#048 - Readiness Testing, Strength Diagnostics, and Markerless Motion Capture Biomechanical Screening

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing some of the readiness assessment technologies, diagnostic strength testing equipment, and markerless motion capture biomechanical screening technologies we utilize. In addition, I discuss how we use the information, on a daily and weekly basis, to drive informed and actionable decisions in sports performance program.

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Key Takeaways

• Readiness assessment technologies, diagnostic strength testing equipment, and markerless motion capture biomechanical screening are all part of the toolkit.
• The real value is in how the information gets used on a daily and weekly basis to drive informed, actionable decisions in the performance program.

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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] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. I created the Matrix. I've been waiting for you. Hey everybody, it is Adam. I want to remind you of one thing. Rather than spamming this show with herbal tea advertisements or performance technology companies coming on trying to sell their latest gizmos, I have opted not to have an advertisement over the last probably 20 shows or so. And the reason I do this is

[00:00:58] Because rather than trying to sell you something, all I would like for you to do, if you support the show, if you're a fan of the Decoding Excellence Show, maybe some of the interviews that we've had in the past, some of the monologues that we're having some of the Monday Minute episodes, please head over to AdamRinger.com forward slash newsletter. About once a month, I'll send you an email and it will be chock full of really interesting things, research articles, fascinating

[00:01:22] Things I found online, books I'm reading, podcasts that I've enjoyed, articles that I'm writing, things and people that I'm interviewing and exploring, I think you're gonna get a lot out of it. I promise I won't spam you and it will be something that would deliver a lot of value to your day. Check it out at AdamRinger.com forward slash newsletter. Hey everybody, welcome to the Adam Ringer show, the Decoding Excellence Show. And today we're gonna discuss some

[00:01:49] Of the technologies that we utilize to both assess the state of readiness of our student athletes that we work with, but also the technologies that we use to diagnose and to provide programming interventions based on limb asymmetries from force plate technologies to vaude performance tools like the force frame and the Nordboard. And then lastly, the markerless motion capture biomechanical screening tool that we utilize to assess joint range of motion stiffness in

[00:02:24] Our athletes coming off of game days. This is a conversation that regardless if you have these tools, these technologies, that you can sort of take something away. If nothing but the morpho cycle or the micro cycle and how we sort of periodize some of these technologies and why and how we utilize them in our sports performance strength conditioning programs. You do not want to miss this show. Hey everybody, welcome to the AdamRinger show. And today we got a

[00:02:52] Good one. Today I wanted to talk about some of the diagnostic testing technologies that we utilize here at University of Colorado Boulder. And talk about how we use it, why we use it, what we do, when we do it, how frequently do we use some of these testing modalities. And ultimately how we try to make decisions based on what we find. So I thought rather than just sort of abstractly discussing it, we'd get into the weeds on this Monday minutes episode. We talked

[00:03:19] A little bit about force plate technologies, what we're doing with the vaude performance force frame. And how we are utilizing both the vaude performance Nordboard and the Kipman Labs capture system. So let's get to it first and foremost, force plates, AMTI dual force plates, acupower software, although, again, and no disrespect to acupower or anything, right, force decks have come a very long way. And it's very intriguing to me. But nonetheless, let's talk

[00:03:49] About what we're utilizing. So there's two different ways that I've discussed this, I think on the decoding excellence show, on the AdamRinger show in the past. And that is there's two different ways that we use force plate technologies. We use it first and foremost as a diagnostic technology, right? We use it to try to diagnose whether an athlete are in their eccentric or in the amoridization aspect of their jump on the concentric portion or on their sort of

[00:04:19] Force production throughout the entire concentric movement. If they have a limb asymmetry, that's greater than 10 to 15%. And I do that across those three movements, whether we want to call that load exploded drive or we wanted to call it eccentric force or peak peak force, or we wanted to call it vertical impulse or concentric impulse. It's ultimately up to you. But nonetheless, on the eccentric, the concentric and a concentric sort of force over speed to

[00:04:54] Get a time duration force over time, we are looking at limb discreferences left and right. And what we try to find is a similar theme with a trend across these different movement patterns. And we do this for both the counter movement jump and a squat jump variation. We use the counter movement jump with both harm swing. We have done a non-arm swing CMJ as well. And we do this so that we can use our programming what we do within the strength conditioning facility

[00:05:25] That we have to try to affect different parameters of that jump, different components. So if we're seeing a limb discreferency favoring maybe the left leg, the right leg potentially is not loading adequately. Then we're going to program or offload some of that right limb eccentric work for that particular athlete. We're recognizing that another athlete is having a hard time in the concentric portion. And they are shifting away from the right

[00:05:54] Right leg for whatever matter it might be. And in a very simplistic model we may try to program some right leg force production. We might even look biomechanically at their hips, their ankles, their knees. What is going on biomechanically? And I'll get to that later. If an athlete cannot for whatever reason produce that force in a fast manner. And we're recognizing that there's a limb discreferency in their drive aspect of their movement. Then again you

[00:06:22] Would find our programming maybe address some of the hip tightness or that anterior chain tightness that we might see that is preventing them from reaching sort of in range hip extension for whatever manner. So we really try to use the dual force plates as a way to not only identify whether an athlete has a discreferency left and right. But then to use our strength conditioning program to be a solution for that asymmetry or that indifference from left and

[00:06:51] Right. Secondly the way we use our dual force plates is a neuromuscular readiness evaluation. So if an athlete does come in and they're using let's just say an arm swing CMJ. And we have consistently done that one to two times every single week for the duration you know the 52 weeks that they are are here. Then we get to see a very good average and over time we can see what that mean is if it's rising, if it's dropping. But we have a good threshold of fundamentally

[00:07:22] Understanding when they are within one to 1.5 standard deviations from their average. So if an athlete comes on those dual force plates and for whatever reason on this let's say particular Wednesday and they're trying to jump and they're trying to jump and they're trying to jump and trying to get within that acceptable threshold that we've established. And for no matter no no way that they can actually achieve that. Then we need to have a separate

[00:07:54] Conversation. We need to start assessing what are they doing from their sleep from their fueling strategies from their stressors. And we need to try to make sure that we're not bearing them further into a CNS sort of regressed state. We want to really try to meet the athlete where they're at. And if for whatever reason their CNS compromised or they're fatigued, then perhaps doing more high intensive work support strategy. Perhaps they might just need some

[00:08:25] Cardiac output, some late aerobic work or some extensive exercise to really allow for that central nervous system not to be overtaxed and buried further. So that is just one way that we use sort of the force play right not only from a neuromuscular readiness standpoint, not just from a programming standpoint, but there's also a very powerful teaching modality for us in that because of the high speed video cameras that we have positioned both in front of the force

[00:08:55] Play and to the side. We can really start to look at how an athlete's loading if they're if they're appropriately hinging at the hips. If they are sitting back too much on their heels or if they're up too much on their toes. If they're having a little bit of a valgus collapse, if they're not, and it really is a powerful teaching technique and tool for us to really dial down how an athlete is jumping and loading and exploding off those force plates. Second piece

[00:09:24] Technology I really wanted to talk about was the force frame. And we've been using that to assess not only the adductor strength of our student athletes but also the abduction strength, right, the hip strength. And in a world where we as performance coaches get evaluated on whether athletes get stronger on their squads or their deadlifts or whatever KPIs you might want to measure. What I really love about these these tools is that for the most part they are very

[00:09:57] Agnostic to technique, right. Once you position an athlete in the appropriate standardized setup, whether it's a 60 degree adduction test, if it's a 90 degree, if it's some other variation that you might be doing short lever long lever, it doesn't matter. It's very easy to operate the test and to perform it. So there's no skill discrepancy between a senior and a freshman coming into the program. And this allows us to have max effort outputs from the moment an athlete arrives

[00:10:28] To the moment an athlete leaves. And it gives us very clean numbers, which is what I love. So if we are trying to assess lower body strength in an athlete's, rather than using a back squat or a front squat, type a skill exercise that is very dependent on your technique. Over time, that also presents a very large risk if you know, if you're going for max effort. So 1RM, something like that, we can position an athlete in these technologies and assess their adductor strength, their

[00:10:57] Hip strength, and then fortunately, with the Nordboard, their hamstring strength in a number of different fashions, whether it is through a Nordic or through an isoleic curl. And this gives us a very powerful way of objectively assessing whether athletes are getting better or they get stronger. And what we've seen is that adductor strengths continue to go up, hip strength throughout the beginning of seasons typically drop a little bit and then we then a little bit of a rebound.

[00:11:25] And because we've programmed so much Nordic hamstring curls throughout our training programs that we recognize that our athletes are actually achieving really, really high marks. Most of our athletes are touching around 400s with our women's population and then a number of them, probably 25% of them are above 500, which is awesome, on the road to 600 on their Nordic hamstring curls. And then a really cool new piece of technology that we've been using is this

[00:11:57] Markerless Motion Capture System. And that is through Kippin Labs. And we have, we've demoed a couple different technologies, which has been great, but this one allows for our athletes to perform a series of different movement patterns, overhead squat, a single leg squat, a CMJ, a single leg jump squat, squat jump, and a lunge pattern. We do a pistol squat variation. I mean, there's a number of them, internal and external shoulder rotation, hip, internal and

[00:12:31] External rotation. So again, it's really fascinating for us to be able to go through this and diagnostically assess very sort of cleanly joint ranges of motion through the ankle, through the knee, vulgar, various hip rotation, hip flexion, hip extension, knee flexion, and an overhead squat. And we get ultimately at the end of the day because we program this typically, our game day plus one or game day minus three days out, which is typically for us, our first

[00:13:02] Lift back is we program this to assess stiffness as a ramification from playing, you know, a two day or two game weekends, you know, women's basketball, it's typically a Friday night game and a Sunday afternoon game. So what we'll see is that we'll play Friday night. We'll have a nice light sort of walk through primer on Saturday. We'll play again on Sunday Monday, typically our mandatory day off, and then we'll come in on Tuesday. We'll go

[00:13:36] Through that motion capture, bio mechanical screen, and we can assess whether or not they're back to baselines or the thresholds. And if not, we can really program some agile flexibility and soft tissue work to make sure that our athletes are actually getting the right ranges of motion that their joints as Charlie Winegrop would say are in a position to both absorb and adapt to stress, which is something that I think is very, very important because very similar to

[00:14:05] Great cook, right, we can add fitness on top of dysfunction. We want to make sure that our athletes are in a position and their joints are in a position where they can actually absorb and adapt to the stressors that we're programming i.e. The strengthening program that we're having our athletes do. So that's a number of technologies that we've utilized, you know, lately in our, in our sort of weekly micro cycle and that more full cycle that we utilize athletes

[00:14:31] Typically come in. If we were to walk through it, motion capture is our first screen. That's three days out. Second day typically are Nordboards just because the delayed onset muscle soreness. So we'll alternate between doing a Nordic and doing a hip abduction to abduction exercise, abduction to abduction. It's very hard on a podcast. Do say that 80 to a B deduction. And then typically aren't day one day out. So game day minus one. What we'll end up doing is our force testing.

[00:15:08] And that's just a good test for us as we go through that dual force plate. And we, we go through that process is seeing that by the day out of the game, our athletes actually in a position where they can really have high outputs and be able to be springy, be light, be pliable to be able to jump and to move their body explosively. And if not, it's our last little tune up before the next game, which is, you know, 24 hours later from the counter movement jump to be able to

[00:15:41] Make sure we put the athletes and give them what they need so that they can perform at their highest potential. Hopefully you've taken something away from it. You don't necessarily need the advanced performance technologies to be able to do these things. You could use a just jump mat. You could use a number of different wellness or well-being questionnaires, session RPE data, to really try to get an idea of how your athletes are adapting to the stressors that you're

[00:16:04] Programming or the competition loads that they subsequently will have to absorb. So nonetheless, hopefully this Monday minutes was something insightful. Maybe you got something away from it, whether it's the discussions around force plate technologies, the Nordboard or the force frame or the motion capture, biomechanical screening tool. But if there is anything that you got from this and you feel like you want to have a larger conversation, please

[00:16:29] Tweet at me at Adam Ringler or on Instagram at Adam Ringler as well. And let's carry this conversation into a social platform. I'd love to continue to discuss some of these technologies in a larger scale. Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to this 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

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