GROIN INJURY CAPTURED BY STRIVE
The STRIVE Performance System is designed to assess muscle function, optimize performance, and quantify movement strategies. By collecting both muscle and movement data, STRIVE is able to contextualize what you accomplished and the effort required.
STRIVE provides athletes with insights to not only keep them performing at their best, but also help identify potential injury risks. In a recent case, STRIVE was monitoring a professional athlete when he started to trend in a direction that signaled he was becoming less efficient throughout his week of training.
Unfortunately, later in the week this athlete was diagnosed with a groin strain.
Before we get into his particular injury, let’s go over what exactly the groin consists of, and how this affects an athletes’ movement.
Groin muscles consist of three large groups of muscles that can be injured: the abdominal, iliopsoas and the adductor muscle group. The adductors of the hip joint include six muscles: the adductor longus, magnus and brevis, gracilis, obturator externus, and pectineus.
These adductor muscles adduct the hip. And the iliopsoas performs hip flexion. These movements are associated with pivoting, lateral cutting, kicking, and twisting.
Typically injuries in the groin muscles occur due to direct blunt trauma, a singular forceful contraction, or microtrauma by repetitive injury. During an examination of an adductor strain, physical therapists often state that the patient will have weakness in the gluteus medius and gluteus maximus. This finding can be backed up by a study of professional ice hockey players (a group where groin injuries are very common) authored by Timothy F. Tyler in the American Journal of Sports Medicine.
STRIVE found the same to be true in this athletes’ data. In the days prior to injury, the athlete shows a marked reduction in glute activation which would indicate that the athlete is not utilizing the glutes in the way that he normally would. When the athlete changes strategies (glute deactivation) the adductor magnus can become the prime hip extensor. His compensation method for creating his force demands posteriorly clearly seems to include increased utilization of his hamstrings (increase by 250%) and possible adductor magnus for higher velocity work. Add in the athlete’s lateral work volume, and the adductors’ work load can increase to levels of exposure they are not accustomed to. Ideally, this is when the athlete or practitioner would use the STRIVE data to intervene and avoid potential injury.
Check out the three graphs pictured to see how STRIVE found the trends in the athletes data prior to the injury.
As you can see from this example with a professional athlete, STRIVE provides insights into knowing how athletes’ muscles are doing internally in order to accomplish a specific movement or action.
To better understand muscle exertion, STRIVE combines measurements of quads, hamstrings, and glutes to be able to compare multiple workouts and understand your progress and efficiency over time. STRIVE enables athletes to know when they might be headed in the wrong direction for improving their performance and in some cases, when they are running toward injury.
Learn more about STRIVE and how you can incorporate STRIVE into your training and programs, but reaching out today.
