#039 Monday Minutes: Force Plate Utilization Deep Dive

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, we're returning to our Monday Minute theme and discussing force plate utilization for readiness testing and auditing the training process. As a reminder, our Monday Minutes shows are a quick 10-15 minute episode where I discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week. I believe with conviction, you'll take away something interesting from this show and I hope it delivers you a little bit of value in your day.

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Key Takeaways

• Force plates can be used for readiness testing to inform daily training decisions.
• They also serve as a tool for auditing the training process itself over time.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] That we're doing. So, I look at force plate utilization is sort of a dual factor, right? So, we can use these dual force plates as a way of potentially determining an athlete's readiness, both from a neuromuscular fatigue standpoint, or the readiness to train or compete. And the actual, the second way that we utilize it is the monitoring the physical adaptation of a training program. So, it acts almost like an audit for us. Are we strength coaches actually doing the things that we think we're doing? Are we driving the changes, the responses

[00:00:41] From a physiological standpoint, for the changes that we actually want to make? So this brings us to a really good point in the conversation where just that we can have a discussion about some of the parameters that we look at when we're trying to determine state of readiness. And everybody will have their, you know, current flavor of the month of what they might want. You know, things come in and out of vogue and research as well. So, whether or not you track these veritable or parameters, that's completely up to you,

[00:01:12] Right? And I'd love to have a conversation about what other practitioners internationally is looking at, because I think that might even refine our own process. So, from a state of readiness, there's a couple of things that I particularly look at. One of which is not only max power, which is a very easy one, probably the most centric and focused parameter that comes out of the force plates, but I also look at rate of power development. And then what we really do as well is obviously one of the great portions and functionalities

[00:01:44] Of the force plate is that we can create some level of relativity based on what the athletes waste. So, this allows us to, you know, not only be able to look at men and female, but also among the same cohort and, let's say, men's or women's basketball, that we can now compare athletes of different sizes and structures so that we can start to look at the force production or the max power, peak power, that a forward that bangs down low versus a wing versus point guard or a shooting guard might have. And, you know, if you're for around the sports,

[00:02:18] You recognize that those body sizes and those structures can wildly be different. So, we like to look at that and we like to scale it relative to an athlete's body weight. And then we look, in addition to rate of power development, I also like to look at concentric RPD, and which is just, you know, essentially another way of looking at RPD. But, and then I also looked like concentric RPD zero to 50 milliseconds and then concentric RPD 50 to 100 milliseconds. And this gives us a nice little indicator of looking at how the kinematics

[00:02:58] Of a counter movement jump actually changes under the state of fatigue. This allows us to, not only recognize, is there a force decrease because of some neurological overtraining or other factor? Or is there, wow, they are producing the force that they do? Are they producing it in a slower response? And are they developing that power a little bit slower? And where in that force trace, whether it's zero to 50 or 50 to 100, is it changing? So, we can really sort of thin slice that. And while we don't have a megawave here, we can start to look at an athlete's state of

[00:03:39] Readiness, DC potential, HRV, and start to overlay not only HRV changes, but obviously an objective output like a counter movement jump on a force plane. We can start to tease out trends with our athletes. So, if we're deploying subjective wellness questionnaires in the morning, we're recognizing an athlete's stressed or they're pinging that they're having an increase out of their own deviation norm that might be indicative of increased soreness or pain or mood disturbance, perhaps they come in and in the state of, if you are utilizing some type of HRV training or HRV monitoring technology

[00:04:27] Like a megawave, maybe we go through that analysis and we check that state of readiness and those DC potentials. And then, perhaps, if we start to see a disturbance there, we do a counter movement jump and we actually look at the objective outputs and say, wow, not only your subjective pointing us in one direction, your two other sort of objectives, both HRV and your physical force profile is also indicative of some type of disturbance to your state of readiness. And at that point in time, it's up to the practitioner to say, what do we want to do? What interventions do we want to make

[00:05:05] In this scenario? So, there's a number of different ways of conducting agile periodization, a number of great research articles that have discussed this in much greater depth in a Monday minutes episode, but you know, you can look at decreasing the intensive exercises in a training session. So, I think Mike Boyle spoke at one point in time about periodizing a program in both a high low methodology, taking the high intensive type of exercises. So, typically, you're pulling your lower body dominant exercises and your explosive exercises, putting those on one day and then having

[00:05:41] A non-intensive or rather a more extensive training session. So, which might be your push horizontal push or vertical push or core stability type pre-hab exercises. So, just think of that even if you don't periodize in that sort of structure, identifying those intensive exercises lower body dominant, your pulling patterns and potentially your explosive lifts, trying to say, where in this lift can I decrease the intensive exercises and supplement with more extensive or supplement with more recovery, rejuvenation type of modalities that may allow them to better recover and find another opportunity

[00:06:21] Where they are more recovered, more receptive to actually the training response that you're trying to deliver. So, that's just a small way that we're looking and we're tracking and trending some of these physical outputs. They go into our athlete management system, we get flagged notifications if it's, you know, one or two Z-scores different than what their typical norms are, we compute it and we look at some T-scores and we end up just tracking the trends of this and sort of making strategic decisions based on the physical outputs that we receive because the idea is to

[00:06:54] Take that information and turn it into actions and to go from insight into action. The second way that we can use force plate technologies is actually auditing the training process, the training program. So, if we are working or in trying to, let's just say it's a six-week strength phase for a particular athlete, there's some things that we would expect that that athlete should be able to output on our force plates. So, we also look very similar to potentially spartiscience, right? We look at our eccentric force or load, right? We can also look at our peak

[00:07:31] Force or concentric forces and so whether it is max power or peak power and then another one is for us is vertical impulse or concentric impulse. So, whether it's load explode drive, like we should be anticipating that an athlete can, as they get stronger and more forceful, improve on that peak power. We also like to look at force at zero velocity as a component of training adaptation, so that's another parameter that we heavily weigh and we, you know, our attentioner is on. If we're working on, you know, trying to, let's just say if we're going through block periodization,

[00:08:09] If that's your strategy of why and how you like to periodize your program, if you're going through a power or transformational phase, if you are trying to add explosive power, then perhaps, you know, looking at takeoff velocity or looking at that, that amortization phase or looking at the differences between your breaking impulse and your propulsive impulse and that could be easily representative as in a, you know, a breaking to propulsive impulse ratio and taking a look at that and tracking that trend or that amortization sort of time duration from the moment an athlete

[00:08:51] Is breaking in that eccentric load into the propulsive impulse of that concentric force production. So like anything else, right? If you're familiar with force plate technologies, there's, you know, hundreds of different ways along that force trace that you can look at different portions of it. And each of them are important, but I think the biggest thing that we try to recommend is that chasing all those rabbits often leads you into a hundred different directions. And sometimes you know, to cut, cut through the confusion and try to create clarity, some of the things that we

[00:09:28] Might want to do is try to limit options. And that's why it's sometimes, you know, beneficial to just look at load or explode or drive or peak power rate of power development relative to their body weight or looking at different ratios like the breaking to propulsive impulse and just narrowing down those parameters into your key five to ten KPIs and just keeping a track on that because it's a lot easier looking at five to ten parameters and tracking that consistently than trying to track 115 different slices and dices along that force trace.

[00:10:08] So that's my thoughts on this Monday. And hopefully, as always, you've taken something away from these Monday minutes. And like I said earlier, in the first Monday minutes episode that we want to kind of publish this, this should just be a short random episode every Monday, just sharing some thoughts anywhere from five, 10, 15 minutes doesn't need to be an incredibly long show, but something that you can listen to on your drive home from work, on your commute, on your walk from one facility to another and try to take something away that you can apply to

[00:10:41] Your practice. And it might be just industry news. It might just be job openings. It might be, you know, research papers that were things that conversations that we're recognizing that's going on on Twitter. It doesn't necessarily always need to be impactful and profound. And that's certainly not what I'm trying to convey in these Monday minutes. But I am trying to deliver you guys something that can directly benefit or provide some entertainment or some direct application to your practice, whether you're a strength coach, a physical therapist, a rehabilitation specialist,

[00:11:15] Or whatever. Hopefully, there's something within these Monday minutes that you can take away and apply to your own domain. Hey, everybody. Thanks for tuning in to this Monday minutes show. I hope you took something away from it. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right? The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at Adam Ringler.com forward slash newsletter. And like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great articles, research papers, sort of daily notes, things I'm finding

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[00:13:45] Buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Ringler. I'll include it in the show notes. And as always, thank you for supporting the Decoding Excellence Show. Sports Science, Strength and Conditioning, High Performance Coaching. Welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. Hey everybody, this is your host Adam Ringler and welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show Monday Minutes. It is a brief five to ten minute episode where we are catching up on everything that is happening in our industry. Things where reading, things where checking out,

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[00:15:43] Hey everybody, welcome to the minutes. Like I said in the intro, I'm your host, Adam Ringler. And let's get into it. Let's discuss what are some of the current events in strength conditioning right now in our industry. One of the responses from last week's Monday Minutes that I received in Instagram and Twitter and elsewhere was the question about how we are utilizing force plate technology and force analysis into the actual individual prescription of our athletes. And that's something that I'm obviously very passionate about. I wouldn't have spoke about it

[00:16:15] On Monday Minutes last week. But I thought maybe we would go and do a deep dive into force analysis and the things that we find important what we're looking at. And maybe how we're actually using that to drive individual change for our student athletes. So the if if you haven't checked out the last week's episode number one start there. I think that would be the first point that you actually would want to listen to some of the changes from a programming standpoint of what we're doing. The individualization for corrective strategies based on a key number of parameters off

[00:16:51] Of the force plates, the dual force plates, AMTI plates that we have in conjunction of using those technologies. We are also using some vaude performance tech, both the groin bar and the Nordboard. And we're prescribing some individual corrective exercises based on the asymmetries and strength deficits that we see on that. But this episode this Monday Minutes is going to be the discussion surrounding force plates. I think we had a very high level 30,000 foot view discussion about hey, if there's a couple areas in those numbers, how are we utilizing

[00:17:32] That to drive actionable change? So over the last week or so, I've had conversations with the number of different strength coaches across the country and actually internationally to discuss some of the things that