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By Michael Kinney

Leander Walker had been hearing about it for months. The Yukon High athletic trainer had heard about the remarkable healing process of the Fascial Distortion Model from friends and fellow trainers to the point where he just had to see what all the hoopla was about.

“We started asking around what the cost would be to go down in Dallas and take it. Got talking to those guys. We discussed how we could get them to just come to us,” Walker said. “So we called out some of our contacts, athletic trainers from around the state, high school, small college, stuff like that. We knew that we could host them here, so we were happy to do it.”

Walker and 20 other high school and college athletic trainers and therapist from around the state took part in the two-day course and came away with what they could be a game-changing way to treat athletes from now on.

“It’s another tool for us to use in our daily treatment,” Walker said. “But when you talk to people who do use it and they say it’s definitely something they use every single day, and it makes them look at injuries and the way that they treat those injuries differently just because you have a different way of looking at what’s happening with the athlete in the injury.”

The Fascial Distortion Model (FDM) was developed by Dr. Stephen Typaldos, DO in 1991. He had begun to pass on his teachings until his death in 2006.

But it wasn’t until 2012 when a couple of men were so impressed with the FDW that they wanted to make it their business to spread the word.

“We go around and train anyone who is licensed to do manual therapy and how to use the Fascial Distortion Model to treat soft tissue and muscular-skeletal disorder,” said FDM partner, Jay Ferguson. “All the other techniques were really just do this, hope for this. And if it didn’t work, you really didn’t have other options. You kind of just kept doing it. You could get some decent outcomes, but you were missing a lot. When we started looking at FDM, it really opened your eyes to so many different ways to use the six different distortions and within them, 12 different treatment methods.”

The six distortions that the FD Model is built on are Trigger bands, Continuum Distortions, Cylinder Distortions, Herniated Trigger points, Folding Distortions and Tectonic Fixations. According to Ferguson almost every ache, pain, swelling and discomfort that can take an athlete away from their sport for a significant amount of time can be fixed using the FDM.

The athlete’s verbal and physical descriptions, coupled with the mechanism of injury and relevant orthopedic tests, will lead the practitioner to the proper form of soft tissue treatment.

“When you are looking at your athlete and you are looking at your patient, there is no more guesswork,” Ferguson said. “If you saw them do this, it led to a kind of a diagnosis of what’s going on. If you understood the tissue and what’s going on with it, you knew how to treat it. Instead of it being kind of a shotgun approach, it’s a sniper approach. You’re really pinpointed at what’s going on, with confidence.”

One of the earliest converts in the state was Michael Bronson, an athletic trainer with the University of Oklahoma wrestling team.

“I have basically been in athletic training since I was a junior in high school,” Bronson said. “I was just tired of the same old, same old. Here is a bag of ice, he is an ultrasound, heat. I wanted the next level. I don’t want six to eight weeks of someone being out for an injury. I want quick, better and fast.”

So a friend told Bronson to check out FDM, who just happened to be holding one of their courses with the Oklahoma City Thunder two years ago and he went

“I just fell in love with it,” Bronson said. “I use it on a daily basis.”

According to Bronson, the results speak for themselves. He is seeing athletes spend less time in the training room and the recovery time cut down drastically.

Bronson even went as far to say he no longer uses ice, a staple of athletic trainers for decades, because it doesn’t do any good, according to the FD Model.

It was Bronson who got into the ear of Walker and several other trainers around the state that the FDM was something they needed to learn about. And when he heard the claims, he was skeptical. But Walker plans to implement the FDM at Yukon this year.

“There was definitely a level of skepticism. We do what we do because it’s science-based,” Walker said. “Talking to him or talking to other people who had used this and were using it in their practice daily, it was just more of about, “Hey, let’s check it out, let’s see what it’s like.” We’ll try and use some of it this next year and see how it goes. I truly hope that we see a lot of the results that they’ve seen.”

Michael Kinney is a Freelance Content Provider

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