CAMERA delivered an impact funded workshop at Resilience Weightlifting Bath, to showcase their latest work with markerless motion capture being used to investigate Weightlifting Biomechanics.

Led by CAMERA Studio Engineer, Harry Davies, coaches and athletes were invited to learn from CAMERA academics & technicians about the innovative methods they have developed. These included developing both coaches and lifters understanding of how markerless methods work, and how their novel application in weightlifting can unlock new insights to performance to offer more frequent and regular athletic testing and monitoring.

Starting with an introduction to weightlifting biomechanics, highlighting previous research that was of interest to coaches, researchers guided attendees through key variables and phases of interest. Attendees were provided with an overview of key principles of sports biomechanics, examples of force plate testing and how kinematics and kinetics can be studied within weightlifting.

Attendees had the opportunity to take part in the testing themselves, CAMERA took down a portable markerless motion capture system with force plates, allowing athletes to be tested, before the data was processed and uploaded to a bespoke use interface, which automatically segments the data into the phases of interest.

Researchers guided attendees through the UI, showing attendees how they can compare themselves to other athletes whilst factoring in a number of key performance factors, such as Sinclair and total.

A fruitful discussion was had towards the end of the day where researchers draw on coaches experience to help better inform the testing.

With special thanks to Dr Steffi Colyer, Dr Adam Brazil, Jake Willott, Matilde Montel (student) and Rebecca Guy (student)