Dr. Julie K. Desjardins PhD

<p>Every year leading up to the end of February college football players prepare for the NFL combine. The goal is to improve the athlete’s performance in the standard NFL combine tests which include vert height, 40-yard sprint time, 5-10-5 shuttle time and others.</p> <p>Athos partnered with Fast Twitch to help 6 college athletes prepare for the combine using the combination of Fast Twitch’s elite performance training approach and Athos’ performance data. Each athlete used Athos’ compression shorts throughout their program. With Athos the coaches at Fast Twitch were able to measure the activation and workload of the quads, hamstrings and glutes and personalize the programming for each athlete based on how each athlete was leveraging these major muscle groups.</p> <p>Each athlete performed a benchmark at the start of the program to evaluate their performance in each combine test. The athletes were re-tested during the program to monitor progress and tested at the completion of the program. With data on how each athlete used each major muscle group over the course of the program we were able to better understand what correlated with greatest improvement in different combine tests.</p> <p>Athos measures the workload placed on each muscle group by accumulating the intensity of the muscle activation over time.</p> <p>Balance of the athlete can be evaluated by comparing the workload of symmetric muscles on the left and right side. For example, overall lower body left and right balance can be compared by comparing the overall left side workload to the right side workload.</p> <p>Also, the contribution of workload from different muscle groups can be compared as a contribution percentage. For example, the workload contribution of the glutes is just the workload from the glutes compared to the total workload from the glutes, hamstrings and quads.</p> <p>Starting with the vertical jump, it is well known that a strong posterior chain is essential to generate maximum ground force to get the body as high off the ground as possible. This is why the vertical jump height is often used as a measure of lower body strength and the glutes being the largest muscle in the body is an essential component to this overall strength.</p> <p>We looked at the relationship between the % of total workload done by the glutes and the improvement in the athlete’s vert. As seen in the figure below, the athlete’s that had a higher proportion of glute workload throughout the program had the greatest increase in vert height. There was a very strong correlation between the % of glute workload and vert improvement. Coaches can use this information to evaluate the effectiveness of a program at the movement, workout or program level at targeting a specific muscle group. Knowing how important glute workload is to vert improvement coaches can use this information to personalize the programming for each athlete to get to higher contribution that will translate into improved performance. <img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/4B0zlhkCVa0cyIos0mCeU0/d05f717b660152bc4267c3015ac832f2/comebine2016graphs_Page_1.jpg" alt="Combine Graph 1"></p> <p>We also found that the athletes who demonstrated worse balance between their left and right side over the program had lower vert improvement. Again, coaches can monitor the imbalance each athlete is demonstrating to adjust the programming for specific athletes to ensure their overall program is promoting balanced training on each side of the body which was shown to result in improved performance. <img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/mTjOXpfB72uUIgmOcOQmq/a5fa735f62da0062e6e1bf878302c061/comebine2016graphs_Page_2.jpg" alt="Combine Graph 2"></p> <p>On to the 40-yard start. The hamstrings are an essential muscle group to helping the athlete get off the line as fast as possible and generate explosive ground force to translate into higher acceleration. The figure below demonstrates that the athletes who had a higher overall workload contribution from the hamstrings during the program had a greater improvement in their 40-yard time. <img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/357Q2yTIOQaYceKmWkWWMs/fce09a98c82d55733ea37ea68b2f854b/comebine2016graphs_Page_3.jpg" alt="Combine Graph 3"></p> <p>Coaches can use workload per muscle to understand how their programming is stressing different muscle groups of a given athlete and to understand how higher stress on one muscle group compared to another can translate into performance improvement in different combine tests. The coach can use this information to target specific combine test weaknesses of a given athlete and use the information as a tool in the coach’s arsenal to dial in the performance for a specific athlete.</p>

Kristen Larsen, Applied Sports Scientist

<p>It’s nearing the end of regular season and one of your best players is fresh off an injury. He assures you that with one game off, he can be back to finish out the season with the team. You are torn; thinking about the risk for reinjury versus making the playoffs. Will he be sitting on sidelines or able to contribute to your success? How do you have confidence in this decision thinking about his future career, the team’s win record, and your reputation as a tactful coach? A lot is on the line. You ping-pong between “Do No Harm” and “I am ready, Coach”, wishing you had more information to make the right decision. <img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/N6YdWUGeKOW0IEu2i6syE/0ada7fe3f70265151db6bd78484f907c/CB_12_12_16_Athos_Miami_378.jpg" alt="Irik Athlete Fist Bump"> Deciding when an athlete is ready to return to the field is complex and difficult and an exercise in risk management. While athletes and coaches may be thinking they are ready to return, reinjury rates are staggering. Athletes suffering an ACL tear (that requires surgery) are 6 times more likely to get injured again within 2 years than their healthy counterparts. This reinjury rate is directly related to the load placed upon the injured muscle (image below: Gabbett, 2016). </p> <p><img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/1H0xyzJJew04UCAEIKswSc/821c371e2d7c88d4b94f8a9219714cee/Photo-20170127173014839.jpg" alt="Acute vs. Chronic workload graph"></p> <p>Traditionally, coaches and athletes have relied upon intuition, general recovery rates and sparse data to make their return to play decisions. </p> <p><strong>Muscle activity based training load gets your injured players back in the game faster</strong></p> <p>With compression gear embedded with biosensors, Athos has developed a system that will allow you to put confidence back in your return to play decisions. This practical tool can help facilitate glute activation, quantify specific muscle activity and training load to ensure the best exercises are implemented, high volume training is monitored and post-injury compensation patterns are reduced. </p> <p>Athos can be used to support return to play decisions through the following: </p> <ul> <li>Creating baselines: Find baseline muscle contributions and balance for healthy and injured sides</li> <li>Real-time Biofeedback: Use visual feedback during corrective exercises. Athlete looks for glute activation in real-time to promote the neuromuscular connection and reinforce recruitment of the glute.</li> <li>Movement Memory: When visual biofeedback is removed, does muscle activation stay from corrective movements through dynamic movements?</li> <li>Balance: See if asymmetries exist with particular movement and track how balance if affected by volume changes after injury. </li> <li>Training Load: Ensure that the healing tissue is not being over or under stressed to validate that your rehab and progression plan is ideal for each individual athlete. </li> </ul> <p>Gabbett, TJ. 2016. The training-injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder? British Journal of Sports Medicine. doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2015-095788. </p>

Chris Wiebe

<p>Many coaches and sports organizations are taking a scientific approach to both designing programs and monitoring athlete performance. What they have discovered is that monitoring training load can help determine whether an athlete is adapting to a training program and can help minimize the risk of non-impact soft tissue injury. </p> <p>The relationship between the performance of an athlete and the load they have experienced is represented by the figure below. One factor that influences the ability for the athlete to achieve a given out for a given physiological load is fatigue. <img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/3C7ai7CdeMc4a0KUw6magg/7601ad508af2e2f1f5692796e6402aef/Workload-Figure_R5.jpg" alt="Workload-Figure"> It can be difficult to compare the stress and load placed on an athlete based on performance output metrics alone such as distance or accumulated acceleration. Different athletes will respond differently to a given distance or total acceleration based on their strengths, technique and efficiency. </p> <p>Athos has developed garments with distributed sensors that measure the activation of specific muscles throughout the upper and lower body. We use the accumulation of this activation to determine training load. Training load is a direct proxy of the accumulated stress or internal load placed on the muscle and this is highly correlated with the output force. </p> <p>To demonstrate how Athos is used to measure the stress placed on the body and how this changes with fatigue, we exposed athletes two identical exercises under to conditions of fatigue: totally rested and fatigued. We measured Athos muscle activity as well as the torque and force generated by the athlete. </p> <p>What we found was that higher EMG activation was required to complete the exercise at a higher level of fatigue. <img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/3v2vbdJwhWU6o20MOWk8EK/4c2d23e5d1b819107e6927d1531dd9f1/Hamstring_Activation_Intensity_with_Fatigue_R5.jpg" alt="Hamstring Activation Intensity with Fatigue R5"> </p> <p>Athletes need to increase activation when fatigued and this translated into a higher demand placed on the athlete. This tells us that the Athos training load represents the physiological demand placed on specific muscle groups of the athlete. Coaches can use this information to understand how their programming is affecting their athletes and how the programming can be personalized to achieve specific performance goals. </p>

Chris Wiebe

<p>At Athos, we’re always striving to gain deeper insights into the human body. To do that Athos partnered with ProActive, an elite sports performance institute that trains some of the top athletes in the world. We threw the gear on seven NFL athletes to capture their last two sessions of offseason training. It was awesome to watch world class athletes like Clay Matthews,Taylor Mays, Lamarr Houston, Jonathan Stewart, and Malik Jackson in our gear. It was also great to take a step back and watch the trainers at ProActivetake over using the real time feedback to adjust the athlete’s position and form. It was all about getting the intensity ratios dialed in across the lower body muscle groups: quads, hamstrings and glutes.<img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/2vrnZjRNvCEAAgc82wcwCE/10bf051456cc1e1902bd434805bf44ca/1-yOb4o-s9UUKzw7aSvy2KCA.jpeg" alt="Perfect Squat Image"> <strong>Friendly Competition</strong> One of the drills involved trying to do as many body weight squats as possible within 45 seconds, making sure to get down to a proper 90 degrees at the knee. We saw a fun competition between two of the NFL players. We’ll call them Player A and Player B.</p> <p>Player B got to 30 and Player A hit 54! (almost 2x)</p> <p><strong>What happened?</strong> Now normally this is where Player B would just go train more and hope to beat Player A next time. But because they were both wearing Athos gear, we’re able to compare the breakdown of load per muscle as a percentage of total capacity. At 21% and 26% muscle effort on his right and left glute, Player A was able to better leverage his glutes vs. Player B at 7% and 9%. <img src="//images.contentful.com/h8rttbgq0m6t/6UA1pvkkA8SqkK0AyCSASw/fc8414b519fb1e93b197b2021b1d8b87/1-D2L6MxeN3HA2TBNUvvzkOw.png" alt="Perfect Squat Graph"> By spreading more of the load onto his glutes and hamstrings Player A was able to take some of the burden off his quads resulting in a more efficient squat. He was able to sustain a higher cadence and ultimately achieve more reps. Now Player B knows what he needs to do to beat Player A next time. (I gave it a go too, but I’d prefer not to disclose my numbers!) We’re looking forward to further collaborations and insights to push the limits and help everyone train more effectively. Stay tuned for more updates from us. Now go do some squats with Athos!</p>

John Jackson

<p>The Challenge:</p> <p>A few months ago, one of my clients approached me with the goal of reducing his 1-mile run time. Not a problem. So the first thing we did was go for a run and get our benchmark. On a sunny Tuesday morning, we completed a mile in 8 minutes and 23 seconds. Not bad. However, the Athos gear that we use in his training that measures specific muscle effort in the quads, hamstrings and glutes revealed some serious underlying issues.</p> <p>At first glance, you might not think that muscle effort output is problematic but as it turns out, there is far too much quad and too little glute activity. This suggests poor running form. There is also a pretty large left-right imbalance, especially in the hamstrings, showing uneven muscle strength and condition. We had our work cut out for us, we set our goal to take a full minute off that time. Somewhere in the 7 minute range. To do this, we needed to work on sprints to decrease the overall run time but we also needed to work on strengthening and balancing out the legs with progressive resistance training to not only get stronger but to prevent potential injury. To do this, we used Athos muscle effort to make sure we were targeting the correct muscles to the right level and we used the Athos Score to track the intensity of each set and workout. Our goal was to increase muscle effort output in the quads, hamstrings and glutes and to increase the set Athos score during weight training and decrease it during runs and sprints.</p> <p>The Plan:</p> <p>Over the next 8 months, we used Athos to target the specific imbalances in his muscles. We did exercises like the Romanian deadlift and the prone hamstring curl to isolate, strengthen and balance the hamstrings.With these, we progressed his set Athos score (his overall effort) from 23 to 39 and his specific hamstring effort scores from 68 to 98.</p> <p>To work on the quads and the glutes, we focused on the jump squat, the glute kickback, and single leg step-ups. With these exercises, we progressed his set Athos score from 33 to 39 and muscle effort scores in his quads from 75 to 99. With these exercises we were also able to increase his muscle effort scores in his glutes from 57 to 89.</p> <p>To compliment the strength training, we also performed interval sprints and running hill climbs. We actually sprinted a lot. We sprinted during almost each and every session. We did this to work on his speed but we also did this to work on his form and efficiency. With the sprints, we actually decreased his overall Athos and Muscle Effort scores and increased his run efficiency. His Athos score during a 1-minute, all-out sprint decreased from 56 to 49.</p> <p>On July 31st, 2015, he ran a mile in 6 minutes and 48 seconds, blowing our 7-minute goal out of the water. We went from a quad dominant run to a glute and hamstring dominant run. Exactly where we want to be.</p> <p>Job well done.</p>