Practitioner’s Advanced Guide to Force Plates
The Practitioner’s Advanced Guide to Force Plates is a comprehensive, expert‑authored manual for experienced sport‑science, strength‑and‑conditioning, physiotherapy and biomechanics practitioners. It expands on basic force‑plate testing by detailing the full testing workflow—from setup, protocol selection and data collection to advanced waveform inspection, phase delineation, and interpretation of metrics such as peak power, eccentric peak force, rate‑of‑force‑development (RFD), impulse, and asymmetry. The guide defines movement phases (unloading, braking, eccentric deceleration, concentric, flight, landing), explains accurate start‑of‑movement (SoM) detection methods, compares uniaxial vs. triaxial plates, and provides practical decision‑making frameworks for performance, rehabilitation, and return‑to‑play contexts. It includes expert commentaries, normative data, discrimination metrics for elite vs. sub‑elite athletes, sampling‑frequency recommendations, and guidance on integrating video (ForceDecks Vision) with kinetic data. Throughout, the guide stresses the importance of contextualizing asymmetry thresholds, avoiding single‑metric tunnel vision, and maintaining rigorous data‑quality checks. The final sections warn against over‑fitting metrics, clarify the distinction between discriminatory and responsive metrics, recap core principles, and outline a professional growth blueprint and future directions for force‑plate practice.
Topics
Defining the Advanced User and Their Decision‑Making Role
Describes the characteristics of an advanced practitioner, their need to integrate force‑plate insights into broader performance and rehabilitation decisions, and the progression from basic to expert use.