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Posted On: July 17th 2026, 08:16 pm
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When Joey first came in, he was several months removed from a tibial fracture.
Despite being “cleared,” he still couldn’t perform a simple single-leg hop on his injured leg without significant pain.
A lateral hop test wasn’t even possible. That told us everything we needed to know.
🔄 Returning to sport isn’t simply about waiting for a bone to heal or receiving medical clearance. Athletes need to regain the physical capacity to tolerate the demands of competition.
Over the next eight weeks we progressively rebuilt that capacity through individualized strength training, plyometric progressions, landing mechanics, and gradual exposure to higher-speed movements.
The result?
✅ Pain-free single-leg hopping
✅ Successful completion of the lateral hop assessment
✅ Improvements across multiple jump performance metrics
Two of those numbers deserve extra context, because they’re the ones that actually predict what happens on the court.
💥 Eccentric Braking Impulse is a measure of how well an athlete can absorb force when they land or decelerate — think of it as the strength of the brakes. Joey improved 23-25% on both legs. That’s the difference between sticking a landing under control and collapsing into one.
💥 Eccentric Braking RFD measures how fast those brakes get applied. Joey’s numbers went up 100% on his left and 124% on his right. This is what determines how quickly an athlete can stop, plant, and go again — the first step out of a cut, closing out on a shooter, absorbing a landing and immediately reacting to the next play. Strength alone doesn’t do that. Speed of force absorption does.
💪🏽 For an athlete coming off a tibial fracture, this isn’t just a performance number. It’s a resilience number. The faster and more evenly the body can brake, the less stress gets dumped into that bone on every cut and landing.
📊 Objective testing matters because it gives us more than opinions — it gives us measurable evidence that an athlete is moving in the right direction.
Every athlete’s rehab journey is different, but the goal remains the same:
📈 Don’t just return to play. Return prepared.
Despite being “cleared,” he still couldn’t perform a simple single-leg hop on his injured leg without significant pain.
A lateral hop test wasn’t even possible. That told us everything we needed to know.
🔄 Returning to sport isn’t simply about waiting for a bone to heal or receiving medical clearance. Athletes need to regain the physical capacity to tolerate the demands of competition.
Over the next eight weeks we progressively rebuilt that capacity through individualized strength training, plyometric progressions, landing mechanics, and gradual exposure to higher-speed movements.
The result?
✅ Pain-free single-leg hopping
✅ Successful completion of the lateral hop assessment
✅ Improvements across multiple jump performance metrics
Two of those numbers deserve extra context, because they’re the ones that actually predict what happens on the court.
💥 Eccentric Braking Impulse is a measure of how well an athlete can absorb force when they land or decelerate — think of it as the strength of the brakes. Joey improved 23-25% on both legs. That’s the difference between sticking a landing under control and collapsing into one.
💥 Eccentric Braking RFD measures how fast those brakes get applied. Joey’s numbers went up 100% on his left and 124% on his right. This is what determines how quickly an athlete can stop, plant, and go again — the first step out of a cut, closing out on a shooter, absorbing a landing and immediately reacting to the next play. Strength alone doesn’t do that. Speed of force absorption does.
💪🏽 For an athlete coming off a tibial fracture, this isn’t just a performance number. It’s a resilience number. The faster and more evenly the body can brake, the less stress gets dumped into that bone on every cut and landing.
📊 Objective testing matters because it gives us more than opinions — it gives us measurable evidence that an athlete is moving in the right direction.
Every athlete’s rehab journey is different, but the goal remains the same:
📈 Don’t just return to play. Return prepared.
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