NBA announces Plantiga as an official partner through their 2024 Launchpad program.

Time-to-peak acceleration and time-to-peak velocity provide insight into the different capacities of different athletes. By analyzing these metrics together, coaches can tailor training programs to enhance an athlete's strengths and address areas for improvement, ultimately maximizing their overall sprinting performance.

Using vectors as a tool, we can identify the necessary movement and loading requirements to maximize sport-specific propulsive patterns and choose appropriate training interventions when there are shortcomings.

USA Bobsled/Skeleton announces Plantiga as the newest addition to their list of official suppliers.

A breakthrough in wearable technology for health practitioners and elite sports teams

So how can we actually apply “applied biomechanics”? To start, we must build an intuition around how movement is quantified. There are two basic building blocks: scalars and vectors.

The human body does not function as a symmetrical machine. So why do we innately strive for an unachievable standard of symmetry as an indicator of our movement health and performance?

In this post, we will discuss circumstances where performance asymmetry may not indicate a deficit and how it should drive performance and injury prevention decision-making.

While limb asymmetry assessments are pillars of movement health and return to sport functional milestones, determining readiness to return to activity is multifactorial. Here are some actionable guidelines for leveraging asymmetry testing in your practice.

After spending 3+ years working with the world’s top organizations (and their athletes) across the NBA, NFL, MLB, MLS, the US and Canadian militaries, tennis, endurance, golf, and other sports associations, we are now launching our Plantiga platform for Sports Performance and Injury.

Concurrent training programs consist of both endurance and resistance training to maximize all aspects of performance. For endurance athletes, research strongly supports the benefits of adding strength and power training to programs.

In the last blog post, we discussed how much ado has been made about injury prediction. To make injury prediction a feasible endeavor, though, we need to study the athlete in their environment like it is a complex-adaptive system (because it is).

We all want to focus on the positive, but sometimes, putting too much faith in our ideas and beliefs leads us to miss the deficits that an athlete is presenting right in front of us. This can lead to rolling the dice on RTP decision making.

When was the last time you ventured out on a trip using a good old fashioned roadmap and a pencil to mark out your route? I can remember my parents working at the dining room table before a long road trip to trace out the route they would take. A bunch of working rules or heuristics guided their decision making. For example, if you were traveling with little kids, you would probably need to plan for a break every few hours and, ideally, those locations would have toilets and space for a good run.

This is the final blog post in a four-part series on the Plantiga system and how it can help the individual patient, the athlete, the weekend warrior, the clinician, and the performance practitioner generate their own objective measures to optimize their health and manage recovery after injury.

Reactive strength is a key strength and power ability driving athletic performance. Strength and power abilities include maximal muscle strength (how much force an athlete can generate irrespective of time) and rate of force development (RFD-how fast an athlete generates force). However, reactive strength is unique in that it involves the ability to couple movements that lengthen musculotendinous tissue (eccentric movement) followed those in which musculotendinous tissue shortens (concentric movement). These movements are called stretch-shorten-cycles (SSCs) and they occur readily in all kinds of human activities like running, jumping and change of direction movements. Movements that involve SSCs are often referred to as plyometrics and reactive strength and plyometric ability are sometimes used interchangeably.

A movement baseline is a series of activity-specific assessments that, when analyzed together, provide a snapshot of your movement patterns. It acts as an objective marker that allows you to set personalized goals and targets, measure meaningful change, and track and evaluate progress. Baselines are the foundation for performance, monitoring, and recovery plans.

As a physiotherapist working out of the Glen Sather Sports Medicine Clinic in Edmonton, AB I work with a large population of people (we’ll call them athletes here as most play sports anywhere from a national to recreational level) with knee injuries and have been lucky enough to spend a majority of my time on knee assessments and knee rehab.

In 2017, a reported 60 million Americans actively participated in regular, run-focused activities. With the exception of a few social and migratory animals, this seems to be a uniquely human pastime. Why is that? The answer to this question may reside in our evolutionary history. 

We’ve all heard that we should aim to walk at least 10,000 steps each day. While the number 10,000 originated from a 1965 Japanese marketing campaign, it is not far from the 7,500 steps per day that provide the majority of the reduction in mortality. The simple act of walking may seem trivial, but it is one of the most valuable steps we can take for our health (pun intended).