Belmont University’s School of Physical Therapy has been consulting with the Nashville Predators hockey team this season to help players perfect their slap shots. The work of PT faculty members Dr. Kevin Robinson and Dr. Pat Sells, using the school’s Motion Analysis Lab, was featured during an in-game report on Fox Sports South when the Preds hosted the Detroit Red Wings on February 5. The video can be viewed below.

Belmont’s consultation with the Predators is ongoing and will continue with additional research later this year in the Motion Analysis Lab. In November, Dr. Robinson’s work with the Predators Shea Weber was featured in a story in Canada’s National Post. The story is available online at National Post’s website, and is reprinted below.

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PT Professor Mike Voight was in Switzerland recently, serving as an invited keynote speaker for the Swiss Sports Physiotherapy annual meeting. His lecture was entitled “Current Concepts in Ankle Rehabilitation.” The meeting, held in Bern, saw over 400 sports therapists attend.

Despite heavy class loads, Belmont Physical Therapy students were still able to find time again this year to volunteer for the Dierks Bentley Miles and Music for Kids benefit concert. Bentley started the concert 5 years ago to raise money for children’s hospitals across the U.S.
This year, over 80 Belmont students volunteered in every aspect of the event, helping to make it a success according to Bentley. “I take a lot of pride in the volunteers from the School of Physical Therapy and in the fans,” he says, “because they are the ones raising the money.”
When all was said and done, the students helped to raise a total of $250,000 for Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. A new record was also set when the annual motorcycle ride that coincided with the event saw over 1500 riders make the trip from Columbia, TN to Riverfront Park in Nashville to show support.
“Whether you have a kid or not,” Bentley continued, speaking about his own experiences with child health conditions, “when you go to a children’s hospital and you see what good they do, it moves you.”

To see more photos for this event go to our Facebook page linked here.

Dr. Kevin Robinson from Belmont University’s School of Physical Therapy was featured this week in a story in Canada’s National Post about his work with Nashville Predators star Shea Weber to improve his slap shot. You can read the story on the National Post’s website, or see the full article below.

Sean Fitz-Gerald, National Post · Monday, Nov. 15, 2010
As a clinician and a professor of biomechanics who has worked with golfers and baseball players, Dr. Kevin Robinson was eager to apply science to a growing hockey legend. And that interest only grew after watching Shea Weber step into his first few slap shots after a recent practice.
It is a shot that ripped through an Olympic hockey net this year, leaving behind what one news agency described as “scorch marks” on the mesh. It moves with the ferocity that has reportedly broken bones in no fewer than four teammates while elevating Weber, a first-year captain of the Nashville Predators, into an object of childhood wonder.
“With that guy on skates,” Robinson said, “I was a dwarf.”
Robinson, who teaches at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., analyzed Weber’s shot last month with help from a digital camera and a computer program. He asked the 6-foot-4, 234-pound defenceman to take about a dozen shots in open ice, and asked the same of Predators teammates Jordin Tootoo and Cody Franson for the sake of comparison.
After taking the top of each player’s backswing as a starting point, Robinson assessed the speed with which each player met the puck. Weber and Tootoo had similar mechanics in their shots, with their sticks perpendicular and their left arms parallel to the ice at the top of the top of their swing, and each took about 0.2 seconds to get down to the puck.
The difference?
“One of them is 5-foot-8, and the other one’s 6-foot-4,” Robinson said. “One of them is swinging a bigger stick, so the angular velocity is much faster.”
Angular velocity is a measure of speed, of which Weber showed in abundance. Robinson recorded the 25-year-old with a speed of 715 degrees per second — which suggests that, if his torso was able to spin like a top, Weber could rip through two full rotations of his shot in about a second.
Tootoo was clocked in at 668 degrees per second with Franson in third, at 405.
“What that speaks to is the tremendous amount of core strength, the strength of his abdominals, the muscles that stabilize his trunk,” Robinson said. “That’s the only way you can pull that off.”
Weber, the son of a mill worker in the British Columbia interior, began to find fame with his shot during the NHL all-star weekend last year. He fired a shot that hit 103.4 mph during the skills competition, finishing second only to the Boston Bruins’ 6-foot-9 defenceman, Zdeno Chara (105.4 mph).
It was at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver where Weber’s ability began acquiring some of its mythical proportions. He sent a shot screaming in from the point in the second period of Canada’s qualification game against Germany, opening a hole in the back of the net and forcing officials to consult video review to confirm what they had missed.
Canada won in a romp, and Canadian fans found their new favourite weapon.
“I’d never seen anything like that happen on a stage like the Olympics,” Weber said with a chuckle. “It’s pretty neat to have kids come up to you when you go home and bring that up.”
It was at home, in Sicamous, B.C., where Weber first developed his shot. He always loved to shoot the puck, and spent countless summer hours hammering shots into a second-hand net off a sheet of plywood laid on the grass outside his home.
“I would wreck my sticks before anything else,” Weber said. “And Dad wasn’t too happy about that. Just try to put an extra bit of tape on it after that.”
He said he usually goes through at least one composite stick a game with the Predators, even though he estimates he really only gets an opportunity to unleash the full fury of his shot once every three or four games.
“It might come a bit in spurts,” he said. “It might go in back-to-back games, where you get an opportunity to really blast it, and then you’d go a few games where you don’t really even get a chance to shoot anything.”
Weber had never put much thought into the physics of his shot, focusing instead on the mechanics of his delivery. He used to position his hand closer to the blade when he was younger, but moved it higher as he grew older and stronger, to the point where it is now mostly muscle memory.
He takes at least 100 shots a week in practice.
“The biggest thing for me is weight transfer,” Weber said. “Obviously, it’s got to be in sequence with everything else: from the weight transfer to how you’re distributing your power from your back foot to your front foot and, obviously, leaning on your stick to get the stick to torque and whip.”
He has taken 50 shots through Nashville’s first 15 games this season, second to Atlanta’s Dustin Byfuglien (66) for most by a defenceman in the league. Weber has two goals and five assists, but struggled to regain his dominant form while defence partner Ryan Suter was sidelined for nine games with a lower body injury.
Being known for his shot can also work against Weber, when teams scheme to pin someone higher on the point when the Predators have the man advantage. That forces him off a shooting lane and into passing mode, where he has to defer to an open teammate.
And he has to be mindful of those teammates in practice, when he consciously dials down the force of his point shots, conceding he has “had some unfortunate luck over the past few years with hitting guys on our team.”
“He’s using what God gave him, his height and his strength,” Robinson said. “That’s what separates him there.”
That core strength comes from the abdominal muscles, which can be strengthened with a diet of crunches and work with a medicine ball. Muscles in the hindquarters also help to stabilize the pelvis, which — in baseball and golf, as well as in hockey — should move first in the series of movements leading up contact.
“If those are in sync,” Robinson said, “then what you have is a really efficient delivery of force.”

Thanks to a new partnership between Gordon Jewish Community Center and Baptist Sports Medicine—one that Belmont’s own Dr. Kevin Robinson from the School of Physical Therapy was a part of—residents of Bell Meade and Bellevue can now receive medical attention much closer to home.
The recent venture made it possible for those seeking medical attention to visit a Baptist therapist at the Community Center for services including orthopedic physical therapy, aquatic therapy, sports medicine and back, neck and spine pain therapy. Bubba McIntosh, interim executive director for Baptist Sports Medicine, said he hopes the program will grow to include more services and expanded hours.
And grow, it has. McIntosh explained that even before the program’s official grand opening, patients began scheduling appointments. Since then, the clinic has begun to see anywhere from six to twelve patients per day, and that number only seems to be growing. The partnership will no doubt serve as a great convenience to the people of Nashville.

Many opportunities exist at Belmont for physical therapy students to get involved on the health front, both on and off campus. One of these opportunities—arguably among the most exciting according to past participants—is a series of annual health fairs held for fourth grade students each year. The event has become an annual occurrence in Dr. Pat Sells’ Health and Wellness course for second-year physical therapy students.
The most recent fair benefited over 200 local fourth grade students from both Carter Lawrence Elementary in the Edgehill community and East Cheatham Elementary. Participating students got the opportunity to teach a series of health and wellness topics, and to conduct fun activities with the children. Topics included safety, heart health, physical activity, dental health, nutrition, healthy bones, and smoking.

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Four Belmont physical therapy students recently got the chance to present at the annual Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA) conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Their research project entitled, “Functional Outcomes and Patient Satisfaction of Client in the Seating and Mobility Clinic,” examined the overall satisfaction of wheelchair users with their product, as well as the patients’ care while in the Vanderbilt Seating and Mobility Clinic.
Betsy Codington, one of the students involved in the project, hopes that the their research would be used by Vanderbilt to “better inform and equip the clinic in serving their clients.” Other students involved included Sarah Jo Lyons, Larry Pemberton and Daniel Rogers. All studies were conducted under the students’ research mentor, Dr. Renee Brown from the Belmont School of Physical Therapy, who also accompanied the students on their trip to the RESNA conference.
RESNA exists as an effort to improve the lives of people with disabilities through the use of different technologies. The foundation’s yearly conference brings together a diverse group of therapists, seating specialists, engineers and end users for this central cause.

Dr. Kevin Robinson, Professor of Physical Therapy at Belmont, was recently featured in a News Channel 5 story about his research study with Baptist Sports Medicine, identifying risk of injury to student athletes.
The story can be found on the News Channel 5 website and the video can be seen below.

“. . . . Kevin Robinson, a Belmont Professor and physical therapist with Baptist Sports Medicine, believes those injuries are far too common.
“We’ve been rehabbing kids for 20 years. We’d like to be on the prevention side now,” said Robinson.
Robinson said new studies show that improved hip and core muscle strength can drastically reduce knee injuries.
Logan Plummer wasn’t sure what to make of the study until the benefits showed up on the soccer pitch.
“I’m able to keep my balance more, and not get knocked off the ball as much,” said Logan.
At the beginning of the study, Logan could barely keep her balance while jumping on one leg. After the training, the improvement is obvious.
“It’s about an eight degree change, which might not sound like much but when you’re talking about forces on the knee that’s significant,” said Robinson.
Robinson said the athletes also showed improved athletic performance in addition to having better stability.
Study organizers got what they hoped for– improved performance and a decreased risk of injury as well as keeping student athletes on the field and playing better in the process.
Baptist Sports Medicine officials hope to expand the study to two local high schools. They eventually hope to create a low cost, effective exercise program that can be used by schools across the mid-state to help prevent major injuries.”

Earlier this year four physical therapy students at Belmont wrote a proposal to the Tennessee Physical Therapy Association asking for $990 to fund their research. Lauren Clark, Laura Green, Carrie Rorick and Ashley Vidrine requested this money for their research on the comparative advantages of the Manu Brace versus “a standard wrist split in the treatment of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome”.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, they explain in their proposal, is “a compression of the median nerve at the wrist, which leads to hand pain and weakness, with a loss of functional activity for many of those afflicted with this pathology”. They note that “conservative measure employed to treat the symptoms of CTS commonly and historically have included the standard or neutral wrist split designed to limit wrist flexion”.

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Recognizing the need for student financial assistance, an anonymous donor recently gave $5000 to Belmont University for a Physical Therapy Clinical Scholarship. This scholarship is designed to assist third year physical therapy students in defraying the costs related to the clinical experiences. Students typically travel to other cities to participate in 8-week long full-time clinical experiences in multiple areas of physical therapy, including outpatient, rehabilitation, acute care and experiences tailored to their goals. These opportunities are available nationwide and internationally. This needed requirement can be costly. Seeing the need to encourage and assist students in their clinical endeavors, this scholarship has assisted students allowing them to focus on their experiences and not on the finances involved since 2000.
A three-person committee, comprised of physical therapists, who were themselves recipients of the clinical scholarship award during their physical therapy education at Belmont University, chose students based on their campus and community involvement, high academic achievements and need. The 2010 recipients are: Emily Burn, Matt Cabbage, Nikki Crosser, Kelly Ehlert, Susan Foster, Holly Gentry, Joy Moulton, Cara Nash, Sylvia Poor and Jenna Reid.