Sports Movement Evaluation for the Adolescent Athlete

Purpose: To describe what is involved in a sports movement evaluation at a clinical motion analysis laboratory. To inform and educate on the application of sports movement evaluation for adolescent injury rehabilitation and prevention.

Description: Adolescent participation in organized sports, along with sports specialization, has increased over time. Focus on injury rehabilitation and prevention is rising, as sports are the leading cause of injury in adolescents. Injuries can lead to decreased participation, increased risk for future pain, and movement dysfunction.

Motion analysis laboratories are an ideal environment to perform sport movement evaluations. These evaluations utilize specialized equipment that provide more insight into movement than observation alone. Optical motion capture uses retro-reflective markers placed on anatomical landmarks to develop coordinate systems for each joint segment, and relationships to neighboring segments, to track relative motion (kinematics). These systems have been shown to have accuracies of 1 mm or less. For sport movement analyses, this is critical as significant functional changes in movement can occur at this scale. Force plates are used to measure the interaction between a person and the ground, recording linear and rotational components from 3 axes of measurement. Combined with motion capture, the forces are used to calculate internal loads at a joint (kinetics. These dynamic joint forces are an important metric for understanding healthy and impaired movement and cannot be measured observationally. Surface electromyography (SEMG) is the measurement of electrical signals generated from motor neuron activation. The SEMG sensors are placed on the skin over the muscle body alongside the motion capture markers, to gather data about muscle activation during joint movement. Together, all of these data provide detailed insight for the motions and loads experienced at the joint level, and the muscles contributing to those movements. This insight leads to better informed clinical decision making for injury prevention and treatment.

Summary of Use: This special interest poster presentation will demonstrate how data is collected in a clinical motion analysis laboratory. Data and images from de-identified adolescent normative research subjects will be used to show the activities performed during a 2-hour comprehensive sports movement evaluation. A detailed sports protocol is followed for all patients. Other activities specific to a patient’s sport can also be performed and analyzed. Kinematic, kinetic, and SEMG findings will be explained as pertains to injury prevention, return to sport, and treatment recommendations.

Importance to Members: Sports movement evaluations are a growing area of assessment in motion analysis laboratories. The data provided by these evaluations are meaningful to therapists and patients because of increased sports participation and specialization among young athletes, and prevalence of chronic sports-related injuries in this population.