The body is a complex system. Reflecting on aches and pains experienced before and after my recent foot injury has brought me to a new realization. It is highly likely that physical indicators were visible in my court movement and stroke mechanics for some time prior to my current injury. It is possible that artificial intelligence video analysis systems might soon be able to identify biomechanical breakdowns and warn of potential significant injury. I think this could happen within the next decade.
Rolling Back the Clock
Last week I had to take a business trip on crutches for a speaking engagement at a trade show. While my injured foot was (relatively) fine, by the second day of the conference I was experiencing muscle pains in other parts of my body. In particular, my left obliques were very sore. That side of my body was clearly compensating to keep weight off my injured right foot.
I had experienced isolated muscle soreness in my left obliques on exactly one previous occasion. It was about a month ago, while playing tennis. In other words, shortly before my foot popped, my body was probably already compensating to keep weight off that foot.
Turning the clock back even further, last November in “Massage Ball on a String” I wrote about biomechanical issues I had noticed in myself in video of a cooperative volley drill featured in “That Hits the Spot.” I was shocked to discover that I was holding my arm way too close to my body on my forehand and that I was rotating my hip up and off the ball when hitting forehands.
At the time, I wondered if that was an early sign of recurrence of an old shoulder injury and subconscious modification of my mechanics to avoid arm pain. Another potential root cause that I did not consider at the time was that I was pulling up to keep weight off my right foot when striking the ball. That now seems a lot more plausible.
I am now wondering if many of the biomechanical issues I have been experiencing over the past few months were all side effects of the emerging problem with my foot. I suspect that it will now clearly be visible to me as I review video of myself leading into the injury. Hindsight is 20-20.
Video and Artificial Intelligence
It has been awhile since I wrote about SwingVision, but my appreciation of the technology continues to grow. I am particularly impressed with how the application uses artificial intelligence to recognize players, keep score, and analyze shots. I cannot emphasize enough how helpful and transformational SwingVision has been to my own personal tennis training.
SwingVision is getting pretty good at identifying me on the video that it analyzes. The improvement is apparent in the player tagging process for each session. At some point in the future, it is possible that SwingVision could compare data of a player taken across multiple sessions to identify changes in stroke mechanics. It seems to be in line with the natural evolution of how artificial intelligence could be further leveraged for personal tennis improvement.
Another related feature that could be available even sooner is analysis of specific aspects of stroke mechanics. For example, it would be relatively straight forward to analyze service toss height and location for consistency. Such a feature would be very much in line with the current metrics that SwingVision already provides.
I have derived tremendous value from use of the SwingVision application. The company is aggressively pursuing new features and pushing the state of the art of the technology behind it. While biomedical diagnostics is only future possibility, subscribing to SwingVision provides the revenue stream for the company to continue to push the envelope.
In the meantime, I am am adding “check for biomechanical issues” to my personal checklist of video review.
 | Fiend at Court readers get a 30 day free trial of SwingVision when you sign up through this link. |
