In just three weeks of NFL football, some of the league's most elite players have been sidelined or nagged by injuries. The list of big-name players includes Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker Terrell Suggs, Green Bay Packers wide receiver Davante Adams and Washington Redskins wide receiver DeSean Jackson.
Injuries are inevitable in a sport that features crushing blows, demands superhuman combination of size, strength and speed, and can involve unfavorable weather conditions. Still, this season's injury rate seems unusually high, frustrating fans, fantasy team owners, players and coaches. Some industry experts have suggested that NFL needs to revisit its policies on offseason training, while teams are focusing on solutions beyond scheduling to mitigate the problem.
Patrick Whaley of TITIN Tech invented a weighted compression vest as an engineering student at Georgia Tech. Though he initially designed the product as a tool for hypergravity training, he noticed his product could prevent injuries and speed up recovery.
Increasingly, NFL teams are thinking out of the box to help their athletes heal faster. For example, players can become injured when they start working out in pads. Also during the regular season, players can only play in pads once a week. If an athlete practices most of the year with just his body weight, when he adds up to 10 pounds of padded gear to his frame, it can leave him prone to injury.
Whaley explained, "You train and go through the runs without extra weight. By the time you get to game day situations, you're operating at full speed with an 8-10 pound weight load. Pads impact agility."
Technology like Whaley's weighted vest provide players a way to practice with added weight load in a way that does not compromise form and make them vulnerable to injury. NFL teams like the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens are already using the technology to get players used to a heavier workload so the shift from unpadded to padded is not so disruptive.
Whaley used it himself when recovering from a gunshot would he suffered in 2009 while still a student. He would freeze it or put it in the microwave and wear it hot or cold while he went about his day. "The weighted compression gear can become a mobile ice bath and source of thermal therapy to allow scar tissue to remain mobile, flexible, and malleable," he explained.
Catapult sports teamed up with XOS digital to provide technology that compliments the weighted compression garment in improving player performance. The Jacksonville Jaguars and many other NFL teams are using Catapult's wearable tracking solution to monitor players' movements. Like TITN, Catapult's technology has many applications, but given the spate of injuries in the first three weeks of the NFL season, its its use for injury prevention.
Catapult's tracking system can alert coaches to precursors to injury before they are visible to the human eye, or felt by the athlete. Slight changes in gait and movement patterns can be a sign the player is fatigued and that injury is lurking. Before the start of the regular season, the New York Giants discovered their players needed a recovery day based on data gathered from the team's tracking devices.
Giants owner John Mara told ESPN, "I've certainly voiced my concern about the fact that we led the league in injuries the last two years. Nobody likes that around here, and we've made some adjustments. We're trying to pay as much attention to that as possible."
Biometric technology also allows coaches to customize workers to each players physiology and can be paired with the weighted compression vest to make sure that players safely adjust to the workload they encounter when they play football in pads. Teams can verify players are making that adjustment by taking a look at data from the tracking system.
When a player suffers an injury during the game, it isn't always because of what happened on the field in that moment. The seeds of injury can be sown by under-training, overtraining and a variety of other factors. While NFL injuries cannot be prevented, teams can help their players avoid and prevent injuries by leveraging new technologies.
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