This interview, conducted by by Nat Thomson, Simmons MSW Candidate, runs abridged in the April 2025 issue of the Simmons MPH Monthly. Michael Welch is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Simmons and Director of the Health & Exercise Science Program.

Dr. Welch, it’s great to be talking with you today. I thought maybe we would start just talking about what drew you to the physical and exercise sciences field initially?

Great question; I have this conversation sometimes with prospective students. In High School I felt the way a lot of students tend to, where I had no idea of what I really wanted to do, which was anxiety provoking. While I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I did know what I did not want to do, which was to sit at a desk all day for eight hours. I found this helpful in narrowing down some of my options and making next steps clearer. I was never really strong with math and numbers, and as an example, the idea of being an accountant wasn’t enticing. I was active and played a lot of sports as a kid, and having sustained some injuries to a physical therapist, which opened my eyes to another area of career possibilities. While working with the physical therapists, I was like, ‘wow, they do this for work.’ They get to interact with people, figure out what’s going on, fix the problem at hand and develop a plan to prevent this issue from happening again. Not only do they get to problem solve every day, but they’re also up and moving all the time (i.e. not behind a desk all day). I thought that was very cool, and entered  into an assisted physical therapy program following high school, which eventually transitioned to an athletic training program, which I really took to and loved. 

After graduating with my bachelors degree in athletic training, I worked as a graduate assistant at UMass Amherst for two years, in a relatively higher level Division I athletics program. While there, I was able to obtain lots of clinical skills and knowledge, while simultaneously completing a Master’s degree in kinesiology. From there, I took a position here at Simmons as an assistant athletic trainer in the sports medicine division of athletics. While practicing as an athletic trainer, I also started teaching some adjunct courses at my alma mater, and found that experience rewarding. Throughout my time in the Sports Medicine unit in athletics, I worked towards completing a doctoral degree in health professions education. After  completing in the summer of 2020, I transitioned from athletics to continue as a faculty member in the Exercise Science program (now Health and Exercise Science program).

It occurs to me that, with this kind of specialized understanding of the human body and such, half the battle has to be translating these principles, diagnosis and implications into more layman’s terminology for clients to be useful; are there any things you’ve come to understand about how best to have these types of potentially intimidating or complex conversations with clients?

This is an important topic I often discuss with students. When you're a student going through a healthcare program, effective communication is something students might not really think about too much. However, students working with patients or clients that do not have the same educational background or experiences, they too often are unfamiliar, or just do not understand the scientific and medical terminology being used, which can be confusing and frustrating, not to mention intimidating and anxiety provoking, albeit unintended. A student could have ten different patients or clients with ten different backgrounds, which can often include language barriers. Their ability to effectively deliver the needed information to patients in ten different ways, in a manner their patient/client, or accompanying companion to an appointment, will understand, is not an easy task and is a skill that is developed over time. It is an art form, and one that many of us aren't really great at at the very beginning of our careers. 

There is a quote I read once that always resonated with me on this topic, and I believe it may be Albert Einstein who is credited with saying “if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” I think this speaks directly to the simplicity of understanding a topic from many different perspectives and contextual factors. To put it another way (which I often use in my courses), is to address a student's understanding of a topic/concept by posing a hypothetical question: “How might (or could) you explain this to an 8 year old child in a way they would understand what you are trying to say…?”  This approach takes a bit of time to hone this skill, but the goal should be to be able to sit a patient or client down and use whatever analogies and examples that might make sense to them, based on their experiences in life, in a way for them to understand. If you can do this, that tells me you yourself have a very strong understanding of the topic at hand.

I noticed that you had given a presentation a few years back about integration of IPEC (Interprofessional Education Collaborative) core competencies and was wondering if you could speak about that a bit if it’s fresh in your mind?

That presentation was out of a project I worked on with a couple of colleagues around the topic of interprofessional education. Interprofessional education, or IPE, is a fundamental element of most health professions today, and it has expanded its reach beyond traditional programs such as medicine and nursing, to allied health care fields such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and relatively recently, my field of athletic training. Education in the health professions can be (and often is) more specialized, which has resulted for years in programs being more “siloed” in their education and training . But then all of a sudden, students get out into the real world after graduating and are working in a clinical or hospital setting, where the nurses, and the occupational therapists, speech pathologists, and physical therapists, and physicians  all have to mingle and collaborate effectively. While this does come naturally to some providers by nature of their profession, personal philosophy and approach to healthcare, not all share the same level of collaborative skills and interdisciplinary approach to patient care. 

So, the idea became, why would educators not be preparing students from the front end, if this collaborative approach is essential across the healthcare professions? And that's really it. Medical schools and nursing programs have been incorporating IPE into their curriculum and clinical education for a long time, although it's been slower for other health professions, particularly in the athletic training field until relatively recently. The conference I spoke at was oriented around identifying the IPEC core competencies within athletic training program curriculum, while reinforcing the need across all disciplines as well. To put it another way, if you are in the healthcare professions, you should be able to effectively engage in interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP), with the aim of contributing towards the benefit and well-being of the patient(s) at hand. So, the big goal is to infuse IPE into the curriculum to better prepare students in developing the required skills for effective IPCP.

That’s great to hear. As a social work student, but also graduate assistant in the MPH program, I get a particular view on the ways that public health and social work overlap and collaborate, but the programs themselves are less about that collaboration and more about the core competencies of the two professions, despite the significant overlaps.

There’s a good interprofessional education example I use in one of the first year classes in our Health and Exercise Science program. It’s a real example, from a close friend of mine who is an E.R. physician's assistant. A patient comes in injured from what was reported (and appears to be) a car accident. Immediately upon entry (and leading up to the EMT’s arrival with the patient) we have an orthopedic surgeon, nurses and a physician's assistant triaging the patient. The physical therapists are also involved in the anticipation of physical rehabilitation following a potential surgical procedure. Things get more complex in that there is another crash victim who has to go into emergency surgery, so we have an anesthesiologist involved now as well. Then we learn there is a  history of domestic abuse between the two individuals, which also involves shared custody of two minors, so we might expect a social worker to be involved now as well. This is all quite complex and layered, but this is a real life example and highlights how these types of situations can tend to play out and why interprofessional education is really important to have embedded within a student’s learning experiences prior to entering their respective fields.

That’s a really great example of interprofessional collaboration on the job and I think too it paints a nice picture of how physical and exercise science oriented expertise quickly comes into play when working with clients. What else would you want people to think about regarding exercise science and public health?

The phrase “exercise is medicine” seems to have become more prevalent in the media in recent years, and I don’t really disagree with the idea. Medical providers can, and do, prescribe exercise for treating or managing various health conditions. Certain chronic conditions are best treated by including exercise with other forms of interventions, like pharmaceuticals, cardiovascular conditions being a notable example. Metabolic conditions often lead to weight gain, and then cardiovascular and muscular strengthening activities become important in managing symptoms. One area where I think there’s a bit of a disconnect is the use of the term “exercise,” which can be intimidating to many people, and often misleading. For individuals who may have always played sports or lived an active lifestyle, then “exercise” might be something that wouldn’t be second guessed. However, much of the population may not have grown up with this kind of perspective or lifestyle. For many people, they may have been turned off by things like gym class or even social aspects about exercise, sports, etc. 

So then, I tend to think that the term “physical activity” is much more appropriate and useful, in that it can mean a broader range of things for people and does a better job at making the incorporation of purposeful activities for one's health seem doable for people, regardless of their socioeconomic status, physical capabilities or lifestyle demands. This kind of reframing, in my mind, makes “exercise” more achievable, palatable and easier to incorporate. You say “exercise” to someone who doesn’t have access to a gym and it starts to feel like a dead end, but if you say “physical activity” and suggest something like taking the stairs a couple times a week, walking a few extra laps around the store, etc., then I just think we start to get towards a better place faster.

That’s a really great reframing. I might say we live in a very marketing message saturated culture with a particular emphasis on sports and high performance athletes if you consume certain media, so if you say “exercise” to someone, their mind could easily go to things like playing full court basketball, even if that’s not the clinical suggestion is. 

The research around exercise goals (i.e. New Year's resolutions) shows that exercise focused resolutions really tend to only last around four weeks, because it’s a big and hard lifestyle change to make for most. The exercise habit and the physical activity habit are different things. More and more I’m interested in the better incorporation of physical activity from younger ages [as a way to improve public health]. One of our former Health and Exercise Science students, Haleigh St. Hilaire, who I’ll give a shout out to here, has been exploring this territory during her senior year internship and she continues to do a really great job. Part of her academic interests has been working with a state representative looking at recess time in the state of Massachusetts. 

Currently a lot of Massachusetts children are only given around fifteen minutes for recess. Haleigh has been looking at how and why the time allotment is so minimal with the aims of advocating for more recess time for these kids. More time, in my mind, would arguably lead to better physical activity attitudes and habits as an adult, where, like we said, there can be a lot of sitting, and therefore tremendous benefits to better incorporate physical activity habits at a young age. I just like this overall example as a public health consideration that incorporates a long term view on the public’s health while also incorporating health sciences concepts. While the focus is physical activity, there are a wide variety of areas where benefits are seen, from mental health to chronic illness prevention, improved cardiovascular function, prevention of muscle and bone density loss and more. And we're not talking about trying to move mountains, it's just trying to incorporate and encourage physical activity in smaller increments as more of a behavioral and lifestyle change as opposed to “needing to get more exercise.”

That’s a great illustration, across public health concerns and client life stages, to boot. As two folks who sit a lot, either writing papers or grading them, I did want to pick your brand about the prevalence of the mostly seated working day.

Absolutely. So I teach kinesiology, which is biomechanics: the study of human movement. But I approach the subject matter in class more so through the lens of being a healthcare provider. Those of us born without predisposed conditions or congenital issues, are born with abilities such as being able to squat correctly and effectively. Over time, adults tend to lose their proper bio-mechanical form, unfortunately, and sitting for long periods of our days, in addition to other factors such as long commutes play a role in that. There are postural implications from this as well; the shortening of ligaments, the tightening of muscles, misalignment of joints and others. This can often first present itself as chronic pain, which can then lead to challenges with mobility, and even a predisposition towards developing clotting conditions which can lead to strokes. That said, this trajectory is preventable, for example, through the way we can approach physical activity in the developmental years. However this kind of thinking and approach is not commonplace, and requires continued effort from providers and Public Health professionals with clients and with policy. Public health practitioners can have tremendous influence in this realm, like my example previously around researching the benefits of longer recess times for school age children. A growing voice around the critical nature of physical activity is going to help across this issue of the impact of sedentariness. From a Public Health perspective, policy making and informed populous is aided and best received from Public Policy makers. Through the lens (and voice) of Public Health professionals, systematic changes can continue to be made for the better through the use of their skill sets and status within the healthcare landscape.

Thanks to Michael for taking some time out of his work day to chat with us!