it because it's
going to be too challenging.
And so you have to intersperse, I guess,
layperson educational opportunities with
some of the more higher level social media
posts.
Yeah, know your audience.
Right, exactly.
I mean,
and I would imagine in a classroom
setting,
It's easier because you have body
language, facial.
We'll call it dead behind the eyes.
Everybody's giving me blanks there.
Got it.
We're going to pivot.
We're going to say the same thing in
a different way.
Let's do that again.
On the internet,
you sort of don't have that.
Yours is delayed whether or not people
like, share, subscribe, re-watch.
Every twenty-four hours,
you get a whole new opportunity,
a whole new audience to do it.
I do that.
I tell people a lot.
If you live by the numbers,
you die by the numbers.
Right.
Um, so first and foremost, I,
with this podcast, my goal is have fun,
learn stuff and also excuses to wear bow
ties and red jackets is always a nice
way to go to work.
Um, but you get,
you get a new set of data,
which said, Hey,
this is how this worked yesterday.
Funny, funny idea though.
Post the same video, three days apart,
you might get four views and then four
hundred thousand views.
And that's my, my answer to that is,
uh, people are peopley.
Yeah, you got to be consistent.
And I think it's finding things that bring
you happiness and joy outside of the
viewership.
You got to like it.
Yeah.
If you don't like it,
doing what you do would be horrible.
And I think for me,
I've always tried to stay true to my
mission statement,
which is providing educational
opportunities for the students at the
college I teach at.
So I teach at Ithaca College.
And so I'm posting stuff on the endocrine
system because we're learning about the
endocrine system.
You're mirroring, mimicking.
I'm trying to allow for them to engage
in content that's relevant to the
classroom.
In a different way.
an extra learning opportunity that they
can stand in line at Wegmans,
waiting for their groceries,
and potentially scroll through their
TikTok or Instagram.
You're making me feel bad.
I used to live near Wegmans.
It's funny.
I never really liked...
had an opinion about a supermarket until
you get one that you love,
then you move away and you're like,
oh man,
you used to love me the Wegmans this.
These people on the West Coast,
they don't know this whole Wegmans thing.
I know.
Why do so many physical therapists feel
boxed in to one career path?
I get it.
Like if you're going to do a bell
curve, there might, you know,
the center of the bell curve,
there's one or two ways to be a
PT.
Sure.
We also know how wide a bell curve
might be.
There's a lot.
Why do PTs feel boxed in to one
way?
I think when you pull the audience of
who are physical therapy's personality
types, we're very type A individuals,
and we follow by the rules.
And so those rules involve studying for a
test, getting good scores,
and so on and so forth.
And we have this trajectory that I think
has been established as you become a
standard practitioner in terms of
clinician,
you're going to treat five days a week.
Yeah, forty hours.
Forty hours a week, X amount of evals,
so on and so forth.
that is ingrained in the vision statement
i think of the profession of physical
therapy but just as we have a branding
problem with the physical therapy
profession i think we have a branding
problem of what opportunities does the
physical therapy profession potentially
allow for us to do and so i
think it takes individuals to step outside
that box and be willing to push the
social norms of the doctoral program to
allow for this upcoming generation of
students to be able to see that there
are more options out there
You are a walking,
talking example of one of the cliches that
I bring up,
which is we are not in a tell
business.
We are in show business.
And I know people might look at, well,
I don't want to do Instagram.
I'm like, then you don't have to.
But you should still show people.
Telling people doesn't work, right?
I need you to show me.
Do you just tell people how to do
an exercise?
Of course not.
I would show.
Oh, they don't get it.
I'll show in a different way.
I give this sort of cliche too,
which is there are these concepts I
learned in PT school.
Frequency, intensity, time, type, volume,
progression.
Those are exercise principles.
Those are also communication principles.
If you're not frequent and you're confused
at why things don't grow, I'm like,
I don't know,
you did one pushup a day and then
you stopped.
Your load is inadequate.
Correct.
So do more.
Well, I don't want to do more.
I'm very sorry.
My content's not hitting.
Well,
you can't go from a yellow TheraBand to
a red TheraBand to a green TheraBand and
expect that to work.
Correct.
So.
Um, why do clinicians, sorry,
what do clinicians forget most after PT
school?
Dude, I knew like origin insertion.
Like I knew all of that.
I will tell my students that coming out
of cadaver dissection,
you will be the smartest that you will
ever be right there, dude.
In that third year of PT school.
Yeah.
And I think it's a lot of knowledge
that's not necessarily clinically relevant
at times.
Like all the branches off the internal
iliac artery.
When am I going to be ever right?
have to discuss that to a patient but
I think it shows the capacity of learning
and the willingness to what's my rating
perceived exertion in terms of my tissue
tolerance right so they can study for X
amount of hours and memorize so much stuff
and I think making it through that summer
experience shows them that they have the
capacity to become a doctoral student
You're going to learn so much stuff in
school and you're going to leave and
you're going to go to a setting and
you're going to use twenty eight percent
of it.
Yeah.
And whatever the math is on the other
side of twenty eight, you're not.
And that's going to go away because that's
how brains work.
They're made.
Right.
Yeah.
And so I think like some of those
fine attachments of like some of these
intrinsic forearm muscles,
like no one's going to ask you about
that and no one's going to care because
that's what Google's for.
And so I think that those kind of
things,
like if I were to give an exam
to my colleagues in a clinic,
they probably would do worse than the
majority of my students in the classroom.
Because they're doing frequency intensive.
Right now, they're in the thing.
Right.
They're learning.
They're doing functional training and not
necessarily accessory exercise.
Correct.
Yeah.
How can social media be used responsibly
for education?
I mean, you're an example of that.
But what are the things that if someone's
like, I have an idea.
People always come to me like,
I got an idea.
You're the media guy.
I go, hang on a second.
I don't know everything.
I like podcasting because I really like
talking to people.
I figured out what I liked first and
then decided how to use it.
So how do you communicate to people how
this thing that's on everybody's phones
can be used responsibly?
Well,
I think if it's from a content generation
standpoint, I think share your journey,
but don't proclaim false expertise.
And I think that idea of you are
a first year physical therapy student,
share what you're learning within your
first year,
but don't necessarily try to jump steps to
say, well, in this,
how we make patients better.
No,
you understand goniometric measures or
special tests.
So produce content around that.
and allow for your educational package to
grow.
Yeah,
your scope to grow as your clinical skills
grow.
And so I think that that opportunity is
more authentic.
And I think that authenticity through the
social media lens
would be the way if i had to
rebrand myself or restart as a physical
therapy student that's what i would do
yeah yeah sharing what sharing good yeah
is the only way to sort of dilute
the stuff that maybe is inaccurate or or
or dangerous right yeah what do you get
most joy out of
The comment,
I imagine seeing how many people interact
with the thing that's like, oh,
people are doing school stuff on
Instagram.
Well, I mean,
five minutes before we hopped on this,
I had two students from the University of
Florida come by and say,
we do your quizzes all the time.
i got a geography lesson for you ithaca
is not close to florida it is not
right but instagram is in your pocket and
so i think it's for me it's it's
seeing the joy that people get out of
the content um because i get so much
joy and satisfaction from teaching and my
capacity to teach is limited to a hundred
and eighty students every academic year
but now i have the opportunity to expand
beyond that uh through the palm of your
hand
And the math, you make a one-minute video.
I'm sure some of you can see analytics.
A one-minute video that's seen X number of
times,
we're not measuring in hours or days.
You're measuring in weeks or months worth
of exposed time.
And that's powerful.
That's compound interest.
And then...
you could reshare that same video,
because I know things change,
but anatomy and physiology,
that stuff's gonna be good next year,
right?
I mean,
pretty sure it's gonna be kind of close,
right?
Or pretty damn close.
Yeah, no,
and I think that that's the benefit,
that every year I get a new academic
cohort
and I get an opportunity to rebrand the
content that I've been doing,
but challenge myself,
how can I do it better?
So just as I'm trying to teach
differently,
I'm also trying to utilize the social
media platforms in different ways.
Adapt the method, right?
Exactly.
And that's the thing,
the platforms are changing too because
Human brain craves novelty.
We crave the novelty.
I'm wearing today a tuxedo with a red
jacket.
I'm not going to wear this tomorrow.
I'm just not.
Because I know on day two of CSM,
everybody's sort of...
Burned out.
Everybody's just sort of like, you know,
because we're going to go out tonight.
I'm not going to stand out.
The platforms change.
Instagram used to be photos.
Then it became super short videos.
Now the videos can be longer.
But now we also have these buttons and
we can ask a quiz or we could
do a tag and do all those things.
So understanding the physics of whatever
platform you're on,
because whatever you're doing on Instagram
doesn't necessarily perfectly align with
another platform because they're similar,
just not the same.
Yeah.
And so content delivery on different
platforms has to be molded towards the
platform itself.
Can't break the rules.
I mean, you can bend to them,
but I would always say, I liked,
when someone asks you to think outside the
box,
First, you got to have the box.
It's OK.
You can do a video and it's going
to be like there's all these parameters.
And then you get to be creative and
go, how do I solve this?
Yeah.
Here's the initial scaffolding.
But the building's going to look
different.
Correct.
You put whatever you want through it.
Right.
Which is pretty exciting.
Yeah.
So you mentioned when you talk to people
or you might have colleagues that are one,
three, five, thirty, forty years out.
How can PTs continue learning without
burning out?
When you're a student,
your prime directive is wake up, learn,
learn, learn, learn, go to sleep, learn,
learn, learn.
When you're in clinic,
there is a learning there,
but maybe some of the things are falling
off.
So what do you suggest for clinicians to
do who want to be that triple L
lifelong learner?
Well,
I think I always leave CSM revitalized and
just have an opportunity to collaborate
and meet people and see the excitement
within the profession.
And I think that the monotony of a
day in,
day out practice sometimes is what creates
that element of burnout when there's notes
to be done.
No novelty.
Yeah.
And so I think that...
you have to challenge yourself to grow
outside the typical uh way that you would
would treat a patient and so uh i've
had practitioners that will treat
everybody in standing or treat everybody
in the gym today or challenge challenge
the way that you typically do the normal
because the recipe book if you follow it
day in day out you might get the
clinical outcomes that you're looking for
to an extent and obviously there's
elements of uh novelty to each of those
patients
but you are not challenging that
neuroplasticity component.
You are just riding that groove.
And so I think that challenge yourself to
explain something differently or to not
use the word pain.
That's one of my sort of clinical pet
peeves.
How can I educate better?
How can I have the opportunity to
communicate differently?
And I think that stays,
that keeps the concept of the profession
new, novel, and exciting.
Same as a social media platform.
We're going to give you rules.
We used to do this thing,
and I stole it.
I forget the name of the movie.
There was a Steve Martin movie where he
was like a preacher,
and he was essentially just like it was
a circus going from town to town.
He was a hustler.
He was a grifter, right?
And he would have a hearing piece in
his ear,
and his team would give him a ridiculous
word like vinyl siding or horseshoe.
And he would be up there preaching and
he would have to somehow make it relevant.
And they were betting whether he could do
it or not.
But that just shows you it's like I'm
going to do the same thing.
But today everything's going to be in half
meal.
It's like you can't do that.
It's like, all right, well,
let me work this problem.
And what you're doing is you're stressing
that neuroplasticity.
It's like I'm going to try this
differently.
And that's when serendipity happens or you
discover a new thing.
Or today was just novel and it felt
better.
And I got through the day faster.
Right.
Because you never know which patient is
going to require that.
Correct.
And so I think that that challenge,
challenge yourself every day you walk into
the clinic and not just go through the
motions.
And I think that that in itself is
what.
And then I'll give a little grace.
That's simple.
It's not easy.
Sure.
So do it a little bit.
Yeah.
And then try some more and then maybe
get excited about it.
Right, one new thing a week,
that's fifty-two new things a year.
I like the math on that.
What's one unconventional path more PTs
might consider?
Are there things out there that you're
like, hey,
more people should know about this?
Well,
I think not necessarily unconventional,
but I had an unconventional way into
academia.
And so I got a text message saying,
would you want to teach night labs?
And I have no PhD, EDD, DSC training.
All I had was a clinical doctorate.
But I think that that concept of
I had a passion for communication and a
passion for teaching,
but never even thought when I graduated PT
school that education was a direction that
I would be able to go in.
And so I think it's be willing to
volunteer and teach that class or put on
that platform or seminar in your local
community and then allow that to sort of
see what opportunities stem from that.
Because that one lab section turned into
two, which then turned into four,
which then turned into a full-time
position.
And so I think for me,
I wouldn't be where I am today without
my physical therapy degree.
And I wouldn't have, yes,
the social media platform or the book or
the opportunity to be an academic if it
wasn't for allowing myself to step outside
the box.
Say yes.
Yeah.
Right?
How bad could it go?
Sure.
Right.
Yeah.
How do you help people rediscover joy in
their work?
Ooh.
Yeah, that's a big question.
And I think that that opportunity,
finding joy in their work,
you have to find joy in yourself first.
And so I think that that idea of
in the book, one of our interviews,
we had this concept of micro joys,
not macro joys,
because I think we live for the for
the Christmas, the spring break,
the summer vacation.
Right.
And then we sort of pedal to the
metal in between these large joy events,
but then we have to intersperse micro
joys.
And I think that finding those small
things that bring you that happiness on a
daily basis and having four or five
different things that can also bring you
happiness in case
Well, the sun's not out.
It's going to be a bad day.
Well, no,
but I can still read a book.
I can still do X, Y, and Z.
And so I think that finding what within
the profession,
what within your occupation is the thing
that brings you happiness.
For me,
it's having the opportunity to
communicate.
And so if I go through a day
and I don't have a chance to communicate
with students, I get itchy, right?
So now I have to figure out, well,
what are the other opportunities that also
facilitate that?
But what can I tap into when I'm
not?
Not teaching.
Kind of look for it.
Yeah.
Right?
If you're not looking for it and you're
waiting for it to show up, it might,
but it also might not.
You have to go out and get it.
We have a tradition on the show.
Sure.
It's called the parting shot.
This is the parting shot.
One last mic drop moment.
No pressure.
Just your legacy on the line.
All right,
Parting Shot is brought to you by U.S.
Physical Therapy.
We're at their booth right now doing a
live stream.
Hi, everybody.
U.S.
Physical Therapy,
a nationwide network of clinics focused on
developing clinicians and not burning them
out, showing them the micro joys.
Leadership tracks, mentorship,
career growth.
What does it look like for you?
USPH supports PTs who want to build real
futures in this profession.
Find them online at USPH.com.
That's USPH.com.
in the expo hall,
which is where I'm standing.
All right, so you're parting shot.
What's one question PTs should ask
themselves to find what actually makes
them happy,
what actually makes them happy?
If you could not tell,
if you could not show people what you're
doing, would you still do it?
Say it again.
If I could not tell you,
if I could not show you,
if I could not post on Instagram what
I'm doing, would you still do it?
Oh, that's a great question.
I think we live for that Instagram
highlight reel.
But at the end of the day,
if you'd still do that, like for me,
I enjoy climbing mountains.
I would still climb a mountain if I
couldn't put a picture up from the summit.
And that's, I forget whose quote it was.
I'll give them props later,
but there's two reasons to climb a
mountain.
One is so that the world can see
you.
And the other one is so you can
see the world and you see which one
is a little bit more, you know.
So if finances weren't a part of it,
what would you still do?
Great parting shot.
All right, Tim,
appreciate what you're doing.
Just make sure,
I'll put it in the show notes,
but make sure everybody knows the
Instagram account.
Yeah,
it's anatomy underscore professor and at
TikTok, A&P underscore professor.
Love to see you there.
Keep doing it.
Well done.
Appreciate you stopping by for CSM.
Yeah.