The World Cup. The Olympics. The adulation of the crowd for medalists and winners. Daryl loved watching those events. However, since boyhood his favorite sport was cricket. He and his father had spent many hours together over the years listening to commentary, watching matches on TV and at the Queen’s Park Oval. Somewhere between the heart-thrumming sound of the conch shell and the crowds rising in ecstatic jubilation as stumps flew through the air, Daryl realised he wanted to be a professional cricketer.
He joined the coaching school of the local club and trained every free hour he had. He was lucky. He had talent and quickly gained the skills to be an exceptional bowler. The spin he put on a ball allowed it to slip past batters and shatter their chances of amassing runs for their team. That awesome right arm, his magical manipulation of the ball and the speed and power which he achieved in bowling helped him quickly catch the attention of the major players in the sport. At his first selection Daryl surpassed the expectations of his teammates and silenced the naysayers. His star blazed to new heights as a highly successful international career developed.
Then during a desperate attempt to catch the ball at a high-pressure match he landed badly on his right shoulder. Everyone held their breath as he was taken off the field.
From that moment the pace of his sporting life slowed down.
He had damaged his shoulder; surgery ensued. All went well and he entered rehabilitation. Daryl conscientiously followed his rehabilitation programme because he had so much invested in quickly returning to play. In good time he started training again. Functionally all seemed well, but somehow that unique skill wasn’t there as it was before.
Frustration. Questions.
What was wrong if everything went so well? How might this loss of skill be explained? Could it be retrieved through more individualized rehabilitation and specific training?
To answer these questions and others, clinicians, physiotherapists and coaches turn to researchers in the field of biomechanics in order to gain more in-depth understanding of how the human body moves in health or after the treatment of injury or joint disorder.
Why biomechanics? What does this subject involve?
Biomechanics is a discipline that advances the objective understanding of how the human body responds, for instance, how much stress, acceleration and impact it can handle. This is achieved through the creative and substantial application of knowledge and experimental techniques in physics, engineering, biology and medicine.
We enjoy looking at athletes like Daryl compete as they seek to achieve personal goals and break world records. The grace, speed, strength, fluidity and skill of their movements are exciting and beautiful to observe. Then injury occurs, resulting in loss of mobility and flexibility, and depending on the degree of injury, disability and possible termination of a sporting career. The rehabilitation of the injured athlete is thus a major area of research in the field of biomechanics. Especially since the injured athlete displays joint dysfunction which normally results in pain and has a negative influence on the range of motion (ROM) in a joint and important aspects of motor control like eye-hand coordination.
Sporting activities are comprised of various types of movements. As such, visual assessment of athletes’ performances by professionals in sports-related fields often involves describing movement in operational terms, such as positioning (the hand or foot moves from one particular position to another), continuous movements (those which require some adjustment of muscular control during the movement), manipulative movements (those which involve handling of sporting equipment particularly with the fingers or hands), repetitive movements (those in which the same movements are repeated like dribbling a ball) and sequential movements (relatively separate independent movements in a sequence). Visual assessment of complex three-dimensional body movements during sports or training is extremely difficult. It is highly subjective and primarily dependent on the expertise of the coach or health professional.
For this reason assessment is more often based on simple tests measuring the ROM of the affected joint. Such tests can be easily repeated over time to monitor an individual’s movement capacity. However, these simple tests often cannot accurately represent the functional capacity of a joint during training or play. Furthermore, it becomes almost impossible for even an experienced observer to follow changes in joint angles and to determine the degree to which an athlete may have introduced compensatory movements when impaired mobility or pain is present.
Biomechanics uses modern devices and equipment to record and measure complex three-dimensional movements. The data so gathered then forms the input to mathematical models of the human body making it possible to extract quantitative parameters and develop analytical techniques for the objective description of movement.
Recent biomechanical research at the Department of Physics at The UWI in collaboration with the Department of Rehabilitation & Prevention Engineering, Institute of Applied Medical Engineering at the Helmholtz Institute in Aachen, Germany, investigated and compared the functional capacity of healthy, non-athletes with that of players on a professional handball team – athletes involved in sports which make particular use of the upper extremities. Measurements were performed using a state-of-the-art three-dimensional motion analysis system. Such systems allow even complex movements of the body and limbs to be tracked and recorded during simulated sporting activities in a laboratory environment.
Analysis of the results showed that the healthy non-athletes displayed an individual style of performing a task: a signature or characteristic movement pattern. Furthermore variations in movement patterns among these non-athletes made it possible to define a characteristic movement pattern for the typical activities of daily living (ADL) such as pouring liquid from a jug. These task-specific movement patterns make it possible to produce an objective reference for the rehabilitation of patients with joint injury or disorders. However, when the handball players were assessed, it was noted that their characteristic movement patterns for the ADLs were different. This seemed to arise from a combination of the athlete’s unique style of movement and the sport-specific demands of their training and has important ramifications for how we define healthy movements for athletes and assess the outcomes of their rehabilitation.
Using the characteristic movement patterns of healthy, untrained matched subjects as references for athletes in rehabilitation may alter the athlete’s characteristic movement pattern and the performance of those skilled movements which initially gave the athlete a competitive edge. These findings are expected to have a valuable impact on evidence-based rehabilitation.
Soon athletes such as Daryl could be rehabilitated with respect to their own characteristic movement patterns determined prior to injury improving the likelihood of retaining an athlete’s unique movement style. This is just one example of how research in biomechanics allows us to better understand the human body and make more informed assessments and recommendations to the benefit of performance and rehabilitation in the sporting community.
Dr Sybele Williams is a lecturer in the Department of Physics of the Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI St Augustine. She presented a version of this paper at the January conference, “Science, Higher Education and Business: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sports Studies, Research and Development. Jointly arranged by The UWI, First Citizens Sports Foundation and The Sports Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited, the conference was designed to initiate discourse on both the development of sports and the use of sport for development. |
