Biotensegrity in skiing! Sound weird? I have been playing with this concept of biotensegrity this season in my skiing. Biotensegrity is an approach to understanding how our bodies deal with forces and load. It explains that load is not passed directly from bone to bone but through tension from muscles, fascia and soft tissue. Dr Stephen Levin an orthopedic surgeon makes an important point about looking at the body as a continuous compression structure. If bones just sat on bones and passed the force through like beams and rafters of a house then calculations of daily activity forces would actually crush and shear bones. However a structure that is held in place through balanced tension is able to distribute load over greater distances and more evenly. The structure also has some bounce or energy storage component to it which if applied to motion can help use energy from one movement to power the next. I have been trying to think of my body as more of a biotensegrity structure that builds energy from one turn to the next. I have been thinking about all parts of my body and playing with how they affect my structure. For example, if I ski with my inside leg lifted off the snow my body has to apply tensional forces to lift that leg which helps to load more power and spring into the outside leg. I think of it like pulling the string back on a bow. In the human body nothing moves in isolation. Every movement effects everything else in the system. See if you can play with the idea of skiing or doing whatever activity you choose with your whole body. And that your body is more springy and bounce like than you perhaps think. These pictures are models of the human body built as Tensegrity structures. I really like the spine one because it explains that if all the tensioned members are working evenly, then load on the spine does not compress the discs between the vertebrae.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 22:25:32 +0000
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