ATHLETE SPOTLIGHT: VIKA, PART I
Part I of this three-part series by Hungry Fan guest contributor, Kurt Brungardt.
P3 Peak Performance Center, Santa Barbara, CA: November 12, 2014
Dressed in Nike shorts, t-shirt, and basketball shoes — I watch Victoria Azarenka’s ponytail whip in all directions, as she explodes to her left, then to her right. The power of her lateral drive is registered on force plates and fed into a computer, while her movements are videoed by 10 high-speed cameras to capture a 360-degree view. It looks like she’s making a Gatorade commercial, except nothing that is being shot today is for public consumption. In the athletic world, the information being collected is considered top secret.
She’s doing a test called the, “one-off lateral skater.” Azarenka, aka, Vika, is going through a movement assessment at P3 Peak Performance Center. The data will give a detailed picture — the strengths and weaknesses — of how her body moves.
Vika has come to P3 as part of her quest to solve the injury quagmire that wrecked her 2014 season, ending her dominant two-year run. In the span of these two years, starting in 2012, Vika won the Australian Open twice, held the No. 1 spot for 51 weeks, won two medals at the London Olympics, and set a single-season women’s record for prize money ($7.9 million). In preparation for 2015, she made a deep commitment — mind, body, and spirit — to get back on track. Vika, in consultation with her longtime physiotherapist and osteopath, Fabrice Gautier, decided to revamp her performance team by hiring a new strength coach and consult with P3 to confirm some of the issues they’ve observed and take a deeper microscopic look.
I watch the reflective sensors — placed on her ankles, knees, hips, sternum and fourth vertebrae — shimmer as she moves. The P3 team is taking Vika through a series of tests that analyze key athletic movement patterns. The combination of 3D video and information from the force plates creates thousands of data points. All of this is done to achieve two main goals: prevent injuries and improve performance. The innovative method is the brain child of Dr. Marcus Elliott, the founder of P3. He calls the player profile he’s creating, “a movement fingerprint.”
Elliot, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, didn’t follow the typical sports science path, which emphasizes the cardiovascular, muscular, and metabolic systems. He chose to look deeply into how athletes move, focusing on the science of biomechanics. After all, sport is movement — life is movement. Athletes are described by how they move: explosive, fast, agile, a high-flyer. Elliott’s innovative process picked up speed in 2005 when he started his P3.
When Elliott’s team has completed their tests, his software will convert the information, with a Pixar-like transformation, into animation that will show Vika going through the movements as if she were literally a skeleton. With an ever-expanding database, Elliott can now flag movement dysfunctions that greatly increase an athlete’s risk of injury. As he likes to tell every athlete, “When we’re done, we’ll know everything about you.” By crunching this massive data set — joint angles, joint velocity, joint force, movement sequencing, strength and power curves, compensation patterns — Elliott can pinpoint where an athlete is likely to break down, if corrective measures aren’t taken. The idea of making predictions causes skeptics to roll their eyes, but the game-changing impact of science has always been its ability to predict outcomes.
Elliott’s interest in sports and training goes back to his early teens. His first subject was his little sister. When he was twelve, he designed workouts for her to do on their family ranch in Northern California (close to the small town of Preston and near the Russian River). “I’d create little circuit programs,” he explained with a smile, “things like: jump in the pool, touch the bottom 10 times, run around the walnut tree 5 times, do 25 jumping jacks, then push-ups.” Elliott excelled as an athlete and dreamed of being a big-time wide receiver, but at seventeen a catastrophic knee injury ended his football aspirations.
“I went from being on top of the world to being crazy depressed,” Elliott says. He still gets emotional talking about the injury. The injury pushed him to investigate ways to rehab his knee. Instead of just looking at the typical bodybuilding magazines like Muscle and Fitness, he read journals like Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, and researched the outcomes of youth ACL injuries.
Elliot’s injury changed his focus from athlete to scientist. He started his college education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, then completed medical school at Harvard, graduating in 1999. This is when Elliott faced the fork in the road moment. He decided not to do a post-grad residency. This meant he would never be a doctor. Instead, he contacted Bert Zarins, the team physician for the New England Patriots and pitched a study on why NFL players and injury prevention. Zarin’s offered him a job.
Elliott began a study investigating the large number of hamstring injuries inflicting the Patriots. He also evaluated the strength and conditioning programs of other NFL teams to determine which ones were the most effective at preventing injuries. Hamstring injuries decreased for the Patriots and Elliott went on to become a sports-science consultant for the Utah Jazz and the Seattle Mariners, where he was the Major League Baseball’s first Director of Sports Science.
I stand next to Elliott as he watches Vika do her next test, the “drop box and jump.” I look around the gym. It’s a series of ideas integrated under one roof. Athletes swing kettle bells, do squats, Olympic lifts, throw med-balls, and use high-tech Keisers machines that create resistance through air pressure. I look up and see the wiring that connects the cameras to the computer command center. It’s a smart building.
As we watch Vika do her last test, I hear my name yelled. It surprises me. Am I getting in the way of the testing? It’s Vika’s new strength coach, Mike Brungardt. He says, “Go move Vika’s car, so she won’t get a parking ticket. Her keys are in her purse. It’s the Mercedes SUV.” He says it like a command, something I can’t refuse.
Okay, now this may seem a little odd that I’m being told to go into Vika’s purse and move her car. It may also seem odd that her strength coach is ordering me around. If you noticed my byline, my last name is also Brungardt. I need to confess in the name of journalistic transparency: Mike is my older brother (and I have to do whatever he says, even it means rifling through a woman’s purse). Over the last 20-plus years I have collaborated with him on books and articles in the area of fitness and health, so this project is natural for us.
Bringing in Mike was Vika’s major tweak to her team. He does not come from a tennis background. For 17 years he was the strength and conditioning coach for the San Antonio Spurs. Vika’s team felt like they wanted to try a different approach. Gautier and Mike have a long-standing relationship. Gautier is also Tony Parker’s physiotherapist, along with other elite NBA players. They collaborated together when Mike was with the Spurs. With Vika, they’re back together again. After Vika pulled out of the Wuhan Tournament last September, it hurt her just to walk. In an intensive and daily effort, they combined their skill sets — rehabilitation and strength training — to get her to move pain free and make her stronger.
I follow orders. I go through Vika’s purse; it’s a Hello Kitty purse. I find the keys. Outside, I scan the street for Vika’s Mercedes. I smell the ocean that is just a block away. I see a BMW, an Audi, and then her Mercedes. They call Santa Barbara the American Riviera. I hop in the SUV and move her car to the other side of the street, parking next to The Fox Wine Co. This area is officially called The Funk Zone. The neighborhood is all about wine, art, food, music, and for those in the know, sports science.
I head back into P3 and put her keys back in Hello Kitty. Everyone has gathered at the computer command center. I join them. As they’re waiting for Eric Leidersdorf, a biomechanist and movement analyst at P3, to pull of Vika’s information, Elliott is on a passionate, slightly frustrated roll, (what he self-deprecatingly refers to as his soap box). He’s explaining his method: “What I do is really earthy sports science. I can show it to an athlete or his agent or his team’s trainer. I can point to the screen and say, ‘Look, you see where his lower tibia is in relation to his upper tibia? That’s not good for the middle, this point right here. That’s where his stress fracture is, right at that point. That’s what the math tells us.’ I can walk away from the computer screen, go over to the athlete and put my finger right on that spot on his tibia. The athlete will wince. Then I explain that he only does this movement sequence on that leg. That’s why the other leg is fine. And most importantly, I can fix it, so it won’t happen again.”
Leidersdorf (a Stanford grad with a degree in biomechanical engineering and a former tennis player) gives the cue that he’s ready. All attention goes the computer screen. He brings up, in a single view, the video capture integrated with the information from the force plates. Vika’s team is able to see how she moves and how she applies force in those movements. So in a vertical jump, they look to see if she is pushing off both legs equally (or close to equally). They’ll look at her weight distribution when she lands. In the “one-off lateral skater” they’ll see if she’sapplying equal lateral force on each leg. They’ll examine the key moments in each movement pattern.
Even with just this first look, lots of information can be gleaned. It confirms much of what Vika’s team suspected and Elliott is giving them a deeper more detailed dive into the issues. All this information is guarded. Players and pro teams have confidentiality agreements with Elliott. Vegas would love to see this information. Elliott will crunch these numbers and give them context. Gautier and Mike will analyze the information and integrate it into Vika’s training program back at her home gym, The Yard.
