 Hello and welcome back to the sports biomechanics lecture series, as always supported by the International Society of Biomechanics and Sports and kindly sponsored by Vicon. Today, it's a lecture I'm really looking forward to, but this really mirrors a big part of the ISPS ethos, which is about bridging the gap between research and applied practice. And I know in previous weeks we've had some really excellent talks on specific research projects within sports biomechanics. But we're always interested in how does that research then actually get applied and how can we use sports biomechanics to make a real difference to elite athletes and performers in various sports. So on that note, we're really lucky to be joined today by Ina Janssen, who is a sports biomechanist within the Netherlands Olympic setup to base at the National Sports Centre in the Netherlands. I'll hand over to Ina and I know she's going to say a little bit more about what her role involves. Thank you Stuart for the introduction. I also want to thank you for all the effort you've put in and putting together these sports biomechanics lecture series. I know I've really enjoyed watching many of the presentations. So today's presentation will be slightly different to the ones which have occurred up to now, which was mainly focused on one particular sport or potentially an injury mechanism. Now I'll give a bit of an insight in applied sports biomechanics in an Olympic setting. And then specifically what happens here at the Olympic training centre in the Netherlands where I've been based for the last eight years. So to give a bit of an outline, so give a background of Olympic sport in the Netherlands and at Papenmel, which is the National Olympic Training Centre. Then talk about the applied sports biomechanics, specifically the injury risk screening we do. So for the ACL screening, so the anti-acoustic ligaments screening, we use handball but also with jumpers knee in volleyball. Then speak briefly about the web workshops we give athletes and coaches on the female athletes. And then finally some case studies looking at how we could improve performance. And I've chosen three out of these. So the BMX starts, the long jump, take off and the paricycling bike fitting. So some of these, particularly the case studies might be a bit superficial in terms of me not going too in depth of theory. But I'll have some references there that you can look into more or you can always contact me if you want more information. I just want to give a bit of an overview of how we apply these at the Olympic level. So in the Netherlands, there are 17 million inhabitants and our ambition is to be top 10 on the medal tally at the Olympics. So let's see how we did in Rio in 2016, at the Olympic Games we became 11th with a total of 19 medals and quite a variety of medals. These were in the sports of gymnastics, rowing, track cycling, road cycling, sailing, swimming, athletics or a track and field, boxing, field hockey, BMX, judo and beach volleyball. For the Paralympic Games in Rio we did slightly better. We came seventh with 62 medals, primarily in athletics, equestrian, wheelchair, tennis, marathon, table tennis, cycling, swimming, boccia, wheelchair basketball and weightlifting. And we also have Winter Olympians. So our last Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, it became fifth with a total of 20 medals, which were almost all from speed skating and also one from short track speed skating. And then our Paralympic Winter Olympians came tenth with a total of seven medals, which were came from snowboarding and alpine skiing. So you can see there's quite a breadth of different sports that we are actually quite good at. I'll give an insight about the Sports Centre of Up and Down, which is the National Olympic Training Centre. This is our multi-sport environment. It's the largest pie performance centre in the Netherlands. And on a daily basis, more than 400 elite athletes come and train here. So I'll use the cursor here. So here you can see an overview of the campus where we have our running track training facilities. There's also a hotel where people can stay or visiting athletes can stay. When you drive onto the campus, you go past this board. So I took this photo this morning, actually, and we had to count down the number of days until Tokyo. So we have 421 days until the Olympics start in Tokyo, and then 616 days until the next Winter Olympics in Beijing. So this is a really reminder every time we come to work, every time we come to train that this is what we're working towards. And here are just some photos of one of the training halls and inside the track. The facilities and services here, obviously the training facilities for athletes. Some athletes even live on campus. So these are primarily under the age of 18. We provide the, there's nutrition services, strength and conditioning, medical services, but then also sports science, which I am a part of. So my role is considered an embedded scientist. And what that means is that I'm a scientist working as part of the support staff in the elite environment. And we try to be the bridge between universities and coaches. So our primary role is servicing, so servicing the coaches, asking the programs, asking what their questions are and helping answer their questions. We don't have to publish. We don't have to bring in money or grants. Just quite nice. Our pure job is to help the coaches answer questions. Now there are quite a few sports that train here. And if a coach asks a question, which is too much work for me to answer on my own. If we need to look a bit more in depth, then we actually align with the university to try and get a master's student to be based here and only work on that one specific topic. So what sports do we support? A lot of team sports. We have hockey, volleyball, badminton, handball, judo, and here in the middle is a Dutch court called Korfball. It's very similar to those. If you know what the netball is, it's not an Olympic sports and it's the only non Olympic sport we support. But it's actually one of the highest participation sports in the Netherlands. And that's why we do support it. Lots of individual athletes as well, including archery, track cycling, athletics, snowboarding, table tennis, rifle shooting, and BMX. And what's also quite unique is that we have a lot of Paralympic athletes who train here as well. So also Paralympic snowboarders and skiers, wheelchair racers, wheelchair basketball, and cycling, and sprinters. Some of the products that we use, I have some commercial products. I'll go through these quickly. Some of you might be familiar with these. And here on the left be these yellow bars on the ground is called the Uptradump system. So this is commonly used in track and field athletics to look at the run up of someone where it measures the contact times, the flight times, the step length, step frequency, etc. We can also use this in a competition setting. In addition to that, we have force pedals, which measures the pedal forces. There'll be an example of this later in the presentation. Use force decks to do some jump tests. We have smart speed, split gates, EMG shorts, also the extents by suit 3D kinematic suits. We can also look at some velocities. This is a pressure plate. We can look at stability and center of pressure in archers. The vertex and the verts are used often in volleyball to look at jump heights. Also a radar to look at ball speed and then in terms of some biomec specific biomechanics software, we use the Quintic biomechanics software system to do some digitizing and analysis. What does daily work look like? We actually do have a sports science laboratory where we can do some standard measurements in the environments. Here's an example of the wheelchair revometer that we have recently got to measure the forces that an athlete can put on the rims on the wheels. And there's some other standard tests that we can do there. But a lot of the work we do is actually in the field. This is all at our campus on the volleyball court here. My office is through that window there, so right by the courts. We look at some landing technique and look at some sprinting up in the track, also wheelchair basketball on the wheelchair basketball court. We can go to the Velodrome and do measurements there and also do some BMX assessments at the actual track. And we also collect data at competitions. So that's a big part as well of what we do, collecting some video and making some analysis for the athletes. Okay, so now I'll give you a bit of some example of some of the work that we do. So start with some injury risk screening. So start with ACL injuries. So if you haven't seen the first lecture that was in the series by Alistair Dempsey on the edgy accretionment ligament injury, I'd highly recommend watching that which he gave a fantastic background on this injury and how it occurs. But it's an injury that happens in many sports for us basketball, handball, football soccer and netball. It seems to be sports where it's very prevalent. We know that it has to do with the decrease knee, hip and trunk flexion along with the knee valgus and internal rotation. And we also know that with non-contact single leg landings that this could be an issue. 70% of ACL injuries are non-contacting nature so it's not due a collision of the athletes and so forth. And four females are four or five times more likely to get an ACL injury than males. There's also been some evidence that some family history can be related to that. So this is something that we keep an eye on as well. Not only is there an early onset of osteoarthritis for people that get this injury and this is why in terms of a health care issue, there's quite a bit of money put into injury prevention for the ACL injuries. But when it comes to elite athletes, they're more concerned with the long absence of the sport. The decimated return to play should be between 9 and 12 months. And when you're a 16 year old handball player at the National Academy, 12 months out of the sport seems like a lifetime, but can also actually potentially be quite challenging to get back into the selection. So we used to pop and I'll have three ACL injuries per season in the female handball program. So these are girls between 15 and 18 years old who come and train here about 25 girls so having three per season or quite a bit. So we decided to do is try to be proactive in reducing this injury. In the morning, those people that are a bit squeamish with injury videos, I'm about to show a video of an ACL injury happening in handball. So look away now if you don't want to do that. So in handball, the ACL injuries can happen with this one single leg landing and also due to the cutting movements, but it is as it is in a lot of sports quite debilitating injury. So we don't have a force plate in the ground in the lab, and we also don't have a 3D motion optical system. So we want to see how can we do this quite effectively. And we use the study based by Meyer and all that looked at the tried to estimate the amount of knee abduction in females. So what this study did, if you don't get aware with it, it's about 700 females that did a vertical jump. And then you looking at the measures of tibial length, body mass, their core steps, hamstring ratio, knee flexion, the range of motion during the landing and the valgus during the landing. And give you a good indication of the risk of someone's injury. So this we've been doing this now for about six years and filming the handball Academy look at their landing technique. And it's actually we've had a lot less ACL injuries in those last six years, which I think definitely this has been part of the education system and working with them proactively to reduce this injury. So that's been really great, but what happens is the athletes coming to the lab, they land from 30 centimeters they know in is looking at my knees I need to do well. But some athletes still struggle but we actually want to see can we move this type of screening onto the court because that's actually where the injuries occurred. So first study that we did is we did the same ACL screening but using the extent system, we actually wanted to compare the values of the two systems and two methods and see if we can actually use this presented this last year at the ISPS conference where we want to compare the data from the extent as well as our high speed video data on how we've done that to see if it was comparable. And we actually found that it was very, it was very comparable so we can use the extent system to do some applied measurements in the field. And when you're working in the elite environment these straps are actually fantastic because you are ready to go very quickly. There's not much calibration and you can actually choose just to do one leg or just do the bottom limbs instead of doing a full, full markup. We've taken this actually a step further, as we know that this was a valid way to do that. And we developed a landing sport specific task for team handball to see if we can simulate when an ACL injury may occur. In this video here on the right, there's some cutting movement, there's a reactive movement that the athlete has to do. They don't have arms in the sandwich mark, it looks a bit strange. And this is actually one of the papers that will be presented at the virtual ISPS conference this is coming summer. Make sure that if you're interested in that that you can look that up. What we actually found is that there were significant, we only had four athletes and four part of the academy, significant between player differences for all the joint angles, not only in the initial contact, but also for the range of motion. And there was a huge variety of the landing strategies that they use, which really gave start questioning if the stuff we were doing in the lab was really representative of what could potentially happen in the field. A few years ago, we had one of the master projects, which I mentioned, and we wanted to see if we can improve the landing kinematics of these athletes. And what we did with the academy, we actually had a total of 16 girls participate. And half of them were just put into a control group. And the other half were given some video feedback of their landing technique using this pictures here on the left, where the red outline is after they've landed this was their landing technique and just with that overlay, if they could themselves figure out what they needed to do to improve their performance. So here we looked at the sagittal plane kinematics. And so the red bar, the black bar, sorry, is the pretests for each of the kinematics. And what you see with the video group for the from the hip, the knee and the ankle is that those that were provided this video so that we didn't explicitly say anything just they themselves were to watch the video. They actually improved their range of motion in those joints. So we improved the hip, the knee and ankle flexion angles, which indicated a safer landing technique and using this overlay visual feedback between the athletes really enjoyed doing the study. We also showed that it was an effective method to improve the landing kinematics, which was a nice step forward. Another injury I'd like to talk about which is quite prevalent in the elite environment is jumpers knee or the teletanopathy. This was actually the topic of my PhD. So something that I studied for quite a long time. So this injury occurred is an overuse injury. So they're very different to the ACL. This is an overuse due to an accumulation of load that the athletes cannot absorb. They have either low tolerance or also low recovery time from the last training session. And it's also because of the high knee loading during the landing and in volleyball, it's primarily the middle blockers who do a lot of jumps who are susceptible to injury. In fact, in volleyball, if you're a male indoor volleyball player, you have a 45% of male indoor volleyball players will get this injury at one point in their career. So it's quite substantial. So we want to know how much force goes through the tendon and it's been shown that up to seven times the body weight can go through the tenant upon the landing. So during my PhD, we want to look at is this slide step movement where they block a ball and land and then we want to calculate the forces through the patellar tendon and we use this using force plates and a 3D system. Actually did the study in Australia where we did have those facilities. And what we found is that 70% of the patellar tendon load and loading rates, we could estimate based on if someone is male. If they have high eccentric quarter step strength, did this using the iso-kinetic denominator. But there was also some really specific landing technique parameters which were related to patellar tendon loading, in particular the ankle dorsiflexion, velocity and acceleration, knee flexion and acceleration, and the trunk flexion. What we also found is that jump height not too surprisingly influences the loading. So the higher you jump, the more load goes through the tendon. One of the reasons that the really high jumpers were susceptible to the injury. This is also one of the reasons they say what we found is that men have more of the injury more than women, it's because they jump higher. Actually when we matched for jump heights, there was just as much force that went through the patellar tendon on the female players than the male players. They're really showing that female volleyball players in particular that jump high are really susceptible to sustaining this injury as well. What we further looked at the data is interesting for the applied world was really nice is a lot of the landing kinematics were in a sagittal plane. So what we've been doing here at Papandale as well is on the volleyball court and actually using a high speed camera and some markers on the athlete's lower limbs. You can get them to do a block landing and actually look at their ankle force flexion velocity and their knee and their trunk flexion and give an indication or an estimation of how much patellar tendon force was generated there without having a force plate in the ground. And it's really the natural and environment of the athlete. So moving on to the female athletes, the last six months we've put a lot of effort into the specific topics which are relevant for female athletes. So at Papandale, 49% of our athletes are female and the majority of our coaching staff and also the support staff are male. And we know that just men and women are different. So about six months ago we started doing workshops for the staff and athletes separately. And we do this separately to also provide a safe environment for the female athletes that they could share their ideas or questions and ask us questions without having their coach next to them, for example. And it's been been doing these for quite a few years more in general where I've taken the female athletes aside and talked about sports bras to explain to them the science, the biomechanics behind sports bras. How do you put the sports bra and why is it important? This is the great research that's come out of Australia and also the UK. And it's nice to see that some of the International Olympic committees are taking the serious things. So that actually Team Belgium had, have teamed up with a lingerie company and also university to make specific athlete specific bras as part of their Olympic kit to take to Tokyo. Where every female athlete would get two bras, specific sports bras, which were useful, were important for them to take with them to the kit, which was really great. I know that in England as well they've had some fitting sessions to help female athletes find the right sports bra. And recently there's been some great research from the group from Brisbane's group looking at breast injuries, and particular in contact sports, female contact sports, but also in many other ends. And this is an area that's still not really investigated. But what I think is really interesting as a sport scientist is this is the table of the participants who had negative performance effects because of their contact breast injuries. And what's interesting if you look here is that some athletes quote that they have they're less likely to die or tackle because of an injury. They're unable to run comfortably, less confidence, less likely to die because fear of getting an injury and the performance is affected. So not only is this still a bit of a taboo topic to talk about. We've known she's shown as well that athletes aren't reporting these injuries. I think a sport sciences is really important to make coaches aware that this is something that can affect performance and for a scientist to be aware of this as well. And the other topic that we've been discussing a lot is the menstrual cycle. For the last 12 months, this has gained a lot of media attention, which has been fantastic looking at how peer tracking can really help female athletes. And the English Institute of Sports has shown that they had 82% of exercising females and never learned the influence of the menstrual cycle on performance. However, 66% of athletes had symptoms such as lower coordination reaction time recovery and sleep, which again a sport science is really important to be able to see how athletes are responding to this so we can actually promote this and and optimize it as much as possible. In the England, they said the menstrual cycle is not part of the coach training. In the Netherlands, it is not either. And I know for myself, I did not have it as part of my sport science training. I hear a few universities in the Netherlands is the same. The same is true as well that if you're doing a masters in sport science, you do not discuss the menstrual cycle and performance. So I think that's definitely some some steps that we can take in the future. What's really nice to see is that the Bristol City Women's Football Club has aligned with one of the universities and Dr. Andrew Green, a biomechanist in the UK, looking at in particular ACL injuries and how this can happen during specific parts of the menstrual cycle. So they're looking at the strength during the cycle, but also that these different and flexibility to see if they can use that and criteria in terms of their injury prevention work. So now I'd like to move on to some some case studies and some of the daily work that happens. And here's an example from the BMX starts. And I had the coach come to me and say, yeah, what's the relationship between the start technique of the BMX and performance. Sometimes the questions are quite broad like this as the BMX sport is not very well known to a lot of people. I'd like to show just a video of one of the races that was conducted here in Papandale, which is one of the official World Cup circuits and give you an idea of how dynamic the sport is. All righty, people, please don't blink because you might just miss something. Fantastic riders gone down. But look at Nick Kiman from game number eight. His history about to repeat itself. He's in there in one. That looks like Doday in two. Roman May is in there in three. Andre's in four. But Nick Kiman looks like he's about to repeat history, Jason. Nick Kiman just having a scorcher of a day hoping to take it to the line all the way in front. Doday trying to make up some ground on him. Actually, Nick Kiman, though, just flying with a bunch of Frenchmen, a legion of Frenchmen behind him. Doday making the charge to the line, though, it's going to be Kiman, Doday, Andre. Of course, the Dutch rider won that race. Otherwise, I wouldn't show that video. But if you take that same video and freeze the frame after two pedal strokes, what you can actually see the rider all the way on the left is of the Dutch rider who won the race. And this is the second pedal stroke into the race, and he's already ahead. And actually, what's been shown in some other research is that a good fast start is really important for good overall performance. And specifically, if you're in the top three after eight seconds, you're likely to be in the top three at the end of the race. And the reason for this, if you have a good fast start, not only can you pick the favorable lines and other athletes have to ride around you, but you can try to avoid some of those collisions as you saw in that video as well, that collisions happen quite a lot in this sport. So what we want to do is find the relationship between the start. And we took three of the riders, some of the Elita BMXers, and what's nice is that, again, it's a case study. And with ISPS, you can actually present these kind of case studies of an NS4. And these are three of our best riders. And what we had them do is we just, this is our, the starting hill at Papandale. We have a specific training hill instead of just the big supercross hill. And it's the same inclination as the hill. And what you see is that there's a traffic light, and they need to respond to that. So we put some markers just with some tape, some sagittal plain markers, and had them do six trials. We then digitized the bike and the lift hit markers and looking at the set position that they used, but then also how they moved throughout the race. I measured some other variables. I won't go into them now, but if you're interested in that, you can have a look at the abstract from ISPS. And I think there'll also be a link at the end of the presentation for these papers. Our performance criteria was actually how far did the rider get after one second after the green light times. As you can see, they actually start moving even before the gate drops. And it's a lot of reaction time that has, that's really important to this and how they're able to move. So we want to know if these riders all race against each other, what did we find, who was best. When compared to the three cyclists, what I actually found is cyclists A had a very different knee flexion angle in their, the lead and the trail leg, which was very different to the others. And they actually indicated that his pelvis had to be rotated. And eventually he's actually using this pelvis with getting the angular momentum at that start to, in that start to get forward. And something we have to be aware of is that could put a lot of load on his lower back. Interesting as well, we know that a lower trunk flexion is much on other literature that be really important and there was significant differences in these trunk flexion angles. If you actually put all the riders next to each other and see if they were at the same time who could get the furthest then cyclists A would actually win this race. Cyclists C would be three centimeters behind them and cyclists B would be nine centimeters behind them nine centimeters doesn't sound like a lot. But if you think back to that first video or of the race, that is enough for you to get your tire in front of the other rider and actually get that favorable line. So we've taken this a step further now and using the XN suit we wanted to get some 3D kinematics of the riders. So if those of you that aren't familiar, this is a 3D full body suits that riders wear and the pelvis is our fixed segment. So that's why it looks very strange and he's not going anywhere. So we're now looking in in 3D what the what the athlete is doing and can actually have them on the on the starting map and be able to compare that to get a bit more insight. See that sometimes coach comes to me and the questions aren't as as clear. So here's a case study with the long jump that the coach says yeah something's not right with the takeoff of the long jump and that's as much information as you can get. And in this case we know from in track and field mathematics there's a lot of information available on the internet what elite athletes do is the IWF or now world athletics. There's a lot of biomechanical analysis at competitions and they get published, which is very handy. We know that internationally, when you take off that you're the horizontal velocities about nine meters per second and vertical velocities about three meters per second. So we tested this athletes and his horizontal takeoff velocity was 8.4 meters per second. So that wasn't too bad, but his vertical velocity was way low was only 1.72 meters per second. There was something going on there in his vertical velocity which which seems to be happening. We actually did is that a lot of the times in athletics or track and field the coach stands on the side and you see the sagittal view of the athletes. What I actually wanted to do is put a camera get a frontal view, and then we zoomed in a lot. So this is in our training hall so this is athletes running towards the long jump pit. I've zoomed in quite a bit to get this view. So this is him coming towards the long jump pit. So this is his left leg and the subsequent right leg left, right, and then he has another left step before he has his takeoff with his right leg. Now some of you may see what might be a reason why his vertical velocity is lower. Others might need a this red line might help a little bit succeed in the first and the third photo that when he's on his left leg his hips are really are square and his upper and the shoulders are square. However, when he's on his right foot. On the second and the fourth frame his left leg lift hip drops down and to compensate for that he rotates his upper body. What we know is if you stand on one side of your leg and you have a weak loop medias. You actually drop down on the other side so normal or normal strength of the media stand when you stand on one leg that the other leg can drop. But here what this athlete was showing is when he's standing on his right leg his right group media was too weak. And his left hip would drop down so you can imagine he's in this position to take off that you need to use energy to get back up and strength up to square and then also be able to take off. And when this is the importance to have the good relationship with the physios as well. And he had seen that in a static position this athlete didn't have any problems but it was when he was dynamic when he was running, but that was seems to be a problem. So this was a good to get this insight and this is something we monitored quite a bit afterwards, just by putting two white pieces of tape on the anterior superior iliac spine. And sometimes I would just film the athlete running towards me, and we could just quickly look and subjectively look to see how it was going with his hip and with his gluteus medias. And the last case study I'd like to show is to do with bike fitting. We have two dimensional force pedals available, and those that aren't familiar give a little bit of background. So if we have the crank here and the force pedal, the forces that are generated or help with propulsion, which are tangential to the crank are called the effective force. And the ones that come along the crank are called the unused force combination of these force give you the total force. So in this picture here this is when we're looking at so that effective force to help with the propulsion. If this is one pedal stroke. If you start at zero degrees this would be 90 180 and go go around so in this circle is our standard circle the further this line is here so this is the left and right separately the more force the athlete is able to generate which is really good. And but on this side the closer it is into to this side of the line that's actually a negative force which we actually don't want. So this is just an example of a very an ideal force. But what it also gives us is the crank angles gives an indication where's the peak force for the left and the right leg, and where along the crank angles that occur. But during the down stroke so this is a propulsive phase so you it's desirable to generate the high amount of effective force, but also minimize this the negative force in the stroke. When combined those together, the total force it actually gives an indication of the direction that the force is being pushed. So here you can see at the 90 degrees that forces here are tangential to the crank which is exactly what you want. And you don't want them to be pushed forward too much. So this is the case study of a Paralympic cyclist, and the coach want to know what's the optimal bike position for her because she has cerebral palsy, and she actually has her left leg is shorter than her right leg. And they've been playing with different crank lines, and also using different plates underneath the shoe. See if that could make a difference. So in the position that what's often recommended in back position bike fitting is that your table curiosity should be in front of the pedal still spindle. And what we did is to put the force pedals on there to see how the force profile of then what we saw here on the effective force is here this is her left leg and her right leg so in the right leg. This is the propulsive parts which is great this is what we want when the left leg is generating less force which is not too surprising considering that she has Cp on the left side. You see here the left and right differences again the left leg is not able to generate as much force. But when you look at the force direction the total force here when you're at the propulsion parts we want to be pushing down for the pedal she's actually pushing forward quite a bit, which is not helping her propulsion at all. So we actually did is move the saddle backwards. And so now the table to Rossi is in line with the pedal spindle. And what we saw here again that her right leg generates more effective force than her left leg. We're going to fix that right away, but in both might be a bit small to see, but whereas here this is a the right leg is 200 newtons and left leg is about 100 is now up to 250 newtons with her right and 150 newtons with the left. So that's already something quite positive. We have a more positive when you look at the direction of the force at the propulsion part she's able to push down into the direction of propulsion as you'd want. So by moving the saddle back that improvements in the effective force and the effective force and the total force were more in a favorable direction during the propulsive phase. So at the bottom of the pedal stroke, which is here we actually saw a difference in the left and right leg. That didn't seem to change much. But the left leg was able to pedal through the bottom that send a more effectively back instead of pushing backwards before, but still not ideal but it actually helped us get a little bit more insight and improve her position so she's able to be more productive with her force So to bring it all together so sports by mechanics in an Olympic setting so whereas the specialist or the academics are often very specialist in one topic. Our role I see our role as a lot more generalists where we have to know a lot about a lot of different topics. And if we don't know a lot about a certain topic we have to be able to and do with going to the literature and learn about force federal learn about Paralympic athletes. So we're able to apply those specific biomechanics which are actually useful for that coach. And at the elite level we really have a lot of case studies and not only the able bodied but definitely the Paralympic athletes are and is one they're really case studies. Recently working with that para cyclist and he's a hand biker reaction sit and use your hands to cramp but he has a left leg amputation. If you look in the literature for the optimal hand bike setup for some of the left leg amputation they're not going to find it. And that's why we have to do a lot of trial and error and we look at them as a case study to see how we can improve their performance. Because in general I actually our goal is just the medals and that's what we work towards the medals at the Tokyo Olympic and the Paralympic Games and also further on from that. I'd like to thank you for your attention I hope that you found some of the case studies useful and interesting and I realized that I went through them a bit quickly and if you'd like more in details about any of the studies feel free to get in touch with me. Brilliant thanks Ina. Is that your car in the top right corner? I wish. Now that looks, I don't think my husband would let me do that. Brilliant thank you. Just if anyone has any questions for Ina then if you use the live chat box on YouTube at the moment then I'll pass those on. While I wait for the feed to kind of catch up just one thing I wanted was following on from the specialist versus generalist idea. If there's anybody watching this that thinks yeah like I'm studying sports science I enjoy biomechanics this is exactly what I want to do with my life and with my career. Do you have any advice for somebody that wants to end up as a applied biomechanist? Yeah that's how I started and I think volunteer I know this has been talked about quite a bit that's how I got my foot in the door really volunteering at competitions to help collect data. It starts very simple of just holding a video camera but when we're now still doing analysis at competitions I still have to hold the video camera to get that data. So definitely try to volunteer as much as you can and be open to different sports. I was never involved in BMX or Paralympic sports but you get a chance to learn about them and to be open to them. So don't try not to be pigeonholed in I really want to work in football I really want to work in baseball. I think it's good to get a breath of different sports and it's been what's really great about this environment is that we learned from each other with the sports. So something we've used with for example the jumpers knee and volleyball we're seeing some jumpers knees issues now in handball as well. We're actually able to apply what we've been doing there into another sport. So that's been that's been really good just thinking outside your own specific sport but looking more at the breath sport in general. Okay brilliant thanks for that. Got the first question through on YouTube which is just asking what did you use to measure the speed in long jumpers so was it on Quintet? Yeah yeah so just using cat markers and using high-speed cameras so even with the Kinovia the freeware you can do some digitizing as well. We use Quintet because it does automatic digitizing for me so I like that. And it gives that was that reflection but definitely there's some other good software out there that you can use to do the manual or automatic digitizing to get the schedule playing kinematics. Okay yeah another sticking on this theme of kind of applied biomechanics compared to more traditional research biomechanics maybe. Something I'm really interested in is communication or scientific communication. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your experiences of communicating biomechanics with athletes and coaches, whether you've got any advice or any examples around that topic. Yeah that's a challenging one. It's definitely hard because the biomechanical principles that we learn then you can't use those words with coaches. And for me it was a bit more of a challenge because in the Netherlands so we do everything in Dutch and I did all my training in English so I actually had to learn what all those biomechanical terms were in Dutch. But it's a lot of relationship with the coaches, understanding what they want, what's important to them and using their language. But on the other hand I think part of our role is also to educate the coaches and even though they've never learned what the force focused on for example power. I've been in cycling club talking about power but I am now talking to them about work and force. They're trying to explain to them why that's okay. They can move away from power and what the differences between work and force. But I give them the basic information they want while in the background. I can do my more in depth analysis and but I think just don't overload the coaches with obviously formulas, they don't like formulas. Really straight to the point reports, not 10 pages and quick and being able to discuss it with them that's in this environment. We have a fantastic setup where we have a restaurant or a cafe where everyone has lunch so we have the athletes and the coaches and the sports staff. So a lot of the times I'll just have a really informal chat to the coach during lunch or while I'm getting coffee about a report or result. Those informal connections that I think make the difference. Yeah biomechanics and food sounds like my ideal combination to be honest so yeah that sounds great to me. I think yeah it's another thing I know we spoke about it a little bit before we went on air so to speak but just with you being in an applied setting. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the challenges with the current pandemic and the kind of return to play return to training and just whether that's had any impact on you as a biomechanist and how it's changing your day to day role really. Yeah definitely. This is my first week back after being at home for 10 weeks and actually our center was completely closed for I believe seven weeks. But a lot of athletes were still training at home from what I hear from the coaches most athletes were able to keep their fitness and do a lot of stuff at home. A lot of strength conditioning equipment was delivered to people's houses so they could do stuff in the garage luckily we're in a small country where you can get to everyone in almost the same day. But a lot of monitoring what athletes are doing at home for my own work it starts to die down a bit because we weren't doing any testing so making reports or analysis was less. There was a lot more watching webinars and setting up databases to make future testing more efficient. But now this is the first week back what I mentioned we have started doing some testing again with some jumps on some profiling also some sprint testing and the athletes in terms of fitness are we're less than the last time we tested them which is not too surprising. But a big thing now as well is keeping motivation a lot of competitions have been cancelled for the rest of the season, or a lot of athletes don't know when their next competition is. So we're working with coaches to put up together either some some mock testing sessions or competition settings internally. So they have some competitions and still have that motivation to really perform well every week. Brilliant I know it's a challenge for all of us in different ways but it's just yet fascinating to hear so when I when you mentioned to me yesterday that you were back and testing athletes I was very jealous initially shocked and then jealous yeah I'd love to get back into the lab. But yeah I know just to move on a little bit but as part of is BS, I believe you're organizing a women in biomechanics event is that correct. Yeah, yeah that's true. I'm actually should have said this disclaimer I'm actually a vice president of research and products projects for is BS at the moment. And one, what we've been working on is the women in sports biomechanics group, and there's also a Facebook group already where where we try to support each other, or share ideas or share problems that we have. And we're putting together an online events during the virtual is this conference in July, where we'll have speakers at different stages in their careers PhD students, early researchers, also senior academics, someone from industry, talk about the challenges of being a female in sport but also the positives. Not only the next but how we can support each other. And on top of that, that's a photo of my daughter on the bottom right there. The more of an informal group of mothers in sports biomechanics to see how at the upcoming conferences we can support mothers going to the conferences either financially or by providing breastfeeding areas or childcare during the conference. That's something that I think is really important and we really want to keep that engagement with the female members to support them as much as we can. If anyone's interested in that feel free to get in touch with me and more information about these events will be on the website for the virtual conference in July. Perfect. I think yeah that's really impressive and something I know from being involved in IFPS something I'm really proud that the society is actually doing so I'm really well done on that. And if anyone wants to get in touch with Ena the contact details are on the slide now. And then do you have is there another slide with the schedule. Yeah, so yeah just before we go just obviously have a look at all of the previous weeks if there's anything you want to catch up on. But there's just a rough schedule there every Thursday for the next few weeks and what's coming up if you're interested in any of those and keep an eye out both on YouTube and on social media. And as well as I said before, if you subscribe on YouTube and click on the bell icon, you should get a notification whenever something else is programmed or something else is due to go out live. So I'll hopefully help you stay in touch as well. Take care everyone stay safe and hopefully see you again next week. Thanks a lot.