🎥 City players tested in 3D!

Wednesday, May 18th 2022

City’s players have finished the season with a unique and innovative testing programme to improve performance and reduce the risk of injury.

The club has joined up with Altruistic to use state-of-the-art data-capturing equipment, including creating an animated 3D model of how a player moves, as well as testing muscle and Achilles tendon strength using ultrasound.

Altruistic is a leading AI and Data Science company in the HealthcareTech space, working with teams and associations globally.

A team of 10 biomechanists from London South Bank University spent two days at the Robins High Performance Centre and City’s Head of Medical Performance Dave Rennie said: “It’s massively beneficial. To have access to this equipment and the expertise along with it is of paramount importance to us.

“It gives us a different way of examining the players and reconstructing their movement patterns so we can improve that and help performance but also try and reduce our risk of injuries.”

🎥 GO BEHIND THE SCENES AT PLAYER TESTING

The data will help in the production of individual training plans for each player and Rennie added: “Already from some of the preliminary results we know we need to change track with certain individuals just to help them be as robust as they can be over the close season so that when we get to the pre-season and using those results from these tests we can try and prevent injuries during that period because that is a hugely important time for us as a club.

“The fact that the players are welcoming new ideas and starting to question their knowledge of themselves and how they can improve their own performance are real key things for us.”

Altruistic Project Director Sebastian Kunz, a consultant orthopaedic and trauma surgeon, explained: “We are testing the whole squad and assessing them in terms of function capacity and we have different stations where they do that. We have one station where we assess the motion of each player, one station where we assess the muscle quality (hamstrings and quadriceps) of each player and another where we analyse the tendon quality, specifically the Achilles tendon.”