Marathon employs a variety of tests, interventions, and services to enhance the athletic performance of individuals and teams engaged in professional, amateur competitive or recreational athletic endeavors. Our skilled and multidisciplinary team will work with you to meet your performance goals in a plan that is tailored to you or your team.
Key Services:
Functional Movement Screen
Video Gait Analysis
Blood Lactate Threshold Profile
Respiratory Efficiency Evaluation
The FMS is an assessment technique which attempts to identify imbalances in mobility and stability during fundamental movement patterns. This screen identifies areas of compensation. These movement flaws may lead to breakdown in the kinetic chain system, causing inefficiency and micro-trauma during activity.
Benefits of Utilizing the Functional Movement Screen
- Creates a functional baseline to mark progress
- Improves functional fitness and athletic performance
- Helps to reduce the potential for training and sports injuries
- Identifies physical imbalances, limitations, and weaknesses
- Improves fundamental movement patterns with simple corrective exercises
- Helps to individualize training and conditioning programs for individuals and groups
- Works to identify potential cause and effect relationships of micro-trauma as well as chronic injuries in relation to movement asymmetries and weakness
Gait is the way we move our whole body from one point to another. Gait analysis is a method used to assess the way we walk or run to highlight biomechanical abnormalities.
Being able to move efficiently is important in avoiding injuries. Having joints capable of providing sufficient movement and muscles capable of producing sufficient force is vital to generate an efficient gait cycle.
Examples of biomechanical abnormalities include:
- Overpronation
- Oversupination
- Increased Q angle
- Hip hiking – lifting the hip on one side
- Ankle equinus – limited ankle dorsiflexion
- Pelvic tilt – can be either anterior, posterior or lateral
Marathon’s Video Gait Analysis involves walking or running on a treadmill utilizing a video camera to record film of your gait cycle. This will then be viewed in slow motion and freeze frames to carefully assess your running or walking style.
Completing a Video Gait Analysis will:
- Identify inefficient running patterns
- Address compensations due to muscle imbalances
- Provide instruction on improving gait
- Recommend corrective exercises and stretches specific to your gait pattern
Blood Lactate Threshold Profile
The Blood Lactate Test is the gold standard used by elite endurance athletes to determine optimal training intensities and is the most effective way to track the progress of cardiovascular training.
Lactate is a metabolic by-product of muscle metabolism. Research suggests that blood lactate response to exercise is a better predictor of endurance performance than VO2 max (Bishop et al, 1998). Measuring the response of other physiological markers during exercise, such as blood lactate data and an estimation of velocity or load and heart rate at lactate threshold, are common practice in laboratory and field-based settings to examine the effects of training on aerobic fitness and to recommend appropriate training intensities.
A lactate threshold test is conducted on treadmill or computrainer. A gradually increase the speed or wattage occurs every three minutes. After each three-minute stage, blood is taken from a finger prick and the blood lactate and heart rate are recorded. This process continues until a significant increase in blood lactate is observed from one stage to the next (lactate threshold).
Blood Lactate testing provides heart rate training zones based on your lactate threshold and is helpful at all levels and stages of training. Testing done at the beginning of your season or when you are starting helps to guide your training. Testing done throughout your training ensures that you are progressing and improving.
Respiratory Efficiency Evaluation
A respiratory efficiency evaluation integrates the knowledge of respiratory chemistry with the mechanics of breathing. Identifying respiratory deficiencies and applying training techniques will allow you to perform at your greatest potential.
Oxygen concentration and glucose supply in the brain can be reduced by 50% through decreased blood flow as a result of CO2 deficit. Further, the blood alkalosis means that hemoglobin is less inclined to distribute oxygen actually present in the brain. Thus, together the net effect of reduced blood flow and disinclined hemoglobin is a major reduction in oxygen supply.
Compromising the blood buffering system (i.e., reduced capacity to regulate acidosis) means reduced physical capacity and endurance, ranging from limiting athletes in their pursuit of achieving peak levels of physical performance, to contributing to the incapacitation of individuals with fatigue and unable to perform the simplest of tasks without exhausting their supply of buffers.