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). 

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.

Hello all! The photo above was taken November 9, 2019 by my wife on the way to Victoria General Hospital after I suffered a syndesmotic ankle fracture (not only did I break my ankle, I also tore a ligament). I slipped on a wet dock while taking a walk.

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.

Movement maps show the movement of both feet along each of the six axes measured by our sensors, over the course of a step. They are unique to each person and represent a qualitative measure of movement dynamics.