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For your patient’s physical therapist or surgeon

Your patient found Montis and asked what you think. Here is what it is.

Strength and conditioning for a skier after ACL reconstruction, in the stretch between discharge from physical therapy and skiing again, coached by a Doctor of Physical Therapy who skis. It is not physical therapy, not a diagnosis and not a clearance; it does not bill insurance, does not replace any care you are still providing, and does not need anything from you to run. This page exists so that when a patient asks, you can answer from the facts rather than the brochure.

What the system is

Two axes, not oneTraining level and impact ceiling are tracked separately. The patient can progress strength week over week while the impact ceiling stays put; neither moves the other.
Four gates that deferSymptom, movement, run and late return-to-sport gates. Each one DEFERS when a criterion is missing — absent data never raises the impact ceiling and never counts as a pass. A full advance requires both the symptom and movement gates affirmatively met.
Plyometrics by stageJumping and landing are staged. No plyometric exercise is rendered until the stage is opened in the app by the coach, a Doctor of Physical Therapy, and only when the criteria are met and nothing the patient reported from you argues against it; without that, the exercise is held and a non-impact alternative is substituted or the slot is dropped.
Pain changes the dayA knee flagged yellow changes the session; a red flag, effusion, giving way or any emergency flag replaces the session with recovery and mobility and tells the patient to talk to their clinician. The app does not triage; it stops and points at you.
A person reads every weekThe rules decide a day. The coach decides a week: reads what the patient logged, completed and reported, and writes the review. Software drafts words from those facts; the coach edits every draft; nothing is sent unedited. Software never writes a dose, a threshold or a plan.
The recordWhere the coach disagreed with a rule and why is kept as data and becomes a written test case the rules are checked against on every change. Watch and Strava data stay with the plan’s arithmetic and never reach the drafting software.

The rest of the ten weeks — what a patient does each week, how the plan moves around their days, what it refuses to be — is in the Preparation Brief. The doses, criteria and thresholds behind the gates are the head coach’s and are not on a public page; ask and you will be sent them.

What it does with what you said

At the start the patient is asked three things: when the surgery was, the graft, and what you told them they may do. That last answer, in their words, is the starting line the coach builds from and the ceiling the plan does not argue with. The coach — a clinician — reads it as one, and when it is vague, builds under the conservative reading and tells the patient to ask you. Return-to-sport remains your decision and the surgeon’s. If the patient asks the coach when they can ski, the answer is: ask your surgeon.

What your patient will be doing

A ten-week block built around their trip and their knee: a kickoff with the coach, a live first workout, strength most training days from a filmed catalogue with the impact ceiling applied, a weekly knee check-in and written review, a midpoint and a closing call, and a Ski-Day Playbook for the first days back — warm-up, how long, which terrain, when to stop. It runs in the app on their phone. If their road is longer than ten weeks, the same coaching continues month to month. What they saw is at montislab.com/return-to-ski.

If you want to watch

Optional, free, and the patient’s to offer: a seat that lets you sign in, open your patient’s page, see the stage they are on with the criteria beside it, and hold or open a stage yourself. The weekly check-ins and reviews stay with the coach; nobody will ask you to coach, answer an app question or read a training log. Most clinicians will not want it and nothing depends on it. If you do, the patient asks the coach and it takes ten minutes, once.

What it will not do

  • Promise the patient anything you have not said: no injury-prevention claim, no date, no “cleared”. That word is yours.
  • Contact you, or use your name, unless the patient asks for that.
  • Pay anyone for a referral, or ask you to recommend it. There is no arrangement with clinicians; this page is the whole of it.
  • Continue through a red flag. It stops, replaces the day with recovery, and sends the patient to you.

Questions, or to be sent the criteria behind the gates: hello@montislab.com. The head coach, a Doctor of Physical Therapy practicing in Bozeman, answers these personally.