Heather Milton leads group fitness classes at NYU Langone Orthopedic Center and is a clinician with the Running Laboratory and Golf Laboratory. She is a board-certified exercise physiologist and strength and conditioning specialist. She is certified in Functional Movement Systems® and by the Titleist Performance Institute. She develops specialized programs to help athletes reach their maximum potential and ability. Ms. Milton creates unique and motivational programs to inspire health and fitness clients and designs injury prevention programs for at-risk athletes and youth sports teams. She also identifies limitations that may affect sport performance, including gait faults in running, swing faults in golf, and swing, kick, and throw patterns in rotational sports. Her undergraduate degree in cardiopulmonary science and her master’s degree in clinical exercise physiology are from Northeastern University.
This is the first of a two-part series. In Part 1 of the interview, Ms. Milton discusses how to screen patients with ACL injury to help guide their training and return to sport; time intervals at which screening measures are used, key areas of a training program that patients with ACL injury must address to transition back to their sport; common traits observed in both male and female athletes that have completed physical therapy following ACL injury; the continuum of older adults attending rehabilitation for gait training and the importance of muscle mass to avoid falls and the onset of frailty; muscle loss (sarcopenia) as a result of aging; and designing a training program for an older adult with many comorbidities.