Former DFB physio now rehab partner of B42

Oliver Schmidtlein has seen a lot in his professional career - as a physiotherapist he has worked in the USA, for the Munich Lions, for FC Bayern Munich and finally for the German national football team. His career reads like the modern dream of every physiotherapist. However, Schmidtlein's path is also characterized by a constant will to change as well as the burden of being a misunderstood trailblazer. 

He and his team at OSPHYSIO are among the best things that can happen to an athlete in the event of an injury or to increase individual performance potential. Accordingly, it fills us with pride and honor to be able to announce:

Rehab expert Oliver Schmidtlein will be on hand to provide B42 with advice and support in the future.

Oliver Schmidtlein has now settled down and runs a center for therapy and training in Munich since 2008. And his view of the sport and its protagonists has also changed over the years: "Today's football players are motivated, hungry and have understood that basic athletic training gives them great advantages on the pitch - unfortunately, that wasn't always the case. However, that makes it even more exiting for me to work with all those young professionals.”

During his active life as a therapist in professional football, the Bamberg native had to fight against a lot of resistance. When he returned to Germany from Los Angeles (USA) in 2001 with rubber bands in his suitcase and a number of ideas in his head, he had to do pioneering work in sports science in this country.

He had to explain to Elber, Kahn and colleagues why active regeneration makes sense the day after a game or how an ice bucket can improve regeneration. Just imagine Kahn's face at the sight of an ice bucket. "Of course the players cursed, even though we tried to introduce changes with tiny steps.

It was a bit of tilting at windmills; after all, the players were used to being wrapped in absorbent cotton after the game."

In the meantime, Schmidtlein says, the status of therapists and athletic trainers is much better - the reputation has risen. The openness to additional training, which he still had to fight for on a daily basis back then, has now arrived in competitive sports, he says. This development becomes even clearer when you get a glimpse behind the scenes, for example with the Amazon Prime documentary about FC Bayern Munich.

Here you see players using the cold room as a matter of course or performing floor exercises completely independently. A fact that was far from the case 15 to 20 years ago - but perhaps the foundation was laid back then.  At a time when strength training was predominantly associated with large training machines, Oliver Schmidtlein did something that no one was doing.

He established functional training and functional rehab in Germany over twenty years ago, and against all odds, dared to implement these training methods among the absolute sports elite.

He was often misunderstood and sometimes even ridiculed. But in the meantime functional training has become the standard and an elementary part of every basic athletic training.

In his Munich-based medical office OSPHYSIO, Oliver Schmidtlein and his team guide professionals and non-professionals back into professional life or onto the football pitch.

Above all, his time in America stands him in good stead:

"Through the exchange with Jürgen Klinsmann, I learned in the USA a training philosophy that was new to me at the time from Jim Liston (editor's note: at the time athletic trainer at L.A.Galaxy, now Toronto F.C.).

With him, I saw for the first time how sports scientists and coaches worked closely together with physical therapists in terms of space and expertise. That was exactly what I was always looking for. Jim was already telling me important names back then, like Mark Verstegen's." 

After the time in Los Angeles, it was back to Munich - to TSV 1860 Munich, at that time still a first division team. In the luggage: new input, new ideas and a lot of pioneering work ahead.

From the Munich Lions, Oliver Schmidtlein then went on to the football Olympus:

To the red city rivals as their first rehab coach and in 2004 (until 2008) to the German national team.

After his time in high-performance sports, Oliver Schmidtlein set up his own medical office in the east of Munich - OSPHYSIO. Here he combines precisely those disciplines that he found inseparable many years before: therapy and training.

In order to be able to ensure that his skills, knowledge and approach are 100 percent in his practice, Schmidtlein believes that constant "working on myself" is of great importance: "Even when I was a young therapist, I quickly realized that I had to constantly develop myself."

Successfully, because Schmidtlein's team is one of the best in Germany.

However, the ex-DFB physio looked even further outside the box. Together with a colleague, he established a set of rules for therapists and rehab coaches that can be used to better manage rehabilitation levels. Many trainers and therapists who work with teams, athletes or convalescents have experienced the signature of OSPHYSIO and now act according to its guidelines.