AMSSM Annual Meeting, San Diego

Johnny Owens speaking about blood flow restriction technology at #AMSSM17

The 2017 American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (#AMSSM17) annual meeting has opened in San Diego, and we have a lot to share with you from our brief time on the ground.

One of the first sessions of the meeting was “Gaining a competitive edge: current concepts in sports performance training.”  The session included lectures on oculomotor training for sports performance and the role of sleep in sports performance, both of which advanced my knowledge tremendously.

Dr. Simon Kemp on the importance of monitoring and adjusting load to avoid athletic injury

The session also included two lectures I was eagerly anticipating: one, from Johnny Owens, on blood flow restriction technology in rehabilitation of injury.  Owens is a senior author on a new RCT on blood flow restriction technology post-arthroscopy just published in CJSM. He presented data on how this technology can be used to provide resistance training with very low loads and accelerate the rehabilitation process.  The other session I could not miss was given by Simon Kemp, the head of sports medicine for England’s rugby football union.

I most recently saw Dr. Kemp at the IOC Monaco meeting, where he gave a stellar talk on video analysis of rugby head injuries.  Here, in San Diego, he tackled a different topic: load management for injury prevention. This is a hot topic in sports medicine, a subject I’m sure you’ll see more of in the pages of CJSM and other sports medicine journals.

Dr. Jason Zaremski presenting a clinical case at the poster session, #AMSSM17

Finally, I was able to meet up with one of the newer members of the CJSM Editorial Board: The Junior Associate Editor Jason Zaremski. He is a busy man here, presenting his own work and moderating sessions, including one on preventing injury in the overhead athlete, one of his principal areas of research interest.

Follow #AMSSM17 if you aren’t already to keep up with the proceedings of this busy, jam-packed meeting.  We’ll continue to Tweet live impressions from @cjsmonline and we’ll post again — a lot more to come including the Instructional Course Lecture (ICL #21) on Friday AM, a session on publishing in sports medicine journals jointly given by BJSM, Sports Health and CJSM.