Force plates opened a new world to the sports science and performance monitoring community. The problem is they're either bolted to the floor or used in the gym, 200 metres from the movements that actually need to be measured.
Every athletic movement begins with force.
Whether accelerating towards the ball, jumping for a header, changing direction to evade an opponent or absorbing contact, an athlete's ability to produce and manage force underpins performance. The faster and more effectively an athlete can apply force to the ground, the greater their potential to sprint, jump, and change direction efficiently.
For sports scientists and strength and conditioning coaches, force profiling provides an objective way to understand an athlete's physical capabilities. Rather than assuming that performance measures such as timing gates or GPS derived metrics directly correlate to an athlete's force production capabilities, coaches can directly measure the athlete's force profile.
How closely an athlete's force production match up with their performance may then give the coach a better idea of whether their movement technique and biomechanics is either limiting or effective in driving performance improvements.
That's why force profiling has become central to performance monitoring, rehabilitation and return-to-play decision making across elite sport.
How Force Plates Changed Sports Science
The widespread adoption of force plates transformed how practitioners measure athletic performance.
For the first time, coaches could accurately quantify metrics such as ground reaction force, power output, impulse, rate of force development (RFD) and inter-limb asymmetry. Countermovement jumps, drop jumps and isometric strength tests became standardised assessments that provided reliable, repeatable benchmarks for athlete monitoring.
These tests remain incredibly valuable. They allow coaches to track physical qualities over time, identify neuromuscular fatigue, and monitor recovery following injury.
But they also share one important characteristic:
Most force profiling takes place away from the sporting environment.
Athletes perform one jump, one landing, or one isolated movement at a time under tightly controlled conditions. While these tests are highly reliable, they rarely reflect the demands of competitive sport.
This creates a gap between what coaches can measure in testing and what athletes actually do in training and competition.
Turning the Pitch Into a Force Lab
What if force profiling didn't require a laboratory?
SprintAI transforms standard video captured during training into detailed force profiles, allowing coaches to estimate key force-related metrics while athletes sprint in their normal training environment.
Using athlete-specific information, including body mass and anthropometrics, SprintAI allows the estimation of:
- Peak vertical, peak braking, and peak propulsive forces
- Vertical stiffness
- Braking and propulsive impulse
- Peak force
- Rate of force development
- Step-by-step force vector direction throughout acceleration and maximum velocity
Instead of collecting force data from a single jump on a force plate, coaches can analyse every step of a sprint performed at game speed.
The result is context-specific force profiling.
Step-by-Step Asymmetry
An athlete may produce symmetrical results during a countermovement jump while displaying clear asymmetries during a sprint acceleration.
By estimating force production for every step, SprintAI helps coaches identify compensations that only emerge during high-speed running, which can be particularly valuable during rehabilitation and return-to-play.
Force Orientation Throughout Sprinting
Performance isn't just about how much force an athlete produces. It's also about where they direct it.
During acceleration, athletes must orient their force as horizontally as possible to maximise propulsion. As they approach maximum velocity, force direction gradually shifts to support efficient upright sprinting.
SprintAI can provide step-by-step insight into force vector orientation, helping coaches understand how effectively athletes apply force throughout each phase of a sprint.
Longitudinal Monitoring
Because SprintAI uses video rather than specialist hardware, force profiling can become part of regular training rather than an occasional laboratory assessment.
Instead of testing athletes every few months, coaches can build longitudinal force profiles across an entire season, identifying subtle mechanical changes before they become performance or injury issues.
How SprintAI Estimates Force
Estimating force from movement is made possible through a combination of biomechanical data collection, data science, musculoskeletal simulation, and physics informed machine learning.
To develop SprintAI, the team at Forceteck collected synchronised force plate and motion capture data across more than 1,000 steps, covering acceleration, maximum velocity sprinting, deceleration and change of direction.
The resulting model was trained to estimate force directly from motion while incorporating athlete-specific characteristics such as body mass and anthropometrics. Validation against laboratory measurements demonstrated errors of less than 5% across key force metrics, providing practitioners with research-backed force estimation from ordinary video.
From Periodic Testing to Continuous Insight
Force plates remain an essential tool for controlled laboratory assessment, but they were never designed to capture the complexity of sport.
By extending force profiling beyond the lab and onto the pitch, SprintAI gives coaches access to the mechanical information that has traditionally been missing from sprint analysis.
Instead of relying solely on isolated jump tests, coaches can evaluate how athletes produce force during sprinting movements, monitor changes throughout a competitive season, and make more informed decisions around performance development and injury rehabilitation.
When force profiling moves onto the pitch, coaches no longer have to choose between scientific accuracy and sporting relevance.
They finally get both.
Want to see how SprintAI compares with traditional force plates? Request a demo today to see how force profiling can move from the lab to the pitch.