Currently the owner of and a treating physician at the Columbus Chiropractic & Rehabilitation Center in Columbus, Ohio, Dr. Richard Ulm came to the medical profession after a successful carreer as an athlete and a strength and conditioning coach. In his practice, he blends his athletic and coaching background with his medical knowledge to offer patient-specific care utilizing the most progressive and advanced therapy tools.
Dr. Ulm started his path towards Athlete-Enhancement at Ashland University, a small university in Ohio, where he had the honor of training under a 4x Olympian Jud Logan. Known for having some of the strongest athletes in track and field, Jud exposed Dr. Ulm to elite strength training. His passion for strength training and optimizing performance began at Ashland University.
After college, Dr. Ulm continued to train with the hopes of representing the United States of America in the Olympics as a hammer thrower. While training for the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Olympic games, Dr. Ulm achieved a Masters of Science and started coaching track and field. During this time, he also began his strength & conditioning career.
It was as a strength coach that he first became passionate about biomechanics, anatomy, and functional assessment as means of enhancing his ability to train athletes.
Once his Master's of Science was complete, Dr. Ulm went back to Ashland, Ohio, to dedicate full time to train for the 2004 Olympic games. While his ultimate mission did not come to fruition, he had the honor and pleasure of training with four future Olympians and competing at the 2004 Olympic Track & Field Trials in Sacramento, CA. Training with such an elite group has given Dr. Ulm insight into the mind of elite athletes and coaches, enabling him to better treat, train and educate this specialized population.
Following his passion to be an elite strength & conditioning coach, he took a job at New Mexico State University as both a strength and a track and field coach. It was there his career path could take a drastic turn. During his time in New Mexico, Dr. Ulm started asking deeper questions which ultimately lead him into the medical profession. He wondered why some athletes chronically pulled their hamstrings or why an athlete would shift to one side in the bottom of a squat; why some athletes responded better to higher repetition loading and others to low rep/high intensity loading; or why some athletes could easily squat to bellow parallel while others could not. Unable to find the answers to many of these questions in the strength training community, he decided to go to school to become a Chiropractic Physician where he would be able to study the science (anatomy, neurology, physiology, kinesiology) behind the practices and principles that are used in the weight room every day. Dr. Ulm attended National University of Health Sciences. During his time in school, he took more than 500 hours of continuing education courses and spent over 1,200 hours in the gross anatomy lab and found answers to the questions that lead him into the medical profession.
As a Chiropractic Physician he passionately seeks out the most advanced therapies and treatment approaches to maximize his ability to treat and train athletes. Perhaps the biggest influence on his approach is Pavel Kolar of Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS) and the Prague School of Rehabilitation. In 2013 Dr. Ulm trained in the Czech Republic and become a certified therapist of DNS; and in 2015, he was selected to be an international instructor of DNS for the Prague School of Rehabilitation. During his tenure as an instructor for DNS, he worked to combine the powerful concepts of DNS to strength training and authored the DNS Weight Lifting course and DNS Strength Training. Other influences are the Motion Palpation Institute, Robert Lardner, and Michael Shacklock of Clinical Neurodynamics. He is also one of only 170 Chiropractic Physicians in the world certified in the McKenzie Method (MDT-Cert). In his clinic, Dr. Ulm blends these influences, to treat and to train athletes across the full functional spectrum from surgery prevention to teaching an athlete how to properly squat or Olympic lift.
Dr. Ulm is also the head team physician for Project Lift, a successful Olympic Weightlifting Team in the Columbus area. In this capacity, he works closely with head coaches Drew Dillon and Chelsea Kyle (both nationally competitive weightlifters) on training, technique and programming. Through project lift and other weightlifting groups he has been able to work with many nationally competitive weightlifters including Holley Mangold who competed at the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
In addition to Olympic weightlifters, Dr. Ulm also works with powerlifters, CrossFitters and other professional athletes where is able to utilize his background as both a strength coach and a physician to it's full effect.
Athlete Enhancement is a platform from which Dr. Ulm is able to share his knowledge of and experience in the medical/rehabilitation profession to help trainers and strength coaches better understand biomechanics, anatomy, neurology and training methodology.
Dr. Ulm presents around the country on such topics of proper squatting technique, Olympic weightlifting, CrossFit and functional rehabilitation. He also teaches courses at clinics, gyms and universities.