Description: Returning to competition does not necessarily mean an athlete has returned to performance. This course explores the complex transition from rehabilitation back to high-level team sport and provides a framework for preparing athletes for more than simply participation. Participants will learn how to establish foundational qualities including strength, power, plyometric capacity, movement capability, and conditioning before progressively building a “ramp” from current capacity toward the demands of sport. The course then moves beyond physical workload to examine how task demands, decision-making, skill, teammates, opponents, coaching, role, opportunity, and other environmental constraints influence performance. Through a constraints-based approach, participants will explore how to progress athletes from controlled rehabilitation toward increasingly representative sport problems by manipulating volume, intensity, density, space, time, speed, information, opposition, and other variables. Rather than simply adding chaos or recreating sport in the rehab setting, the goal is to create the conditions in which sport-specific solutions can progressively emerge.

Objectives: 01 — DEFINE Differentiate return to sport from return to performance and recognize performance as an ongoing, multidimensional process. 02 — APPLY Apply a constraints-based framework to identify individual, task, and environmental factors influencing return to performance. 03 — DEVELOP Describe how foundational physical qualities and progressive exposure can build a ramp from rehabilitation toward the demands of team sport. 04 — INTEGRATE Recognize how skill development and interdisciplinary collaboration can facilitate the transition from physical preparation to sport reintegration.

Presenter(s): Tommy Otley

Status: Active

Activity Difficulty Level: Advanced

Domains:

• Therapeutic Intervention

Format: Virtual Asynchronous - On Demand

Dual Credentials and JA: Physical Therapy Professionals

Start Date & Time: 10/01/2026 02:03 PM CDT

Cost: $0.00

Capacity: 1

CEUs: 1