I recently sat down with Brian Buck, Performance Analyst at Sparta Science and Nike Master Trainer, to talk about how Sparta Science’s technology is changing the injury prevention game. Watch the full interview here and read the show notes below.
SHOW NOTES
Brian talks about how Sparta Science’s technology is changing how athletes see their careers. It allows them to diagnose what’s happening in their physiology and how this affects injury risk.
By seeing that your left leg produces 20 lbs more force than the right this shows signs of how it can affect your long term career.
His approach stems from the perspective that you can’t be an athlete if you are hurt.
They use this technology every 6 weeks to make sure they can make tweaks to the programming and avoid any injuries waiting to happen.
This was originally introduced as a performance enhancing tool. After implementing the tool, injury rates dropped by 50%, so they quickly changed how they were using Sparta Science’s technology.
Brian talks about how the trends they notice can prevent future injuries before they happen.
For example, a baseball athlete may have decreasing force production from his lower half while the use of momentum is increasing.
They know that this stress is being transferred from the muscles to the ligaments. A 98 mph fastball that is being generated from momentum in the elbow, instead of force from the legs, is going to result in an injury.
This can then be used as an analysis tool as athletes recover from previous injuries, too.
The biggest use, however, is noticing trends during the course of the season. It allows for tweaks to be made during the season to training volume and intensity, so that these injuries don’t occur.
This then also leads to better conversations with the athletes, too. When you see the numbers responding negatively, you can ask “are you getting enough sleep?” or “hey, how is your recovery work going?”
Brian talks about how having more clients use the technology only makes it better and better.
By combining data from all these people and places, their ability to notice trends becomes more and more accurate.
When someone tears a hamstring in the premier league in England, this benefits athletes in the states. This is because there is a greater understanding of why that has happened now due to the recorded data.
Brian says that this technology is going to become more widely available, even making its way to normal gyms, thanks to people’s desire to learn more about their bodies.
People can learn more about Sparta by calling the facility. Brian says that you could watch someone come in cold all the way through to the end. You can see the kind of force analysis they conduct and how it dictates changes in their training that day.
For those that don’t want to call the facility, the blog on spartascience.com is a great resource. There is a lot of cool content, case studies, and stories available there where you can learn more about this approach.
You can learn more about Brian and Sparta Science at:
https://www.spartascience.com/
Follow Brian on Instagram @brianbuck6
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