The Indiana Pacers’ sports performance staff runs its teams through a screening about once a month to investigate each player’s risk of a knee injury. The assessment centers on the LESS Test (Landing Error Scoring System) in which a player starts on a 12-inch box, jumps down with two feet, lands and then jumps straight up.
This is all done in front of a Kinect camera powered by Physimax’s markerless motion-capture software platform. One of the Pacers starters performed very poorly on the test and, while he was already undergoing some physical therapy for his knee, the Physimax system detected another issue in the kinetic chain for which there was a swift remedy.
“With this data, we really found that there was something going on also in his hip that was contributing to the knee,” Pacers director of sports performance Shawn Windle told SportTechie. “They literally did a pelvic adjustment, re-tested him and his score improved from 11 and went to a 4, which is a low-risk factor for knee injury.”
The Pacers have been working with Physimax for more than a year and recently announced a multiyear extension to their partnership. Physimax is one component of the Pacers’ injury prevention program that appears to be working well. A study by NBA injury site InStreetClothes.com showed that the Pacers had lost the fewest salary dollars to injury or illness through February’s All-Star break; Indiana admittedly ranks in the bottom-five in team payroll this season but were also 11th in fewest total games lost to injury or illness.
Most issues identified by these evaluations don’t have an immediate fix, like the above example, but Windle noted that two other players showed significant asymmetrical strength in their legs, according to the Physimax testing, and the platform offered a training program as a guide.
The two primary advantages of this system, Windle noted, were its ability to take “quick snapshots” of reliable information without interfering too much in a player’s routine and also the company’s eagerness to find “a willing partner” and customize the product. He said Physimax worked directly with him throughout the onboarding process and added a couple of motion tests at his request. They even complied with feedback about smaller details such as the appearance of the dashboard and the font size on printouts.
“We’re not in the research world, so I’m not necessarily looking for something that is something comparable to a markered system where you’re doing lab research,” he said. “I just want something that’s reliable to itself so I can compare apples to apples because I’m not trying to publish any of this.”
Physimax, whose headquarters are in Tel Aviv, also works with Israeli basketball team Maccabi Tel Aviv as well as the U.S. Army, Marines and Military Academy at West Point and a few American universities with major sports programs, including Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina and Syracuse. Physimax CEO Ram Shalev emphasized that all of its musculoskeletal protocols are evidence-based. The company provides and upgrades the camera as part of the partnership. Feedback can be shared to an athlete’s smartphone
“It’s actually a computer vision that analyzes and scores reliably the prediction and the rate for injury and then provides very actionable conclusions,” Shalev said, noting that the full gamut of tests can be run in under eight minutes.
“Then, immediately, the objective measurement and scoring appear and then you have the recommendation and the injury risk according to this evidence-based [solution],” he added.
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Shalev said Physimax connected with Windle through a data consultant helping the Pacers, Paul Robbins, a former STATS executive who now works with Kinexon and Kinduct. (The Pacers use the Kinexon wearable in practice.) The Pacers players go through all of the tests in preseason but, during the long 82-game schedule, Windle gravitates toward using the LESS test as the best, quick baseline.
The league endures so many knee injuries — tendinitis, tendinosis, sprains and even ACL teats — and this helps catch risk factors up and down the body, with ankle mobility serving as one of the best indicators.
“We just want to make sure that our guys are moving efficiently,” Windle said, adding: “All the way up through the back, it can cause a whole cascade of events if your ankles don’t move.”
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