Streamline how you assess athletes with Valor Biomechanics

The TWIST Report is a weekly sports tech newsletter highlighting a company on the cutting edge of innovation in the industry.

If you are involved in any aspect of athletic performance, do yourself a favor and pay close attention.

You're ability to boost the performance of your teams with a data-driven approach to tackling terrible athlete biomechanics is about to increase exponentially.

You can thank me later.

Who is it?

Valor Biomechanics is an Austin, TX based startup developing a cutting-edge platform designed for athletic trainers, physical therapists, strength and conditioning coaches, and other sports performance specialists to streamline their movement assessments.

Valor helps assess injury risk and ultimately produces measurably better athletes.

What do they do?

By efficiently analyzing movement patterns, Valor Biomechanics helps practitioners keep athletes in competition. Their user-friendly platform allows a sports medicine professional to conduct comprehensive assessments of an athlete's range of motion, timing, sequencing, and acceleration for more than 10 exercises in less than 10 minutes.

The sensors provide cutting-edge movement information that allows practitioners to:

👉 Identify the risk of injury

👉 Help maximize performance

👉 Track rehabilitation with objective data.

Their vision is to create a world where everyone can rehabilitate like an athlete.

Key Stakeholders

Understanding how complex motion capture technology works is a difficult task in itself. But actually leveraging the technology with a proprietary machine learning engine, enhancing it, and generating a data output in real-time for sports medicine practitioners?

That takes a ridiculous amount of intelligence, and they have it.

The founding team and performance consultants are packed full of brainpower and experience in the sports industry.

William Kodama and Evan Anders Magnusson are the main source of fuel behind the engine that gave birth to Valor. Michael Macri leverages his experience at the collegiate, professional, Olympic levels in over a dozen sports to provide actionable insight into player performance.

These people are the real deal.

Why are they different?

While there are computer vision products that seek to solve the same mission as this company, Valor Biomechanics built their solution specifically to capture all layers of movement:

✅ Existing workflows in the athletic training room

✅ Functional movements in the weight room

✅ Movement analysis in the area of play

The incredible versatility of their product is the reason why they have impacted collegiate and professional organizations across the United States.

Why should you pay attention?

Let's get straight to the point - the learning curve to their platform is minimal and the applications are enormous.

Certified Athletic Trainers like myself and other members of the National Athletic Trainers' Association are mission-driven in the prevention, care, treatment, and rehabilitation of athletic injuries. Technology in sports medicine has made incredible progress during the past twenty years in the areas of care, treatment, and rehabilitation.

When it comes to prevention, technology was always available - but not nearly as developed as other areas:

🔥 The Valor Biomechanics platform significantly boosts the ability for sports medicine practitioners to not only rehab athlete injuries more effectively, but also prevent potential injuries by detecting inefficiencies in movement that could lead to missed practices and games. 🔥

Gone are the days that ATCs, PTs, and S&C staff would need to use the old-fashioned "eyeball test" in breaking down an athlete's sport-specific technique to identify problem areas. It's much easier and more accurate to use a data-driven approach like Valor provides.

As a young company, they have also made groundbreaking strides in improving rehabilitation for numerous professional teams. By combining their company vision with the feedback of every team, they have created a solution that directly helps practitioners rather than another piece of tech they will struggle to integrate.

Who should contact them?

• Certified Athletic Trainers ( National Athletic Trainers' Association )
• Physical Therapists ( American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) )
• Strength and Conditioning Coaches ( National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) )
• Directors of Performance
• Sports Scientists
• Anyone else invested in keeping their players in competition

What's in store for the future?

Already in early 2024, the company is well on track for a significantly more traction and a huge uptick in client teams and schools. The February and March meeting calendars are quickly filling up due to requests from a number of MLB franchises to demo the technology during Spring Training, as well as some major NCAA Division I colleges and universities.

Expanding data capabilities beyond joint kinematics is at the forefront of their R&D pipeline.

Additionally, they are continuing to work with practitioners to determine further inefficient movement patterns and the best corrective exercises for athletes in-session and post-session.

Keeping athletes healthy and on the field is of the utmost importance to them and they are 100% dedicated to ensuring that happens.