Advice from Boo: “If you really want to help Wallace, you need to get out on the track and see how he’s moving and see all of these positions that he needs to be in to be successful. And that might guide and dictate what you’re doing in the weight room, not the other way around.”
“The very specific centralized stuff of what their sport is should be the primary tool for evaluation and assessment. And then everything else should kind of peripherate out on more of your general spectrum.”
“For younger coaches, just go and observe what their athlete is doing in their environment. And if they’re having chronic pain in their knee or low back, that’s going to give you your roadmap and how they’re moving in their sport of maybe why those pathologies are occurring.”
“Acceleration and the ability to initially overcome inertia in good projection angles is the barrier of entry to being good at deceleration.”
“If your athletes can’t accelerate and get in good positions and joint angles to initially overcome inertia, the likelihood of them being able to reverse that mechanism and be good in deceleration is extremely low.”
Deceleration: “Our bigs, our taller athletes, usually kind of grinded their penultimate step, used longer stride length, and bigger, wider stances in the point of zero velocity when they had to change direction… Our guards had shorter ground contact time, choppier steps, but greater degrees of hip and knee flexion at that point of zero velocity when they had to change direction.”
“You have to be a good accelerator to efficiently decelerate.”
Deceleration: “If you can’t flex at the knee, ankle, and hip, more than likely what your trunk is doing is going to go through greater degrees of flexion rate and rotation. So athletes that are tall, as we all know, and longer spines, different pelvic positions are probably more predisposed to chronic low back pain… So I think, from a wear and tear standpoint, having a little bit more of ankle flexion and hip flexion at the point of zero velocity wouldn’t be the worst thing for some of those bigs as it relates to them being predisposed to chronic low back pain and low back pain issues.”
Deceleration: “As it relates to the guards, I actually think having a little more impulse might help… So what we saw, especially on those really short, stocky guards, is their ground contact times were so fast that a lot of times it would decrease stride length and they would get in such degrees of hip and knee flexion that maybe it reduced some of the horizontal impulse in the penultimate and final foot contact as well as the pre-penultimate to where they could actually maybe use a little more ground contact time and a little more rigid penultimate step to essentially create larger magnitudes of breaking forces.”
“Deceleration is just reversing the mechanism of acceleration.”
“Athletes that had prior injuries were actually more efficient in turning off of the affected limb… And we said, well, why is that? Well, the magnitude of horizontal force is going to be greatest in the penultimate foot contact, right? So they changed their strategy to actually put more weight on the trail leg at zero velocity. So they were actually putting more force through the limb that was unaffected.”
“So if I had a prior ACL on my right, I actually had a better total time to completion and a better velocity time curve is what we called it in the 1080 study of turning off my right if I had a prior injury of lower extremity on my right.”
“What we saw consistently is that athletes that had severe injuries requiring surgical interventions were actually more efficient in 180 degree turn and change of direction off of that affected limb.”
“If you looked at the weight distribution of lead leg versus trail leg. The trail leg is going to have the brunt of the distribution based on the medial trunk lean of the athlete as they go out of that 180 degree cut. So again, that could be it because you’re kind of inherently offloading that affected limb.”
Achilles ruptures in the NBA: “We just pulled as many clips as we could going back. I think the first one was Dominique Wilkins, 1992, and he actually had a good career after that. Isaiah Thomas, 94. So it was like early 90s is when we started pulling clips. And we just looked at what are some common denominators or factors that were consistent among these Achilles tendon ruptures. And what we found was just that false step was present in 100 % of them. this kind of low ⁓ center of mass velocity, stepping backward to project your center of mass horizontally, was present in 100 % of these Achilles tendon ruptures within the NBA.”
“The other thing that was quite interesting is that when you look at the foot position, over 80 % of them, the long axis of the foot was externally rotated and there was a pronation and eversion moment at the point of terminal dorsiflexion. So there was kind of this tensile load from the false step, right? But there was also this rotary component with what the foot was doing in relationship to the shank.”
“Our hypothesis was just not having the current diagnostics to know when the rupture actually occurred is that that 45 degrees of terminal dorsiflexion, or I think it was 46.7, was actually the result of the Achilles tendon already being ruptured, not necessarily the cause.”
“We feel like that kind of valgus collapse or that medial collapse of the knee in an ACL tear is actually the result of the ACL already being torn, not necessarily the cause. It was more medial tibial rotation and anterior shearing of that tibia.”
“All of the research in ACLs suggests that the ACL goes very quick. We know this on cadaver studies, we know this in a lab-based setting. The ACL is going to tear between 40 and 60 milliseconds. It goes quick, right? What we saw in our film review is that the dynamic valgus moments in these ACLs are very slow. 80, 90, 100, 110 milliseconds, right? So at that point, the ACL is already torn. It’s not necessarily the cause of the ACL tear. We feel like with this terminal dorsiflexion, it’s kind of the same thing. We don’t know. It’s just speculation. But just again, something that we consistently saw in our film review.”
Straight foot Achilles ruptures: “Of that 20%, they actually had greater degrees of terminal dorsiflexion. So I mean their foot was straight but their shank was really close to the foot. So like they had larger degrees and again why that is we don’t know.”
Achilles ruptures: “Dorsiflexion at the ankle, knee extension, hip extension, forward rotation of the trunk, and then the lead leg was just knee flexion… So that swing leg was flexed and forward.”
“The mechanics of this as far as dorsiflexion, knee, hip extension, and trunk rotation, I think it goes back to being a good accelerator, right? So having a stiff, rigid foot and then just the medial column of that foot of power contact has to be engaged to where you don’t drop the heel and go into pronation and eversion as the tendon is lengthening, right? So I think having a very stiff, rigid first ray and medial column is really important.”
False steps: “Hitting the ground with a very stiff rigid foot and making sure the heel doesn’t drop and the foot doesn’t turn out I think is vital because you’ll never train a basketball player out of false stepping.”
“One interesting thing too is there’s a researcher out of University of Bologna in FIFA and UEFA and they found the same thing that the positions were very similar as far as dorsiflexion, knee and hip extension with forward trunk rotation.”
“Good mechanics are good mechanics and they’re universal. I think being good in acceleration or having a false step where you can get in a good foot position and good projection angles is gonna be really important as it relates to mitigating potential risk of injury.”
Achilles ruptures in max velocity sprinting: “Rarely ever and I think it has to do with the position because when you look at just max velocity sprinting, the ground reaction forces are going to be primarily vertical and the trunk is going to be upright. So you’re not really going to get in that forward rotation where the foot is posterior to the center of mass, it’s going to be more upright.”
“The thing about basketball that’s so interesting is most of the most of the athletes we looked at on film were in possession of the basketball at zero or low center of mass velocity. Either they’re kind of like sidestepping into a false step, had the basketball, and they’re initiating some sort of velocity to overcome inertia with the false step. But they were never just accelerating down the court or upright running and the Achilles goes.”
“Athletes older in their career that sustain Achilles tendon ruptures typically have a decline in performance. So we know player efficiency rating, points per game, minutes per game prior to rupture and then post rupture.”
“So for calf strains and for planar fasciitis, the group that ended up rupturing their Achilles tendon was out a shorter duration of time relative to the control.”
“There is now six athletes in the NBA that have ruptured their Achilles tendon and torn their ACL and of those five, it’s the contralateral. So it’s like one knee, the opposite tendon.”
Achilles ruptures: “If you bucket it by decade, is increasing. The year prior, the 23-24 season, there was no Achilles tendon ruptures. So it’s an average of four, which is still greater than if you look back in the early 2000s.”
Achilles ruptures: “It’s a U-shaped distribution. There’s a big spike early in October and November, and then prior to the All-Star break, it kind of goes down. And then there’s a double peak where it goes back up in the months of March and April going into the playoffs… So within that, there’s probably some fitness issues early in the season and maybe some fatigue issues later in the season… So maybe the younger athletes didn’t come in fit enough and prepared and it went. Maybe the older athletes had chronic fatigue and damage structurally and then it went later in the year. So I don’t know, it’s too small of a sample to really know, but I do know this, there are windows of hotspots of spikes in injury and it does fit that kind of U-shaped distribution where there’s a lot early and there’s a lot late.”
Offensive lineman and Achilles: “They’re false stepping going backwards as somebody’s hurling their mass into them. So I think left tackle, pass protecting, I mean, that’s essentially at low velocity that kickstand mechanism is pretty much a false step but the thing is it’s initiated by the the lead leg not the trail leg so that may be a safer mechanism so they’re pushing back to decelerate ⁓ instead of the opposite.”
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Basketball Mechanics (Book): https://uaconcepts.com/product/basketball-mechanics/
Adam’s Research: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Adam-Petway-2171554388
