The Performance Lab presents at International Congress

Matt Kenyon form the Performance Lab presented his research last Saturday at the World Confederation for Physical Therapy European Congress.

This was held in the exotic city of Liverpool unfortunately for Matt. Here is my interview with him last week after the event.

Matt, what was experience of presenting at an international conference like?

The whole event was huge. There was over 1200 physiotherapists at the event and it was held in the BT conference centre at Liverpool Docks. This was the first time I had presented at such a large event and it gave me the opportunity to network with some really great people including Chris Mercer (MACP chair), Jack Chew (physio matters pod casts), Michael Brennan (Chief executive of the Canadian Physiotherapy Association).

How did you get involved with the Congress?

We have been working on quite a few research projects around lower limb rehab and return to sport testing at The Performance Lab. The abstract from my dissertation research was selected by a committee to be used at the congress in March. My research looked at 'safer neuromuscular knee control' and was a correlation study looking whether the test we use at the Performance Lab (the star excursion balance test) had a relationship with traditional return to sport tests. The problem with the traditional return to sport tests is that they are inaccessible, expensive and sometime unsafe.

What were your results?

We carried out the experiment at the Performance Lab on 40 lower limbs (20 males, 20 females) and found that the balance test did correlate with the other tests. However, the really interesting finding was when we looked at gender differences. The balance test strongly correlated for the females but did not correlate for the males. We put this down to different muscle activation and movement patterns deployed by males and females. This has now led to us look further into these gender differences and we are now busy developing safer and more effective ways of performing return to sport testing so that we send our patients back to the field of play as safely as possible.

Whats next for the internationally famous Performance Lab?

Well we hope to continue with our research and develop our elite management of sports injuries further. Our next plan is to look at patella pain (see our condition info on our website at http://www.theperformance-lab.co.uk/patella-pain) and we hope to have research presented and published for the next Patellofemoral international conference in Brisbane 2017. A bit more exotic than Liverpool!