For the last decade, the most innovative performance programs have closely measured and monitored athlete peak force. This shows the capacity of a muscle to create an action with force so you can see, with clear visuals, when a muscle is fatigued.
Athletes have a five-second window to generate as much force as possible so we can understand their peak, with the idea being that you can monitor improvements in isokinetic strength but also have baselines in place to safely return an athlete to competition and mitigate the risk of injury in the first place.
The downside to only measuring peak force, however, is that we can see that the athlete hit a certain point of peak force, but we can’t see how long it takes them to achieve it. This has two ramifications:
On the athletic profiling front, RFD is utilised to understand not only how much force an athlete can produce but also how rapidly this force can be produced. The data provide an indication of the athlete’s nervous system's ability to recruit and synchronise motor units, the muscle fibre typing of the athlete, and the stiffness of free and intramuscular tendons responsible for force transfer from the muscle to the bone.
These qualities affect the RFD of any athlete on any test and, therefore, have ramifications for how the athlete performs and how likely they are to sustain certain types of injury.
In terms of athlete monitoring or neuromuscular recovery, RFD has the potential to be more sensitive to how fatigued an athlete is than measures of peak force alone. This is certainly the case for those athletes who, when fatigued, can still produce similar peak forces but struggle to do so as rapidly.
So, while peak force has been measured for quite some time to determine when athletes are sufficiently strong, adequately recovered, and ready to play / train post-injury, RFD has enormous potential to inform the clinician with additional granularity as to athlete type, injury risk, and recovery.
Moreover, by understanding the temporal and spatial characteristics of the rate of force development, the relative biomechanical properties of the musculotendinous unit (e.g., tendon and intramuscular tendon stiffness) involved in any specific test can be analysed, and injury re-injury risk related to tendon properties can be mitigated.
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