Students often struggle to connect assessment findings to appropriate treatment interventions, but that’s where the right teaching and learning tools make all the difference. Join us to explore how ATu’s Orthopaedics app helps turn classroom practice into real-world performance through structured, evidence-based therapeutic exercise resources. You’ll discover practical strategies to help students confidently design, progress, and modify patient care plans based on movement faults, associated impairments, and functional goals. Discover ready-to-use approaches that strengthen clinical reasoning, enhance student confidence, and bring therapeutic exercise to life in your classroom and lab.
Featured Speaker: Christopher Schmidt, PhD, ATC
An athletic training professional for 30 years, Dr. Schmidt’s career spans clinical care, academic leadership, and professional service. From treating patients across diverse settings to shaping undergraduate and graduate programs, he’s a contributor in the field, influencing best practices through research and committee roles with the NATA and CAATE. His passion extends to curriculum design, interprofessional education, and youth sports injury prevention, helping to shape the future of athletic training.
00:00 Webinar Intro and Overview of the Ortho App Series
03:04 Turning Practice into Performance: Four Steps of Graded Exposure for Skill Development
07:15 Clinical Reflection Worksheets Premade for You!
08:39 Locating Ther Ex Content in the Exercise Patterns App
11:57 Locating Ther Ex Content in the Post-Op App
13:42 Using the Search Bar to Locate Ther Ex Content
15:36 Using the Ortho App for Teaching Therapeutic Exercise: Creating Lab Handouts
20:34 Using the Ortho App for In-Class Discussion: Designing Video Augmented Presentation Slides
23:21 Preparing Students for Application and Clinical Decision Making
25:17 Upcoming Ortho App Webinar: Completing the MSK Care Plan
26:35 New App Suites! KinesioU and SportsMed
28:21 Upcoming New Therapeutic Exercise App & Webinar Conclusion
Helpful Links: Complimentary Educator access | Educator resources | Set up a Demo
From Practice to Performance: A Strategic Approach to Teaching Therapeutic Exercise with ATu
Teaching therapeutic exercise effectively has always required more than simply demonstrating techniques in a lab. The real challenge lies in helping students progress from awkward first attempts to confident, clinically appropriate application – transforming practice into genuine performance. During our recent faculty webinar, we explored how ATu’s comprehensive platform can support this developmental journey through a structured, evidence-informed approach that honors how students actually learn complex motor skills.
The gap between watching a demonstration and performing a therapeutic exercise with clinical precision is significant. Students need multiple exposures, varied learning contexts, and progressive opportunities to build both technical competency and clinical judgment. That’s why we’ve developed a four-stage model for integrating ATu into therapeutic exercise courses – one that scaffolds learning from initial cognitive understanding through to real-world application.
Building the Foundation: Preview and Mental Practice
The model begins well before students enter the lab. In the first stage, we establish cognitive understanding through assigned video content. Rather than encountering exercises for the first time during precious in-class hours, students preview techniques at their own pace, building familiarity with movement patterns, positioning, and therapeutic rationale.
This preview stage leverages ATu’s Educator Tools, which make creating customized video playlists remarkably straightforward. Within any section of the Orthopedics app – say, quadriceps strengthening exercises for post-ACL rehabilitation – you can copy page titles with embedded hyperlinks and thumbnail images directly into Word documents, Google Docs, or your learning management system. The result is a professional lab handout that students can access from any device, with direct links back to specific therapeutic exercise videos.
But passive viewing alone doesn’t create learning. The second stage requires students to actively engage with what they’ve previewed. This is where mental imagery and peer practice come into play. We’ve developed pre-made clinical reflection worksheets for nearly 70 common musculoskeletal pathologies, each already hyperlinked to relevant ATu content. These worksheets prompt students to watch specific videos, identify appropriate interventions for various impairments, and make preliminary clinical decisions before arriving in class.
For instance, an ACL worksheet guides students through clinical findings and differential diagnosis before asking them to select manual therapy techniques, therapeutic exercises, and modalities for specific impairment patterns. This pre-class engagement transforms how students show up to lab – they arrive with questions rather than blank stares, ready to refine technique rather than learn it from scratch.
The Synchronous Learning Experience
The third stage brings everything together during in-class time. With students already cognitively primed, instructors can focus on what truly matters: refining technique, correcting errors, discussing clinical reasoning, and addressing nuanced questions that emerge from actual practice.
This synchronous stage benefits from the same Educator Tools used for handouts, but now applied to presentation slides. You can build lecture slides that mirror lab handouts – complete with hyperlinked video titles and thumbnail images – creating visual anchors for discussion. During class, clicking a hyperlink pulls up the exercise video in ATu, allowing real-time demonstration while you circulate through the lab environment, observing and coaching individual students.
This approach fundamentally changes the efficiency of lab instruction. Rather than spending precious contact hours on initial demonstration and basic explanation, you’re spending it on the higher-order work of skill refinement and clinical application. Students have already seen the exercise multiple times. They’ve thought about it. They’ve tried it with a peer. Now they’re ready to perfect it under expert guidance.
The Performance Phase: From Lab to Clinic
The fourth and final stage represents the ultimate goal: applying learned skills in authentic clinical contexts. Whether through clinical rotations with preceptors, practical examinations, OSCEs, or ATu’s own simulation environments, this is where students demonstrate true competency – selecting appropriate exercises, adapting them to patient presentations, and integrating them into comprehensive care plans.
With ATu accessible on smartphones and tablets, students carry a complete therapeutic exercise reference into clinical settings. Those same videos they previewed weeks earlier? They’re available for quick review before treating a patient. The progressions they practiced in lab? They’re organized by mobility, strengthening, motor coordination, and functional movement phases, making it easy to integrate any single exercise within a broader rehabilitation framework.
Three Apps, Multiple Pathways
While our four-stage model primarily leverages the Orthopedics app, it’s worth noting that therapeutic exercise content in ATu extends across multiple apps, each serving distinct educational purposes.
The Exercise Patterns app functions as a comprehensive exercise prescription tool, organizing content by musculoskeletal patterns and performance progressions. Its embedded home exercise program builder allows students to create fully customized patient protocols, adjust parameters like sets and repetitions, add clinical notes, and share programs via email – an ideal tool for case-based assignments or clinical simulations.
The Post-Op app provides quick-reference, evidence-based rehabilitation protocols for common orthopedic surgeries. Each protocol is organized by rehabilitation phase, complete with goals, precautions, common problems, and progression criteria. For students learning to manage post-surgical patients, this resource bridges the gap between general therapeutic exercise knowledge and procedure-specific application.
And if you’re ever uncertain where to find specific content, ATu’s enhanced search function cuts through the app structure entirely. Search for “quadriceps strengthening exercises” and you’ll see the top 50 results across all apps, each marked with its source and – when a play button appears – viewable directly in search results without navigating to the full page.
Making It Practical in Your Teaching
The beauty of this four-stage approach lies in its flexibility. You might use it across an entire semester, gradually building student competency in therapeutic exercise. Or you might compress it into a single unit, moving from preview to performance within two weeks. The structure adapts to your curriculum while maintaining the core principle: multiple exposures, progressive challenge, and movement from cognitive understanding to motor performance to clinical application.
We’ve also designed these tools to minimize faculty prep time. The clinical reflection worksheets are ready to use. The Educator Tools require just a few clicks to create hyperlinked handouts and slides. And because students have their own ATu subscriptions, they can access assigned content anywhere, anytime, making asynchronous learning genuinely feasible.
As we continue developing therapeutic exercise resources – including a brand new therapeutic exercise app launching later this year with hundreds of newly recorded videos – we remain focused on supporting this progression from practice to performance. If you’d like to participate in beta testing for the new app, or if you want to discuss how this four-stage model might work in your specific courses, we’d welcome the conversation.
Teaching therapeutic exercise well has always demanded more than technical knowledge. It requires understanding how students learn, how skills develop, and how practice in controlled environments translates to confident performance in clinical settings. With thoughtful integration of technology, clear pedagogical structure, and resources designed specifically for progressive skill development, we can help students make that journey more effectively than ever before.
