💪 Force, Force, and More Force!

• For well over a century, science has been fascinated by this equation. Before the post-industrial revolution, scientists and business owners sought to quantify this mysterious phenomenon in hopes of developing machines that could out produce the modern man or beast and develop an economic value of individual output.
• Decades later, modern athletics would see a similar fascination with Force production in the form of recruiting, hoping to evaluate and thus subsequently project future economic value. From the humble beginning of Dynamometry and Hook's Law, it is worth the read and understanding by the modern practitioner.
• As Dr. Jason Lake said simply in a HD podcast interview quoting Roger Bartlett, "Force is a pushing or pulling action that one object exerts on another. A push or pull against something, yourself, an opponent, or implement." Internal forces create external forces. On force plates we measure this Force, and it's called Ground Reaction Force.
• Very quickly one can appreciate the need for accurate measurements of Force and thus companies' obsession with creating reliable measuring tools like the original French Mathieu dynamometer of the early 19th century.
• At Hawkin Dynamics, we measure human Force output better than anyone in the world. We recently had a paper published out of the University of Salford validating the HD Force Plates against AMTI Force Plate (previous industry standard). Check it out!

✍️ 1,577 National-Team Athletes Compared

Read the paper

Key Points:

• 588 Women and 989 Men from 44 different sport disciplines tested Countermovement Jump (CMJ) hands on hips on a force platform at the Norwegian Olympic Training Center between 1995 and 2018
• Men jumped 33% higher than women.
• The Law of Specificity? - Do vertical oriented sport athletes jump higher in the CMJ than horizontal oriented sports? In this study, the opposite is true.
• "Horizontal oriented sports displayed superior results compared with more vertically oriented and powerful sports such as beach volleyball, weightlifting, and ski jumping, both in men and women."
• No surprise here. Sprinters showed the highest jumps for both men and women (our performance team at Hawkin Dynamics has also seen this internally, working with some of the top National Sprinting Teams in the world).
• The highest CMJ hands on hips jump in the database for men was 78cm and 58cm for women.
• What is the takeaway here? For some sports, it makes sense to use jump height as your key performance indicator (i.e. sprinting, speed skating, etc). Whereas for other sports that are not strength & power sports, or those that require a lot of change of direction; jump height might not be the best KPI.
• What can I use then instead of jump height? Our performance team at Hawkin Dynamics suggests using the TSA Report to rank your athletes. View the in's and out's of the TSA Report below!

Brought to you by Trent Bassingthewait & Drake Berberet

A BETTER WAY TO RANK YOUR TEAM

Brought to you by Drake Berberet

💥TSA Report - Unique Ranking Scoreboard

• TSA stands for Total Score of Athleticism.
• The concept was originally developed by Anthony Turner and colleagues out of Middlesex University (UK) in a paper titled Total Score of Athleticism: Holistic Athlete Profiling to Enhance Decision-Making which was published in the NSCA Strength & Conditioning Journal in December of 2019.
• In short, it is a way to cluster together tests and metric you care about, and create one score to rank your athletes.
• You should include tests and metrics that fit with the population that you are looking to compare.
• For example, a Basketball population might include CMJ & Jump Height, CMJ & mRSI, IMTP & Relative Peak Force (BW), IMTP & Force at 250ms, and Drop Jump 30cm & mRSI. These were selected because basketball is a reactive sport, that also requires a level of relative strength so that athlete doesn't get pushed around in the paint.
• On the contrary, in a sport like Tennis it might not make sense to use the same inputs to compile the TSA Report because there is a much different level of physicality involved. Instead of using the IMTP for Tennis, maybe you use the CMJ Rebound and report back L/R Average Landing Force between the two CMJs, and also mRSI during the second CMJ. Now you have combinations that help tell you something about the athlete in respect to their sport (i.e. Tennis is prevalence of ACL injuries and reactivity in the sport).
• Read the TSA Report blog on our website here.

• Dr. John McMahon and University of are on 🔥. The University of Salford is a public research university in Salford, Greater Manchester, England, 1 mile west of Manchester city centre
• Leading author, Dr. John McMahon (@forceplatecoach on Instagram) and company have been publishing a massive amount of research on the Hawkin Dynamics force plates. Recently publishing "Force Plate-Derived Countermovement Jump Normative Data and Benchmarks for Professional Rugby League Players." Read the paper below.

🗣️ The Hawkin Podcast Latest: Matt Nein

Lastest Episode:

• N34: Matt Nein - Creating a Competitive Environment for Athletes to Thrive
• Matt Nein is the Assistant Director of Athletics & Campus Rec/Head Sports Performance Coach & Manager of Fitness & Facilities at Salisbury University, in Salisbury, Maryland, and has been since 2004.
• Before that, Matt was the Minor League Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. In 2018, Matt was named the National Strength & Conditioning Association College Strength Coach of the Year, an award given annually to the top strength coach across NCAA DI, DII, DIII, and NAIA divisions.
• Matt also serves on the NSCA Advisory Board for the State of Delaware, is the Chair for the NSCA Lacrosse Special Interest Group (SIG), and serves on the NSCA Honor & Awards Committee. Listen here!

🦃 Thanksgiving is Coming...

• Thanksgiving in the United States is next week! Did you know the heaviest turkey every raised was 86lbs, or a System Weight of 383.55 Newtons!

• At maturity, a wild turkey will have around 5.500 feathers. Quite an impressive Rate of Feather Development (RFD).
• The peak instantaneous values for hindlimb muscle mass power output during high accelerations in turkeys exceeded 400 W kg-1, occurred late in the stance phase, and was asymmetrical. What do you think the L/R Average Braking Force would be for a turkey?
• Wild turkeys are athletes...they can run up to 25 mph, fly up to 55 mph, plus swim & jump!
• Maine and wild turkeys. Did you know Hawkin Dynamics is headquartered in Westbrook, Maine? Here in Maine, there are an estimated 70,000 wild turkeys. They're everywhere!

😎 #HawkinFamily of the Week 

Kinetic Performance Institute (KPI) - Silicon Valley's Premier Athletic Development Hub

Checkout their website here.

• Kinetic Performance Institute - KPI for short, has been using the HD Force Plates since March of 2021. Within 5-months, they had collected over 20k jumps.
• Who is KPI? KPI is based out of Morgan Hill, California. They focus on providing technology fueled individualized training in the group training setting. They work heavily with baseball athletes for development.
• In a recent Twitter interview with Dan Cabuling, KPI Director of Strength & Conditioning and Operation opened up about how consistent testing on the force plates have allowed them monitor strength fatigue, and stress levels.
• A quote from Dan: "I know these are in the moderate-budget range, but when we adopted these I completely re-wrote our entire strength and conditioning program around these force plates."

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