We cannot make good decisions from a distance ... If you are not proximate, you cannot change the world. —Bryan Stevenson.
It may sound unusual, but I am both a physiotherapist and a physicist. I left my position in the radiation department of an oncology hospital years ago to pursue a calling in sports, aiming to integrate it with physical medicine and rehabilitation. Originally trained in the mathematical rigor of physics, I transitioned to a sports university. In a moment, I went into subjects that, while lacking the genuine depth and difficulty of physics, were mainly anecdotal and often used obscure language to comprehend their complexities.
After over 15 years as an sports physiotherapist and rehabilitation specialist, I gained some muscles, became literate in exercise prescription, and achieved lots of experience as business owner and head of rehab in the healthcare industry. I was also taught manual treatment techniques – the conventional method of physiotherapy education in Poland during the early 2000s, where I completed my MSc studies. However, my main focus has primarily been on human movement research, biomechanics in sport, strength development, and conditioning drills.
If I am somewhere proximate right now, it's the connection to patients, athletes, and and the interdisciplinary staff members of teams building organisations, training centres, medical clinics, and sports teams. In all my current professional pursuits, there is now a much wiser approach to science policy-making, directed at enriching 'cultures' I belong and support, creating pedagogical environments and establishing a foundations for a common language.
I am also highly committed to educating coaches, physios, and physicians in the areas related to exercise health, athletic rehab, and performance coaching. In doing so, I adopt a translational approach to communicating expert knowledge, use the language of a practitioner, and advocate for science and industry free from the meme-like image often seen in social media content. By this, I mean the excessive faith in overly generalised one–fits–all solutions, along with the current over–fixation on commercial technologies. It may sound a bit contradictory, but in many cases I just consider them neither 'scientific' nor 'applicable', especially when lacking contextual information and proper analytical education of the users. Quite often they just serve the attitude of collecting data to promote the idea to collect the data without the purpose and because it's currently fashionable.
If the mother of all sciences has taught me anything, it's that I can be wrong with math, but I cannot lie. Of course, I also engage in collecting objective information with enthusiasm, yet always with honesty and a perspective that prevents me from reducing discussions about the human athlete to stats, graphs, and metrics, while claiming the precision and sharpness of physics. It simply doesn't work that way. Just to give a clear example why: although Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation can predict the orbit of a given planet with great precision, they do not provide information about its surface, atmosphere or the presence of life.
In the dynamic world of living motion (i.e. somewhere between the macro and micro scales), outcomes always involve a certain level of uncertainty and can, in fact, be non-replicable across different settings, such as 'from bed to gym' or 'from lab to pitch'. In athletic rehabilitation, for instance, we can effectively reduce the risk of future re-injury, but never to absolute zero. Physical performance is so deeply embedded in individuality and its specific, context-dependent interactions with society (team) and the environment (game), that currently, there is no single method ensuring 100% success in winning or injury avoidance. Fortunately, due to current research we have more and more reliable input to guide us. And that's great, because it just means that it's just enough to identify unique superpowers.
If this introduction evokes familiar associations with the many paradoxical struggles stated here, there's a good chance that my texts can bring some educational or, at least, entertaining benefit. This is one of the reasons I decided to share my 'personal narrative' and finally introduce this blog to a wider audience.
Aims and Scope.
My creativity is dedicated to physios, coaches, patients, athletes, as well as physicians, academics, and perhaps those lost physicists who one day – like me in the past – wish to teach exercise to their closest community. Through the concise essays, interviews and art, I share my passion for human health and performance, clinical reasoning, scientific modeling, and the systematic simplification of 'the ways humans move'.
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My writings emphasise self–criticism and bounded decision–making: the idea that practitioners' rationality is limited by the available information (data), their cognitive limitations (biases), finite tech resources and time constraints. Therefore, in unpredictable situations, one needs to concentrate on key factors, avoid becoming paralysed by diggin' the details and understand the overall message that as yet there is no maths with the power of predicting the behaviour of complex phenomena.
My quest constitutes efforts to overcome the occasional misunderstandings of applying science in conditions that are deeply influenced by socio-humanistic, self-emergent, and sometimes even random (spontaneous) aspects of the splendid performances of highly-skilled athletes. This, one might say 'aesthetic', angle is included in my reflections on one purpose: to make the circle round.
The categories of texts I provide in my blog are listed below. I believe their selection is sensible because the common debate, primarily found in the virtual space, often covers topics that are too general thus 'flat' and lack moderate skepticism that comes from real and authentic work. The topics I consider essential for delivering successful, results-oriented outcomes of physical development and recovery after an injury, are as follows:
science theory.
exercise health.
athletic rehab.
sports science.
skill aqcuisition.
big–data and tech.
NOT Covered Here.
discussing topics in which I have NO experience at all.
AI–generated reworks of someones else literary and scientific achievements.
promoting useless products through paid marketing campaigns, you have my word.
overly generalised claims about the outstanding specificity of science fiction and fantasy.
favoring hardcore scientism – the ridiculous belief that science holds solutions to all inquiries.
Now, if we are clear with that, fell invited to jump into my writings!
