Technology makes it possible to observe athletic motions in minute detail. Super slow motion video, special motion capture software and that kind of stuff is getting better, cheaper and more portable all the time. And the internet makes it easy for us to look on. For example, have a look at the walking animation at the Biomotion Lab at Queen’s University in Canada. That site lets you play with their BML Walker software right in you web browser, and you can even take part in their research.
But advances in biomechanics observation technologies and ways of sharing them aren’t confined to the words of research, therapy or athletic training. Fans and even weekend warriors are getting into the act. Some of the more serious baseball fans described in a recent Slate article have taken to watching and commenting on the mechanics of players. You can go well beyond arm-chair managing or fantasy general managing your team to be freely comment on angles and degrees of freedom in players performances. According to the Slate article, there’s no shortage of fan instant experts willing to share their observations and prescriptions.
Who knows if these new experts really know what they are talking about? No one needs a credential to post observations of athletic prowess and prescriptions for improving them.
But you don’t have to be a real or imagined expert to want to apply this sort of science to your own athletic endeavors. The technology is getting so much smaller and cheaper that bio-mechanically related products are starting to appear. The UltimateBalance Trainer, for example, is a small device worn on a headband that tells you when your head deviates from a certain angle as you play tennis. The basic idea is that tilting your head excessively during a tennis stroke throws you off balance enough to compromise your swing. That’s probably true for most of us, although I don’t know of any research that would support that.
In any event, it’s easy to while away more than a few minutes reading and viewing videosof this thing in action on the tennis court. And it’s easy to get sucked becoming an instant expert on balance in the back court.
I do like the thinking behind the UltimateBalance Trainers. I’ve only occasionally dabbled in tennis, so I can’t offer an opinion on how well it might work there. What really grabs my attention is the instant feedback the thing offers. One of the reasons these guys developed the trainer had to be because they observed that their tennis students were doing things that they didn’t realize they were doing. Like tilting their heads far enough to throw them off the balance needed to accelerate a swinging motion around their centers.
It’s easy to extend these assumptions to other athletic motions, as any time spent observing golfers hacking away at the local driving range will attest. And I understand a version of the trainer tailored for golfers is in the works.
I can easily imagine using the functions offered by such a device in my practice of the Feldenkrais Method. In fact, many Feldenkrais “lessons” are designed to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of moving from the pelvis and finding a central axis. A device that gives you instant feedback as you’re moving could be quite helpful.