Introduction

Healthcare practitioners would like to see a shift towards prevention across different domains, which is no different in physiotherapy. Sofie Vanlommel, Jonas Stas, and Jelle Matheus decided to set up Lichtert Sport Lab within their physiotherapist practice to focus even more on prevention & individualized training programs to minimize injuries and increase the performance of athletes. With their physiotherapy practice, they treat patients and athletes with a focus on musculoskeletal rehabilitation and prevention.

Lichtert Sport Lab

Within their Sport Lab, athletes will be able to get screenings for rehabilitation as well as for performance improvement. During the last few years, they’ve received increased interest from runners to assess their strengths & weaknesses. Initially, with the lab, they’ll focus on guiding individual athletes with screenings & adapted training programs. In the next phase, they’ll collaborate more with sports clubs as well.

They started offering running analyses a while ago but felt limited by their tools. Following up on the scientific insights and comparing these with their own test results in Excel proved to be too difficult, so they followed an expert training with Prof. Van Tiggelen and started using the Hylyght platform afterward. They combine the knowledge in the platform with their own knowledge.

Sofie, Jonas, and Jelle use an ActivForce dynamometer to conduct force tests. To have an even more extensive library of exercises, they also work with Physitrack, a digital platform for clinical home exercise and education prescription. Besides that, they use Kinovea, which is a video annotation tool designed for sport analysis, for the analysis of running technique.

Feedback clients

Sofie, Jonas, and Jelle have received a lot of positive feedback from patients & athletes, saying that they appreciate the extensive insights into their own weaknesses & strengths. On top of that, they like the reports they get which give them a clear overall overview. Sometimes, however, specific insights coming out of the screening are too complex for a patient to immediately understand, since not a lot of patients/athletes have been screened/tested before and still need to become more familiar with it.

Best practices for other physiotherapists

Sofie, Jonas, and Jelle stressed the importance of standardized testing. Before the expert training, they were already following up on some of the scientific benchmarks for testing, but the Hylyght expert training was a great showcase for them on why the protocols are so important. They recommend other physiotherapists to follow the training as well or to start executing basic testing & screening already. Although the Hylyght platform includes a lot of extensive screenings, they say it might be easier for many practices to start executing the basic screenings first and get familiar with those. Otherwise, an extensive screening might take up too much time.

Their 2nd point of advice is to communicate with athletes in the language of “performance” instead of “prevention”. Not many athletes realize the importance and value of prevention yet. Talking about performance resonates a lot more with athletes and lowers the threshold to being screened and receiving an individualized training program and actually putting in the work at home afterward. On top of that, they have seen that regular testing had a positive effect on the motivation of some of their athletes. By being tested regularly, athletes can get an objective overview of their training progress and might adhere more to their training program.

The final point of advice is to communicate about these screenings. By leveraging social media and putting flyers in their practice with information about the content & benefits of the screening, they’ve seen an increase in demand. This is something in which we, at Hylyght, try to support physiotherapist practices by offering templates that can be adapted in only 5 minutes.

Interest in a similar project?

We believe that Lichtert Sport Lab is a great example of how to improve the offering of services to patients and athletes. If you’re interested in following an expert training or want to know more about the Hylyght platform and how you can get started with screening yourself, you can contact us.