In The Greener Grasses continued effort to interview experts and connect people that are doing, and thinking interesting, progressive things we called upon a local authority in the health and wellness community, The Cincinnati Bengals’ Head Athletic Trainer, Paul Sparling.
For you health conscious people, Paul has timeless words of wisdom- and for you sports fans, it’s just cool to hear directly from a member of a professional club.As you mention the title here is Bengals Athletic Trainer. It unfortunately is a misnomer, in the old days simply calling somebody an athletic trainer would suffice, but in this day an age the head athletic trainer for an NFL team does much more than just the standard injury care and prevention.
So to start, what made you go into Athletic Training?I had an interest in going into athletic training back in high school when I was too small for football, too short for basketball, and too slow for track. So it kind of limited my options. I had a coach there who was great and he asked me if I would help him out as a manager, so I toted the clipboard and the stopwatches, but then at the end of the season he asked if I was interested in athletic training. I had no idea what athletic training was, or what it meant. He spent $10 and sent away for a home correspondence course from Cramer products, one of the original product manufacturers for athletic training supplies and I absolutely fell in love with it. With the concept of seeing injuries, trying to prevent them, treating them when they happen, everything from open wounds to sprained ankles to torn rotator cuffs and all the sort of thing and really enjoyed being involved in athletics without having to let any physical limitations get in the way of my participation. So I did that through high school, I was a nine-letter winner in high school all as an athletic trainer. And interestingly enough Don Brown who was a sports director up at one of the local television stations up in Dayton, Ohio where I went to High School, reminds me of this he was a junior when I was a senior in high school and he asked me what I was going to be when I grew up and I told him my goal was ultimately to become the head trainer for the Bengals. Little did I realize that I would end up putting my self on a path that would get me there.
Tell us about your educational background.I worked as a student trainer and manager at Dayton Stebbins High School, where I went to school. Then I went to Wilmington College I received my undergraduate degree at Wilmington College of Ohio. It was a triple major of industrial education, health education, and athletic training, and then I ultimately received my master’s degree from The University of Cincinnati in health administration. The reason I chose Wilmington was two-fold. One because it was a smaller school, at that time you had to have a teaching degree in order to sit for the certification test, because essentially we are teachers, unfortunately I think the National Athletic Trainers Association has gotten away from that concept and quite honestly you can see a difference in students today than what you had 25 years ago because now they do not have to have that teaching degree. But the other reason I decided I wanted to go there is because I figured if there facilities were good enough for the Bengals to go there for training camp, it had to be good enough for me, and maybe I’d have a chance to meet the head athletic trainer, little did I realize that I would ultimately become the head trainer.
How did that happen?It turned out the Bengals were looking for a laundry boy to do laundry during training camp and they in the past had always hired somebody from the student trainers. At the college there were three kids ahead of me by seniority that had the rights to be offered the position first, and they all turned it down and I jumped at the chance, and after about two weeks of doing it getting done 3 or 4 hours before the guys in the past used to, the equipment manager asked me to start helping him in the equipment room so I was fitting helmets and shoulder pads, changing cleats and that sort of thing and then Marv Pollins who was the long time trainer there with the team at the time said “When you’re done helping out in the equipment room, why don’t you come in here and help me out in the training room”, once he found out I was a student trainer. So the next thing I knew I was taping ankles and mixing Gatorade and cold whirlpools and making ice bags and stuff. They took me on a couple of road trips that year, I worked all the home games, and in the next year they let me hire a couple of high school kids to do the laundry, so I still oversaw that but was working as a student assistant trainer in the training room and just kinda fell into it, right place at the right time.
Has the Head Athletic Trainer role changed from when you first started out at Wilmington to where you are now?It is a unique position. It’s changed it’s evolved a significant amount. Probably 25 years ago the head trainer would spend 70% of their time out in the training room actually administering treatments and such, and 30% of the time in the office. Unfortunately now it’s almost reverse. Now you spend 70% of your time in the office doing administrative duties, 30% of your time out in the training room actually treating, and fortunately we’ve got good assistants and student trainer interns that carry out the appropriate treatments. That’s the big change I’ve seen.
What is a typical week like for you during the season?It’s 7-days a week, there is no such thing as a day off. You use the day after the game as the starting point, which is a Monday. You’re taking care of all the bumps and bruises that occurred from the day before, scheduling MRI’s or x-rays, or administering treatments, and whatever else needs to be done. Tuesday is a player off-day, but for players that are injured, they are required to come in and do treatments. And in addition to treating the athletes, we also give our best forecast for who’s going to be available during the week and who is likely gonna be not able to play on Sunday, because that obviously plays a great deal in the game planning. Wednesday is a full practice day; you’re here from 6:45 am until about 5: practice, treatments, and I’ve got doctor clinic here first thing in the morning to see if there is anything else that we missed earlier in the week. Thursday is the same way. Friday is a lightened, shortened version of that where you practice, but they are in shorts and helmets, there is no hitting on Fridays. Saturday is a walk-through and Sunday is the game, then you start the whole process over again.
What is a typical week like during the off-season?During the off-season, years ago, about a week after the season was over you could turn off the lights and lock up the doors and then come back in March when the players started coming back. Nowadays there is no such thing as an off-season; we just call it the “non-playing season,” - affectionately. You’re taking care of all the guys that were injured during the year; you’re doing off-season surgeries and doing their re-habs. To prepare for free agency, injury evaluation physicals on the players you’re considering bringing in. You’ve got the NFL combine, which is held every February, where you are looking at the potential draft eligible players - doing physicals on them. And then you’ve got the draft, and then mini-camps and then you’ve got the OTA days, which are basically organized team activities – that’s a nice way of saying practices, and then you’re getting ready for training camp. So you don’t have that long lull, and it makes it a little bit more of a challenge. You do what you can to manage your own personal schedule.
Nowadays there is no such thing as an off-season; we just call it the “non-playing season,” - affectionately.
When did the off-season phase out like this?This change occurred gradually, over about the last 10 years. The OTA’s changed, free agency became a big deal about 15 years ago, off-season conditioning has become more of a standard around the league, I mean years ago, when the players were not making the kind of money they are now, a lot of the teams had the philosophy, and Paul Brown certainly had it, that the players during their off-season need to be preparing for life after football. That football is considered a short-term occupation, and you better be preparing for that by doing internships and that sort of thing. Nowadays, with the minimum salaries being what they are, if you are fortunate enough to play for several years, you can really prepare yourself quite well financially, where you don’t have to do those kind of things during the off-season, and you can kind of pick and chose what you want to do. So that has definitely changed.
How has this change affected your role?As the responsibilities have expanded, the administrative aspects of the head trainer’s position have expanded. It’s forced us to increase our staff, which has been good because it frees me up to do the other things I need to do.
How big is your staff?In addition to myself I have two full time assistant trainers, and then I have a season-long full time fellow. It is a fellowship that we offer to a person who has already graduated, already has their license and is certified. They work with me during the season, and we try to help them at the end of the season get hooked on with another NFL team or into a college setting. We started that last year, and the guy that we had last year we got him a full time position with the Tennessee Titans. And then in addition to the fellow, I have four college student trainers from local colleges and they work with me during the season as well as during the off-season. And they are again full-time college students as well, so this is considered an internship for them. Many of them get college credit for it and it really gives them a head start in what their going to do and what they want to be when they grow up. I’ve got a list of student athletic trainer interns that have worked with me over the past 15 years and on that list there are physical therapists, there’s a physician, there are chiropractors, there are professional athletic trainers- you name it, we’ve seen our guys graduate and move onto other fields related to athletic training, and we’d like to think we’ve played a little role in where they’ve gone.
One of the things The Greener Grass looks at it is how to help consumers sort through all the information out there. How do you find out about methods and products that are relevant to your field and how can the average consumer learn from those methods to evaluate products and services for themselves?The consumers that I have obviously are my athletes. And we do everything we can to provide up-to-date research on given techniques and given products. There tends to be a general perception that if the team is doing it there’s got to be a newer way to do it. There are gurus out there that get their hooks into these players and sell them on ideas that they’ve got a better mousetrap or they have this better supplement or they have this better exercise technique and what have you, and sometimes it can become a little overwhelming when you’re continually bombarded by it. We have found that most of the other stuff that’s out there isn’t tested, isn’t researched independently, doesn’t have a lot of scientific data to back-up their claims, it’s one fad after another. This year it will be this, next year it will be that and by and large, the things that are time tested, and have research behind them, are the things that are consistent, safe, and effective.
Supplements are a common product between professional athletes and average consumers, what are your thoughts?If you’re looking for an answer in a bottle, you’re looking in the wrong place.
The problem with supplements is that they’re not regulated by the FDA. So as a result they do not have to adhere to the high standard of purity as well as demonstration of true effectiveness. And as a result you get a lot of guys bringing in supplements that say it’s going to do this or it’s going to do that and it only has this in it or it only has that in it. Often times those items have materials in them that are actually banned by the league, although they may not be listed on the list of ingredients, and that is the problem you run into. I call it the Wild Wild West – anybody can put anything in a bottle, and put on a label that it only has this in it, but it’ll do that for you, and there is absolutely no oversight, no restrictions, no regulation, so quite honestly our philosophy as a team, and mine as a parent is that there is no shortcut. If you’re looking for an answer in a bottle, you’re looking in the wrong place. The old standards of hard work and eating healthy still are the tried and true techniques that work. Nothing in a bottle is going to take somebody who is a marginal NFL player and turn them into a good NFL player, unless there is something illegal in it like steroids. There is just no shortcut to it.
How do you address this topic with your athletes?Number one we provide educational opportunities to the athletes a couple times a year. I will meet with all the players in a team meeting and review the latest research on certain items and just kind of give them a general warning. The league has set-up a hotline so athletes can do it either themselves or bring it to me, a particular item that they are considering taking and the hotline people will go ahead and research what is listed in the ingredients and determine if there is anything banned on it. The unfortunate thing about it is they always throw the caveat (because these things are not regulated), it’s called “buyer beware” and the athlete is responsible for what they put in their body, and that’s the one disadvantage to it.
Tell us about your methodology when you rush onto the field to treat a player.You try to get them as comfortable as you can, and then come up with a game plan on determining what approach you’re going to take to getting them off the field, are you going to send them in for x-ray? MRI? Do we have to use a stretcher? or can we walk them off? Do we use the cart? All of this has to be determined in a relatively short period of time. When you’ve been doing it for a couple of years like I have, it’s not that difficult.
You have to make sure somebody’s taking care of getting the crowd away from you, so you can make good decisions and sometimes you do have to ask players around what they saw, because more often then not somebody else saw it or heard it. A player may say “I felt like I got kicked” and somebody else will say, “no he didn’t get kicked he was out in the open”. The more information you have when you get there the better, and then it’s a step-by-step process.
#1 preventing them from hurting themselves anymore
#2 evaluating what you are dealing with
#3 putting together a game plan on how you’re going to address it.
And then get them off the field and keep the game going.
How is the relationship between the athletic trainers and officials?The officials are great. They will never, ever pressure or push the medical people to move a player before they are ready. It’s a good understanding that we have. And we don’t tell them - well I take it back -
sometimes we do tell them what to call when it comes to penalties if they’re missing them...but they don’t interfere with us so we are good with that.
Concussions are a common injury associated with football, how do you determine the severity of the athlete’s condition? They’re not as common as you would think, it is fewer than a dozen a year per team.
It is a very specific examination that we do on the field. The old days it was how many fingers do I have up and who are we playing and what’s the score – there is a lot more to it now. We are looking for finite, cognitive function in terms of reaction, emotion, memory recall, things of that nature.
Before we allow them to return we utilize a local neuropsychologist who has provided baseline evaluations of each player, (which is basically a brain function test) and we don’t allow them to return to the field until that player has returned to their baseline. We routinely wait 48 hours after the player has suffered the injury before we do a retest to see if in fact they have returned to their normal brain function. If they haven’t, then we hold them in terms of any practice activities until we retest them and see that in fact they have returned to their normal function level. If they have any lingering symptoms such as a headache, dizziness, nausea, insomnia, then we will not only limit their practice, but actually limit their physical activity, restricting them from engaging in even cardiovascular workouts, because we want to keep the blood pressure down. Studies have shown that if they have lingering symptoms and they’re exercising, they actually pro-long those symptoms. So it is a well thought out approach. The league did a good job last year of reminding the coaches, trainers, and physicians of the importance of never allowing competitive decisions to affect medical care, and I’m proud to say that here that’s never been a problem.
Football players are big guys with famously big appetites. What efforts are made to support healthy weight gains and loss?
Yeah, we do have some big guys, they do have big appetites. We have a dietician who is on retainer who is a consultant but will work with our players, those who either request, or those that we direct to the dietician. We are able the ensure guys that are gaining weight or are losing weight are doing it in a healthy, and safe, and appropriate manner. We will also look at players’ family history, if they have family members that have suffered from coronary heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, high cholesterol; we assess that in when we are assessing the athlete. So in addition to not only treating football related injuries or illnesses we also treat and manage the non-football issues.
Fluid intake, to manage muscle cramps, is an age-old debate in fitness, what formula do you prescribe to your athletes? Strictly water, or sport drinks, or a combination of both?We do an educational session at the start of training camp, talking about heat illnesses, and we include muscle cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke. Most muscle cramps are related to dehydration although not all of them are. So sometimes it is a misnomer to tell people that all you need to do is to drink more fluids because that is not always correct, and also it’s not just a matter that you’re drinking it’s a matter of what you’re drinking.
The important thing is not just the fluid but what you have in it. Gatorade is the name brand that the league has endorsed and it’s endorsed for a number of reasons. One of which, their products are backed-up by science, it’s not just a beverage company that went into sports; it’s a sports company that went into beverages. Specifically designed for athletes and in our particular environment. We do know that in addition to fluids they also need sodium and potassium. I can remember when I was in high school, they were just at that time getting away from giving athletes salt tablets before they’d go out on the practice field, and the theory was that again it’d help prevent cramps, well actually they had part of it right, the sodium was true, they did need that, but they also discouraged water intake, which they needed as well. Gatorade corrected the concept, and we call it “it makes water work better”, yes it has a significant amount of water in it, but it also has potassium in it, and it also has sodium in it, and it also has sugars in it. If it’s not palatable, they won’t drink it. So we again, subscribe to using a significant amount of the sports beverage drinks, Gatorade in particular, water as well.
But again, there’s immediately an assumption if they guy’s cramping it’s because he’s not drinking enough. Often times there are other nutritional deficits that need to be addressed, or it can be a case where an athlete is taking a supplement that pre-disposes them to muscle cramping, and through education, we’re able to get them out of that cycle of putting themselves in a bad spot.
Throughout your initial injury evaluation and basic rehabilitation of athletes, and how your athletes follow your instructions, is there anything (a product or service) that would make it easier for everyone involved?The easiest thing would be for people to get out of their head thinking that there’s a better mouse-trap, a better machine, or a better exercise, or a better drug, or a better whatever, to think that’s going to somehow shortcut biology – because it’s not there.
Everyone is looking for a short-cut or a magic elixir, or some super new machine that will cut your rehab time in half, accelerate your recovery – let me dispel all of that crap, because that’s what it is. The bottom line is, the body will heal if you let it. The most important thing that we do is to optimize the conditions for the body to heal itself. If we do that, the body will heal as fast as it is going to and no amount of medicine, exercise, different kind of electrical stimulation treatment, or other voodoo is going to change that. It’s not a glamorous thing to tell players, but it’s reality. Hopefully over time we’re able to educate these guys to understanding that there’s no magic, there’s no shortcut. It’s interesting to hear players say “Man, what are we doing using ice? Ice has been used for years, why do we still use it?” It’s real simple. It’s called, it works. The body hasn’t changed. The body’s reaction to hot, the body’s reaction to cold, it’s a physiological response that is consistent, it works, and that’s why we do it. And again, unfortunately it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, it’s not glamorous, and it’s not fancy, and it’s not chic, if you will – but it’s effective.
The most important thing that we do is to optimize the conditions for the body to heal itself.
How do you address the fact that there is no shortcut to recovery?The ideal thing is word of mouth. You get a couple of name athletes, veterans that have been around, that will take the younger guys under their wings. And that will help in some instances, but it’s a never-ending battle. There’s one manufacturer of a modality that actually called me and told me that what I needed to do was to get this machine, and put it on David Pollack’s neck while he was in a halo, and it would cut his rehab and recovery time in half. I mean it’s nonsense, the kid had a broken neck. Everybody’s looking for a quick fix, and part of it’s our environment we live in, look at what’s on television, look at what’s on the radio, look what’s in the magazines. It’s “take this pill, and you’ll lose all the weight you want, and you’ll look like this…Use this machine…Do this exercise…Take this supplement…and you can heal things in half the time.” That’s what they’re told, and ultimately that’s what they’re sold, and when you’ve got guys that have significant amounts of disposable income, I tell the players when they bring in some of the things that they bought I say you know what I’ll make you a deal, you give it back, and I’ll give you my machine for half the price, and it’ll be a shoe box wrapped up with foil with some wires coming out of it which will do just as much as what you bought. It’s a never-ending thing that we just continue to have to educate as best we can.
How does the NFL support the physical fitness and emotional wellness of players transitioning to life after professional football?The league does not get enough credit for the programs that they offer for the athletes. Not only in terms of how to deal with life while they’re a professional athlete but also how to transition for when they are no longer a professional athlete, by encouraging them if they haven’t gotten their degree to get their degree, to provide internship opportunities during the off seasons- during the time they do have an off-season, to begin to think about what they want to be when they grow up – is kinda as I put it.
So it’s more of a league initiative than a team initiative?Correct. Each team now has a player development coordinator, where one of their roles is to help the players deal with issues that come up, to help facilitate the managing of the educational opportunities, and they’re mandatory now – they didn’t use to be mandatory for the players to go through. We ourselves last season hired a psychological consultant to assist us as well. The idea is to have a well thought-out, well-rounded, multidisciplinary approach to help the athletes both on and off the field.
The idea is to have a well thought-out, well-rounded, multidisciplinary approach to help the athletes both on and off the field.
What can younger athletes (in all sports) do to make themselves more
injury-free? If you tell most coaches that the player needs rest – rest is a dirty four-letter word in some peoples’ minds. The way I see it, rest can also mean “Resume Exercise below the Soreness Threshold – r.e.s.t.”
Understand that any time that you are involved in a physical activity there’s risk of injury. It happens. Obviously eating properly is a benefit, proper conditioning, proper warm-up, proper cool-down, all of those sorts of things are appropriate. I think in some ways we’ve almost gone from one extreme to the other, and I don’t say the club here, I say society in general, in that I think in many instances, whether people want to believe it or not, there’s the risk and there’s some evidence of episodes of over-conditioning / over-training, that are actually making players, or anybody, more pre-disposed to suffering injury. The body can only endure so much. When you’re off-season gets shorter and shorter and shorter, the physical demands get greater and greater and greater. I think there has to be an awareness that there has to be a proper balance of ensuring that athletes have the opportunity to fully recover from the rigors of a season, before they start training for the rigors of the coming season. And that’s something that we are continually looking at, the strength and conditioning coaches continually are reviewing what they did last year, what they did the year before, looking at injury patterns with us in the medical staff and seeing if there are things that we can and need to do to perhaps offset the mind-set of more is better. More is better to a point. But there is such thing as too much. If you tell most coaches that the player needs rest – rest is a dirty four-letter word in some peoples’ minds. The way I see it, rest can also mean “Resume Exercise below the Soreness Threshold – r.e.s.t.” Which means, rest doesn’t need to mean that they’re laying on a couch watching T.V. and playing video games, it can often times mean that you simply just back down contact, or you don’t have as much running, you don’t have as much pounding.
The body can only endure so much.
It’s hard because so many of them have the mind-set, “I need to do more, more, more – I need to work harder, harder, harder” – I disagree, I think you need to work smarter, smarter, smarter. There’s a balancing act that you have to take into account. As I see it now, the way things have evolved it used to be that training camp was to get players into shape to play, that’s not true anymore. If you don’t come into shape in training camp – you’re gone. I think there is a tendency to over-train, and when you get to training camp if you have over-trained; you’re going to struggle getting through training camp. Not because you didn’t do enough, but because you did too much.
More is better to a point. But there is such thing as too much.
And finally, on a lighter note, if you added up all the rolls of tape you have applied to athletes, how
many times would it circle the earth?We use on average an excess of 50 miles of tape a season –that includes training camp and mini-camps. That’s a lot.
Labels: fitness, Food and Nutrition, Health and Wellness, Interviews
