Doing more. Much more.
We are already going to extreme lengths to protect the health and integrity of our athletes. The medical teams, physical therapists and overall teams of physicians that work with sportsmen are the finest in the world. Whenever a famous athlete gets hurt, clubs will finance their access to doctors and surgeons that are almost as famous as they are!
But we still need to do more.
We need to make sure we prevent pain and hurt before it even happens. We need to detect the kind of behaviors and movements that players are performing that are increasing the risk of injury.
Especially because not all athletes get access to elite healthcare. The vast majority of sporting hours are performed by children, not adults, let alone professionals.
Here goes a stats dump:
- Each year, over 38 million children and adolescents participate in some sports in the U.S.
- Over 3.5 million children under the age of fifteen receive medical treatment due to sports injuries.
- 62% of injuries from organized sports occur during practice, not games. According to a national survey, 27% of parents don’t always take the same safety precautions during practice as in games.
- The most common cause of sports-related death is traumatic brain injury; sports and recreation account for one out of five TBIs in children.
- Sprains (usually ankle) are the most common sports-related injury in children.
Young athletes are getting hurt in ways that are preventable
ESPN recently published a massive investigation piece on why NBA athletes are getting hurt more often and with more severity.
We recommend you read it, because it really does shine a spotlight on why players like Joel Embiid, Blake Griffin or Zion Williamson, true superstars, have missed entire seasons of basketball before even making their debut as rookies.
Of course there’s not just one reason, but there are three main issues why we are witnessing more injuries, and more serious ones:
- Kids are playing a lot more organised matches. A typical NBA recruit in 2021 will have close to 1000 matches (the equivalent of 12 NBA seasons) on his legs when he enters the league. This didn’t use to be the case. Players like Kobe Bryant only started playing organised basketball in high-school.
- Kids are specialising earlier. The common experience for kids used to be playing a variety of sports for fun, in school or with friends, only specialising late. Allen Iverson famously captained both his basketball and football teams to Virginia state titles. This doesn’t really happen anymore, and kids tend to specialise at age seven, now.
- There is a lot more emphasis on building physical strength and speed, even at younger ages, for competitive young athletes. It is now normal to see high school athletes dunking the basketball and weighing in at adult levels. Doctors compare this to adding more potent engines to the same chassis.
What this means is simple: players are putting more stress on their bodies, and repeating the same specific movements more and more as they specialise. And they are being pushed into doing it with more strength and speed.
It’s the Performance Paradox, and here’s how it’s described:
«Simply put: Today’s players are faster, stronger and more athletic, the product of years of weight training, speed training, vertical jump training, skills training. But the brakes, the suspension — their ankles, hips and core — while often neglected, remain tasked with enduring the brunt of the body’s force. “We would joke that half of these athletes are so good that they could almost out-jump their ability to land,” says Blase, who is now Fusionetics’ director of professional and collegiate team services. Says Clark, “All the specialization is helping the player become more skillful and more powerful and more athletic, but at the same time they’re not working on the things that prevent injuries and help them recover.”»
There’s not a lot a doctor can do about this.
AI can save the day
AI can, though.
Have you seen what we are working on? Check out our MVP here and test it yourself.
What our technology does is perfectly track the movement of what it “sees” on a video. The AI can analyse movement, and perfectly interpret what every part of the users body is doing. We have programmed it for a simple task right now, because this is only at an alpha stage of development: it’s evaluating how good people are at performing football tricks.
That seems like just a fun little game, right?
But it can do anything else just as well. All you have to do is teach it what to look for.
We have written recently about how our AI’s superior capacity to identify the movements of athletes could help referee the Olympics.
Well, it can do this too.
Working in tandem with doctors, sports scientists, and anyone who fully understands the mechanics of repetitive motions, and their consequences for the bodies of young athletes, AI can track what players do during matches and practices and figure out what movements they are doing that are putting excessive pressure on specific spots.
This will help training staff and the athletes themselves correct what they are doing and adapt best practices to prevent injury and spare their bodies.
It will also allow doctors to get accurate statistics on what the body is being put through and run specific tests to assess damage before an injury occurs.
AI is the next step in sports evolution.
We are building the future of the world we love.
Won’t you join us?
