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.

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.

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). 

Physical movement drives our health in many ways, yet it’s something we often take for granted. Understanding this relationship is the first step to improving and maintaining our ability to move, and experiencing its many benefits.

Do you know how you move when you are in the heat of the moment? That's a tough question to answer without objective measurement tools, but it's a very important one, as it can have implications on both health and performance.

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.

If you live in the sport performance world, much ado has been made over the notion of injury prediction. If only we had a genie in a bottle that could predict an injury, right? These issues were brought to the forefront recently in a journal article published in Sports Medicine (Hughes, Riley, Callaghan, & Sergeant, 2020). The researchers went back retrospectively to obtain “periodic health examination” data that included measures of lower body joint strength and range of motion from soccer players to see if they could predict muscle injuries.

Earlier this year Sean Ross-Ross, Plantiga’s CTO, posted about his recovery from a right ankle fracture and syndesmotic injury he suffered in November 2019 after slipping on a wet dock. In this post, I review Sean’s Plantiga data and discuss his rehabilitation progress, 7 months later.

At the end of the day, a practitioner is trying to figure out how a person is doing (progressing, regressing or sometimes just maintaining) and if there are trainable deficits that can be addressed with exercise and treatment.

For the last few weeks I’ve been assessing individuals exclusively via telephone or video due to COVID-19 precautions. There are some clear benefits to a Telehealth practice: patients don’t need to travel or pay for parking and I can easily show web-based resources with a screen share. Studies have shown that for chronic musculoskeletal complaints and concussion there is a high level of agreement between in-person and Telehealth assessments and patient satisfaction is high (1–3).

Companies like Plantiga have been provided an opportunity in these times of uncertainty. Last week therapists and coaches might have thought assessing clients outside the clinic was a “good idea.” This week they have been forced to find a way to monitor outcomes and make decisions remotely, evaluating their patients who are not physically in their brick and mortar clinic. Instead care has to be provided virtually.

Have you ever heard of the Hawthorne Effect? You should Google this term. It refers to the effects of taking a measurement on what we actually want to measure. Imagine you are a sociologist interested in the sexual behaviours of middle-aged men. How effective would it be to park your lab equipment in the bedroom of your study participants to understand what really happens? That’s the Hawthorne effect. The Hawthorne effect also impacts neuromuscular testing.

I struggled early in my career to marry science with coaching. I lived in a dichotomy. I was a graduate student completing a Master of Science in muscle physiology, doing all kinds of neuromuscular testing. I would then leave the lab, head down to the weight room to coach athletes. I found it hard to bring science into the weight room in a meaningful way. The testing methods I was using were either (a) noisy (b) impractical or (c) not sensitive to performance or reducing the impact of injuries.