31 Mar Welcome Dr. Caitlin McGee

Posted at 16:37h in Blog by Matthew Hwu 0 Comments

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Horde Members, Meet your new Support Hero

My fellow physical therapist and friend Dr. Caitlin McGee, who has been a huge part in helping the Dota, Smash and esports community play more and hurt less is now a part of 1HP as a Strategic Partner and eSports Physical Therapist She also…

Got her entry into gaming through Ocarina of Time (OoT) on an N64 emulator on my college roommate’s laptop, but only when she got too annoyed at bosses she couldn’t beat.
Is a support main in every game she plays except for Division (where she’s a sniper) and Guild Wars 2 (crit/condi build necromancer)
Is a former competitive soccer player who’s crazy enough to enjoy running marathons and other obscenely long distances.

Her Journey into esports

I’d love to say I got my start in gaming as a physical therapist as a result of my education—an undergraduate degree in exercise science and neuroscience from Ursinus, then a Master’s in Clinical Anatomy and a Doctorate in Physical Therapy from the University of Delaware.

But I really got my start because my gaming friends got fed up. They told me to stop complaining about the bad ergonomics I saw at tournaments unless I was going to do something about it, so I started doing something about it. My first effort was writing for a website called HighGroundTV. That caught the attention of players and managers who had questions about preventing and managing injuries, so I started writing an advice column to answer them. Last April, there was a tournament announced near me: Pound 6, back after a long hiatus. I emailed one of its organizers and offered to provide onsite help—education, assessment, treatment; whatever would be most useful. And thanks to the TOs, Pound 6 became my first in-person tournament.

Pound 6 led me to Super SmashCon, which led me to Smash Summit, which led me to Dota Summit. As a result, I’ve had the chance to work with players of every level, to write guides that have genuinely helped people, and to make videos with incredible content teams. Along the way, I’ve also learned how to feed (slightly) less, how to (inconsistently) waveshine, and just how much materials farming is required in Guild Wars 2 to make a legendary (a lot). I’m beyond excited to have the chance to continue working with Matt and to help this community I’m so lucky to be a part of.

Her one message for us gamers

As with everything else in gaming, it’s about adaptation. Your body adapts to the stresses you place on it, but you have to adapt your preparation, your setup, and your recovery.

Working with 1HP

Hey guys, Matt here again…I have been blessed to have had the opportunity to work closely with her on our esports podcast Evidence-Based esports educating both gamers and professional team support staff about how to incorporate recent discoveries in research to help gamers play more, hurt less, move well and game well. I could not be more excited that we will be working together as we both share a big passion to help everyone in our community live healthier and ultimately improve the standards of health of our community through our content. Our goal is to make 1HP into the resource for the gaming community to learn and apply simple advice to live a healthy lifestyle. We hope to be a centralized location for gamers to learn about injury prevention, balanced lifestyle, gaming performance, mindset management and nutrition advice. A balanced gamer can play for smarter, longer and with less pain. We will be working together to create some awesome content to help you guys play more, hurt less, live, game and replenish your lives. We have a lot planned and I am really looking forward to how we’ll be able to help everyone learn how to improve their quality of life to improve their quality of gaming.