Where I have been

I don’t want to lead you astray. I have been on a crazy adventure the past couple of weeks, but not of the type you may think. I can only dream about skiing, climbing, hiking and hunting. No, the adventure that I have been partaking in is called engineering. I am participating in Dartmouth's gateway engineering class. The only prompt for our group project class was to "improve the quality of life". After a lot of brainstorming, we decided to tackle something close to home for me: the correlation between hip strength and sports injuries. There are many studies showing that there is an optimal ratio between hip muscles and quad backsquat strength. Looking at the picture below, there are two flow charts. The one on the left represents most athletes. Training typically includes dominant muscle training and specific sport training until an injury occurs, then non dominant muscle training in physical therapy. After the athlete is recovered, non dominant training is often forgotten. The flowchart on the left is more sustainable, with non dominant(ND) training intermittently throughout the sports season.

We asked why athletes don't train non dominant musclest since the correlation with injury is already known? We questioned athletes, trainers and physical therapists and came up with 4 reasons:

      1. Athletes feel "too strong" for ND training because there are no direct results, ie: it doesn’t make them better at their sport.
 

      2. Athletes don’t screen for muscle imbalances throughout the season, only post injury.
 

      3. Athletes don’t want to ‘waste’ time with coach/athletic trainer, asking how to do ND training correctly instead of taking advantage of manual therapy/asking how to get better at sport.
 

      4. ND training technique is hard to do and if done wrong only enforces bad muscle patterns.

From these barriers, we came up with goals for our device:
 

      1. A positive biofeedback loop that sets the athlete up, based on their backsquat strength, to strengthen their hip muscles to the correct ratios, thus adjusting throughout the year to their strength.
 

      2. Make the device much less technique dependent than the state of the art.
 

      3. Make the device not a replacement for PT or athletic trainers, but something that would allow the athlete to take full advantage of the trainer’s time. If the athlete has balanced muscles already, the trainer can get straight to manual work.

From there we started designing and building, developing a works-like prototype! Now just to make it a bit prettier…