Eyes can be helpful to assess movement patterns for coaching, but they really aren’t accurate. Relying on technology gives the eyes a rest, scales well, and can put you in two places at once! Trust the signals and use your time to add other value.
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“The best engineers automate their processes to make themselves redundant. Because once that problem is solved, there is always another.”
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Historically (and I mean a long time ago), all biomechanics measurements were in fact done by eye, and although we have come a long way from a technology perspective, it’s still pretty common.
Now, it may frustrate some biomechanists, but you actually can do some assessments by eye without instrumenting. Watch someone with bad landing mechanics medialize on a drop jump, and there you have it, you’ve used your eyes to do a biomechanics assessment!
Although this does have some face validity, it is saturated with issues. Parallax error alone makes me question all visual measurements I make with my eyes. But let’s say that's not a problem, am I supposed to resolve 3D motion by eye, and somehow remember that, and pay attention to the entire movement? What about fast motions? My poor eyes just see blur! If I’m trying to track progress, you can’t expect me to be able to see differences week to week (or even remember them), when I have a hard enough time finding my car keys.
So, there are clearly some pretty big problems just doing an assessment by eye, but instead of bashing what some coaches do (because sometimes you can’t measure it, so this is better than nothing), I want to focus on some bigger issues that plague biomechanics, which is scalability and standardization.
Assuming the person doing the eyeball measurement can make perfect measurements, they only have two eyes. So, they can only measure one person and only while they are present. This may sound like job security, but it’s actually a drag, and is not scalable! And, in the real world, where these eye measurements are far from perfect, they just aren’t standardized, so, someone else doing seemingly the exact same thing will inevitably get different results. This is bad for everyone, especially the person being measured.
The solution is simple; if we want to provide a standardized and scalable system to measure human movement, we need to rely on technology to help us out. It actually doesn’t hurt the job security of the coach or the person doing the eye assessment because now they can be confident in the data and instead, provide an interpretation of the data. Automating that one aspect of their job will just free up time for them to solve other problems, and will really make the service they provide far better. Maybe I’m different, but everyday I try to automate my own job until it’s redundant, so I can spend my time working on other things.