Pitcher Matt Soren pitches under 16 motion-capture cameras at the Motus Global biomechanics lab in Garden City, N.Y. (Photo by Joe Lemire)
GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — Sharing space with a physical therapy center is an open-plan fitness center as big as an airplane hangar and brimming with activity. While a rehabbing NFL player did deadlifts in the center of the facility, off to the corner stood a former minor league pitcher toeing the rubber of a high-density foam, turf-covered mound as part of Motus Global’s advanced biomechanics lab.
Affixed to Matt Soren’s 6-foot-5 frame are 54 motion-capture markers and six Motus sensors tracking his movement under 16 Raptor-E cameras. Soren, a righty who pitched a year in the Philadelphia Phillies organization before playing for a few independent league clubs, threw 20 pitches — 10 fastballs, five sliders, five changeups — and then went through the paces of a standard mobility assessment, a more comprehensive evaluation than is possible from just the sleeve wearable for which Motus is best known.
A Long Island native who pitched for the local Ducks (where Los Angeles Dodgers left-hander Rich Hill recently resurrected his career), the 26-year-old Soren has a mid-90s fastball and a potent but erratic slider. A stick-figure skeleton appears on the laptop shadowing Soren’s motions. The collected data is sent to the cloud where angles are generated and asymmetries identified, before suggesting corrective exercises.
“Any way I can get more consistency in my release point, in my swing back or whatever they see, I’m ready to change up because this is the last effort,” Soren said, adding: “I can’t figure it out just by throwing a million bullpens. I mean, you can do it, but when you have actual science behind it, it’s facts, not just my opinion on what I think I can do to get better.”
Motus’ primary objective is to personalize athlete training through the use of objective biomechanics data. In addition to its array of sport- and position-specific inventory — for baseball pitchers, football quarterbacks, cricket bowlers and, soon-to-released, volleyball players — the company offers a four-sensor motusONE shirt. A more comprehensive six-sensor version, which includes two additional chips to track leg and hip movements, is in the research-and-development phase. (The sensors communicate via Bluetooth technology and, while Motus’ technology could accommodate more chips, iOS apps currently limit connections to six.)
“Our goal is to bring this lab to the field through our technology,” Motus sales and marketing vice president Bryan Goelz, a former minor league ballplayer, said.
While that effort is farther down the company’s projected timeline, two other initiatives will be underway this spring, including enhanced machine learning capabilities in the app to produce a pitcher’s readiness score and the launch of the motusCOMBINE, a collection of sport-specific physical tests to discern an athlete’s mobility, power, speed, agility and mechanics. (As a Motus engineer explained the advanced data that would be collected, Soren joked, “Can you guys make me lefty? That would be groundbreaking.”)
The combine draws on both the wearable tech and the recently relocated biomechanics lab which, since 2012, had been stationed at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. Motus moved it northward to be closer to the home office on Long Island and for work exposure to new populations, as the company expands into non-sports markets like home health-care, physical therapy and workplace safety. The director of the on-site performance center at the Garden City Professional Physical Therapy, Dean Maddalone, also expressed his interest in the research for designing better return-to-play and return-to-work protocols for patients.
The athletes undergoing the first combine assessments were a team of 12-and-under Little Leaguers, who will be playing on up to three travel ball teams this summer. The players were went through the combine last weekend, will have weekly motusONE screens on their shoulder, trunk and hip mobility and wear the motusTHROW at all times, beginning a three-year longitudinal study of arm health.
“We’re going to understand that workload perspective for kids who are on multiple teams, which we know is a major risk factor for overuse and injuries and at the youth level,” Motus chief technology officer Ben Hansen said.
Recent research conducted using the Motus sleeves by sports physical therapist Sameer Mehta found that an increase of a player’s acute-to-chronic workload ratio (ACWR) of more than 30 percent made athletes about 15 times more likely to be injured. This research is powering the app readiness score and will be tracked closely in the Little Leaguers.
Hansen said that these “dynamic averages of workload” — much more so than, say, a pitch count — are a better indicator of risk, hypothesizing that high ACWRs coupled with mobility issues lead to injuries. He noted that the data they’ve collected has shown decreases in internal shoulder rotation as the season progresses, probably due to inflammation and scar tissue; another joint, such as the elbow, has to compensate for that diminished mobility.
As pitchers at all levels ramp up their preseason training to get ready for another season this spring, everyone is starting with a chronic workload near zero. Slow, incremental gains seems safest, but as Hansen noted, even the standard interval throwing program can lead to a high ACWR.
“We find that a lot of people don’t have good control over that if they can’t see it,” Hansen said, adding: “It’s just phenomenal how, unwittingly, so many pitchers are putting themselves in fatigue scenarios when they could be using this feedback to dial it down or progress in a more informed way.”
Motus hopes the work done at this lab collecting data and validating products will serve athletes at all stages of their sporting pursuits, from the Little Leaguers just starting out to the veterans giving it one last go.
“I couldn’t live life just giving it one more go, you know?” Soren said. “I’ll always have that to fall back on, and we’ll see where it goes.”
