Happy New Year everyone! Hope everyone had a great holiday season and was able to take some much deserved time off. For returning readers, welcome back to The PT Page. For new readers, welcome! 2026 is here and I thought we’d get back in to the swing of things by looking at some of the best posts from 2025. These are my must read posts from the last year. If you’re new this is a great time to see what The PT Page is all about. If you’re a returning reader you can revisit some of your favorites or catch up on any that you missed. I’ve linked the full posts and don’t forget you can listen to the audios as well! Here they are.
1. Flipping the Script on Exercise Prescription
This one was early in 2025. I still believe that exercise prescription as a profession could use some work. I think we’re definitely getting better, but still not where we should be. In this post we talked about both exercise prescription and selection – how we fall short, why we fall short, and how we might fix it. What do you think about where we are as a profession with our exercise prescription? Read the blog post and share your thoughts!
Key quote:
“Scaling is key. A lot of times I think we make the mistake of completely stopping an exercise if it’s too hard or painful. However, most of the time I find the exercise is good, we just maybe need to adjust for patient tolerance. By scaling things like ROM, resistance, speed, etc. we can continue an exercise that might be really good for the patient instead of moving onto something less helpful.”
2. Bridging the Gap: Why PTs Should Be the Link Between Health and Healthcare
After thinking about where PTs sit with exercise prescriptions, I started thinking about where they sit with exercise and health as a whole. That’s where this next blog post from 2025 came from. I firmly believe PTs are best positioned in skill set and opportunity to become the bridge between health and healthcare. In this blog post I explain why that is. I also explain why patients tend to come to us with general health and wellness questions in the first place and why we should spend some time answering them. We also explore what an opportunity it is for PTs to step up into this role. This may actually be my favorite blog post out of all of them from 2025 so you should definitely check this one out!
Key quote:
“I think everyone would agree that patients with modifiable chronic conditions that cost the healthcare system billions every year could use some health and wellness education. Like I said before, no one is stepping into that role – not PCP’s and certainly not specialists. So why not us? In my opinion we’re the best people for the job anyway.”
3. The Great Manual Therapy Divide
This one may have rustled some feathers or got some debate going. If you keep up with PT social media, you’ve probably seen some of the discourse about manual therapy. Often there’s this idea of choosing a “side” – either for or against manual therapy. These days it seems you’re either a manual therapist who only performs passive treatments or you’re an exercise therapist who believes more weight is always the answer. In this post we discuss both sides of the aisle. We also debunk some of the general myths and misinformation about manual therapy. Which side do you fall on? Do you believe there’s a balance that can be found? Who benefits the most from manual therapy? We discuss all that in this blog post so go check it out.
Key quote:
“In my opinion, manual therapy has its place in PT, but definitely shouldn’t be the primary tool in the toolbox. If you’re someone frequently using manual techniques for entire sessions, every session, I encourage you to ask yourself “why?”. There is something to be said for evidence-based practice which says manual therapy benefits are short-lived and may not get the functional results we aim to achieve.
On the other hand, if you never use it, I encourage you to be open to putting it in your toolbox. Even if it sits at the bottom. If PTs who overuse manual therapy make PTs look like glorified massage therapists, then PTs who only use exercise make us look like glorified personal trainers.”
4. Does Posture Really Matter?
Just like there’s a lot of myths about manual therapy out there, there’s lots of them about posture too. At one point training posture was extremely popular in the physical therapy field. As time has gone on and more research has come out we now realize that postural retraining maybe isn’t all that effective. It then leads to the question – how much does posture REALLY matter? In this post we discuss research surrounding posture, what that means for us and patients, and how we integrate this into practice. If you’re still relying heavily on postural training in your PT practice you’re going to want to read this one.
Key quote:
“Our bodies were made to move. At the end of the day, any posture, whether text neck or something else, is ultimately just some flexion or extension of the spine, some rounding or retraction of the shoulders, or some posterior or anterior tilting of the pelvis. Regardless, our body was made to do all those movements. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t. So I definitely don’t think sitting up so straight and tall you could balance a book on your head is the solution.”
5. Words Matter: Using Safe Patient Language to Stop Catastrophizing
This last one was a little lengthy but I still think it was one of the top posts because of its usefulness. We all have patients who catastrophize pain. Unfortunately there’s not an exercise to fix that. Sometimes the words we use can be just as effective as any exercise we prescribe.
In this blog post we discuss what safe patent language is, its components, and how we can use it to get patients to stop catastrophizing pain. The best part is we go through a few common clinic scenarios and give examples on what you as the PT might say using the components of safe patient language. In my opinion this is the most clinically helpful blog post from 2025. Even though it’s a little longer, it’s definitely worth the read!
Key quote:
“Sadly, many physicians (PT’s included!) don’t realize how much our words matter when it comes to patients’ perceptions of pain and diagnoses. However, we can prevent (or even undo) some of the misperceptions planted by other people through safe patient language. Is it frustrating? 100%. Absolutely. But is it sometimes necessary if you really wanna get anywhere with a patient? Absolutely.”
Honorable Mention: PT Isn’t ‘Professional’ Anymore
I just couldn’t not mention this one. The Top 5 Posts of 2025 was supposed to be posted before the end of the year. However, I felt the need to write this one instead and get it out there if that tells you anything.
In this post we discuss the implications of PTs being taken off the list of professional degrees by the Department of Education. We discuss the implications of this for future PTs, current PTs, and patients. We also discuss what we might be able to do about it. I even share the message I sent to my state representative.
Key quote:
“Most of the time, healthcare workers and patients don’t have a lot of power in this wild healthcare system we’re asked to operate in. But if you take all the healthcare workers plus all the patients, that is a lot of people. That is a large constituency of voters and we have strength in numbers that way.
What did you think about these blog posts from 2025? What was your favorite? What do you want to see discussed in 2026? Share in the comments below! As always, make sure to follow on Instagram @the_pt_page to connect with other PT Page content and stay up to date on all things PT.
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