Today our class toured Dr. Hannah Moir’s sports science lab at Kingston University. The University has a remarkable facility set up for young students to study all aspects of sports sciences. Students get to use these state of the art tools to help them identify movements, injuries, percentage of body fat, muscle mass, and more. As a part of our day, we got to use some of these tools. Two people from each group got to put on sensors that allowed us to track their movements on the computer program. We watched as they jumped up and down seeing just the sensors and we could then use that imaging to measure different aspects of their power, strength, and movement ability. Then we got to work in the lab with some current students. They showed us what they were working on that day which was testing for diabetes. This part had us all measuring our muscle and body fat percentages on one of their machines. It’s pretty cool because most of us have never seen or dealt with any tools like this before. Apparently, classes and programs like this are common in the UK and a lot of football clubs use these tools to better their team performance. However, we don’t usually see things like this at US schools. Maybe we can get something like this implemented at Carleton?? Hopefully someday! After we finished up the lab with the students, we went back into the testing room and put sensors on our biceps and thighs. That’s when we all competed against one another to find out who has the most strength when pushing against something. It was interesting to see the computer input the data and graph out our muscle spasms. All in all it was a super fun and awakening experience. It’d be great to see something like this back home!
