More Fun In The Motion Lab

Posted Aug 28, 2007 by Aaron Knox

Updated Aug 28, 2007 at 11:18 PM

GAINESVILLE — After spending some time in UF’s Biomechanics and Motion Analysis Lab last week while working on Wednesday’s story, I’ll be sorely disappointed if the following scene didn’t play out in Florida’s football offices.

Offensive coordinator Dan Mullen (Bursting into staff meeting): Gentlemen, we can rebuild Tim Tebow’s throwing motion. We have the technology.

Do they ever have the technology. Senior biomedical engineer Bryan Conrad loves to play with all his toys, and he even let your faithful beat writer have a turn. After our interview, Conrad pointed to a golf tee set up next to the floor plates that measure the force a person exerts on the ground. Next to the tee was a driver. The ball, club head and two points on the shaft were wrapped in reflective material — the same stuff you’d find on running shoes.

Conrad told me to take a few practice swings while he set up the computer. When I was ready, he clicked on the motion capture cameras, which would record the epic ugliness of my swing and feed it to the computer. There, a data analysis program would explain just how flawed my swing really is.

A professional golfer getting his swing analyzed would have more than 20 of the reflective markers placed on his club and his body. He’d also be paying a ton of money for the analysis. My pitiful swing didn’t need that kind of scrutiny.


Much to my surprise, I made solid contact. I didn’t break the tee as I had on my first practice swing. Conrad waved me into the room next door to give me the numbers.

He printed off a report that explained that while my trunk rotation generated sufficient power, I left a few yards off my drive because I didn’t follow through and didn’t transfer my weight efficiently from my back foot to my front foot.

The club head moved at 78 mph on impact, and I hit the ball 126 mph. A little birdie told me Gators football coach Urban Meyer grabbed the club and blasted a 132 mph drive, so I guess I need to hit the gym.

Conrad said that despite the hideousness of my swing, a 60 percent increase in speed from impact to flight is considered pretty good. Of course, I don’t know if his instruments were entirely accurate. The computer measured my drive at 1.7 degrees to the right. That probably would have landed in the fairway, and my drives never land in the fairway.

Before you discount the lab for analyzing the hopeless golf swing of a sportswriter, remember that the folks at UF do work that actually benefits humanity. Conrad showed me some of the real-world uses for motion analysis, including a project that helps patients who have lost pieces of their legs to cancer learn to walk again.

Conrad explained that UF surgeons sometimes attempt a “limb salvage” surgery when removing bones afflicted by cancer. In some cases, a patient will have cancer in the knee but not in the lower leg. Instead of simply amputating above the knee — which makes it difficult to use a prosthesis — surgeons will remove the affected area. They then take the patient’s ankle (with foot still attached) and rotate it to form a crude knee. The foot, now pointing straight down, serves as a stump to hold a prosthesis. Using the data gathered in the lab, Conrad said, some patients have responded so well that if they were wearing pants, you’d never be able to tell by looking at their gait that they’d had part of their leg amputated.