Jo Shattuck: The Science of Sport & Motion (Full Transcript)
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Ronen Ainbinder 0:31
This Halftime Snack features a former top-10 world-ranked racquetball athlete and elite coach. She is an entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and she's currently working as a sports scientist.
She is the founder & CEO of Panthertec – a performance enhancement company that combines data, neuroscience, and biomechanics to capture athlete's motion and provide sensory feedback.
Their goal is to enhance performance and reduce injuries and impact by disrupting sports' training and recovery.
I can't wait for this conversation, so grab a quick snack for my discussion with Dr. Jo Shattuck!
Jo Shattuck 1:13
Thank you. Thanks. I'm happy to be here. This is fantastic.
Ronen Ainbinder 1:16
no joy. It's a pleasure to have you on the halftime snacks. Thank you for accepting my invitation. Let's kick it off with a fun icebreaker. And I want to ask you, what is the greatest burger you've ever had?
Jo Shattuck 1:31
The greatest burger I've ever had? I was 16 when I just ran a marathon of five hours, 26 minutes, 13 seconds in Montreal, Canada. And honestly, it was just I was just so hungry after a bacon cheeseburger, bacon, and fries. And I didn't have to pay for it. Because I was just a kid, oh, it was great. That's my best burger.
Ronen Ainbinder 1:54
Well, what a great memory you remember the exact Oh yeah, the exact situation. That's amazing. I love burgers. And that's what I wanted to ask you. So it's good that you remember one of your best burgers. Joe, it's fascinating to have you here. It's fascinating the product and the company that you're building. So we're going to talk about it, we're gonna discover a little bit about your story and the path towards finding your mission towards Panthertec, the value of biomechanics and neuroscience, in sports and in the wearables market, learn about a couple of technological challenges that you've been facing through with Panthertec and discuss a little bit about opportunities in this in the intersection between sports, neuroscience, and biomechanics, which is your sweet spot. So let's just kick it off with a story. How about you tell us the story of how the idea or inspiration came for hunter tech?
Jo Shattuck 2:55
Sure, I'd love to, so in the ninth grade, I smoked cigarettes behind the high school dumpster. And my mom being the wonderful woman that she is, signing me up for a dozen different things: Girl Scouts, knitting, and whatever else, and about to leave for college. And she signed me up for racquetball even though it was fun. And so I was just at the local gym, whatever. And I lost every game like 21 to two that was back when you played the 21. But a few months later, I went to college at Louisiana Tech and needed 13 beautiful courts. And I remember the exact moment I was just hitting in there by myself, and I hit one particularly hard, and I was like, wow, I want to be good at this. So I went out in the hallway, and I asked the fellows. I said, Hey, do they have contests and stuff for racquetball? And they all laughed at me because they're not called contests but are called tournaments. But I remember that exact moment to this day if I wouldn't be good. Anyway, fast forward, I eventually became a professional athlete, and there's no money in pro racquetball is not what I played. So you had to do other things: coach or teach or run programs or sell rackets out of the trunk of your car or whatever, which I did. And so yeah, I got to, I've got to be a good coach and the biomechanics, that technique of the sport, I would spend a lot of hours in a court just if you and I played rolling over you and were the racquet me sitting on the floor, or jumping around or moving or trying to help you feel a sensation of moving a certain way and then replicated. And during those hours and hours, I wish I could find a way to capture my instruction. A little later on in Denver. I was a pro at Denver Athletic Club for seven years. And people would fly in to train with me. We do six days, two sessions a day. And then they go home for a couple months and come back when they come back. It's like where they did all the practice time where they forgot they got bad habits again. And I was like there's got to be a way to better impart knowledge or sensation in another athlete of how they're moving. So that was the seed of capturing some sensation. Not with words, pictures, or looking at a video later, but right then. And I think that was the genesis of the cat kinesthetic awareness training.
Ronen Ainbinder 5:16
Yeah. And can you share with those maybe one or two examples that you remember, from your experience in building the product and developing the cat that made you realize the real intrinsic value of neuroscience and motion in motion capture, as you mentioned, it, things that you didn't think existed, but they were there once you kind of like develop the product?
Jo Shattuck 5:44
Yeah, I think I can if I'm answering your question, right. So the first cat was in 2012. It was one blinky light and one little proximity sensor, and I put it on my friend Sarah Ward hostage. She's worked for us as a DNA expert, Ambassador director, but um, she just moved her leg six inches one way, and the feedback went off. And then she moved six inches the other way. And the feedback went off, we're working on her stance, and she could see where she was without having to look at herself so she could feel where she was. And that was the first like, Oh, this might work. And that was 10 years ago.
Ronen Ainbinder 6:23
And I feel like there's this theory about Pavlov and the dogs. I don't know if you're familiar with it, that he had a couple of dogs when he rang a bell, then the dogs knew that time for food was coming. And so then he just proved that one once he even rang the bells. Even if there wasn't any food, dogs were expecting food now. I wonder if there's any kind of similar feeling that you've realized in athletes, things that they because what I'm thinking is that once I can, I can have specific feedback on something that I'm doing. I kind of like to get familiar with it, and then even kind of like, maybe prepare my body for it, or I'm not sure if I can even express it. But it's something that you feel like a Pavlovian effect on the body. Is this something that happens with the cat or with the panda deck or something similar that you can maybe relate to us? Is this in this product?
Jo Shattuck 7:33
It's very similar. It's similar in the way of neuroplasticity. So there's Pavlovian conditioning, Skinner conditioning, and all the different learning theories that have come up along the way. What's different here is whether you teach someone with verbal cues or have to put your hands on them and have them recreate it. The term is muscle memory. Although it's not, it's, it's very misleading. The muscles don't hold memory. The motor cortex does. But in any case, the idea of sensory compensation may be what you're getting it and that you don't have to know you're learning things. And that might be what you mentioned with Pavlov and Skinner. But this is more about bringing awareness to something that you were not aware of before. And that's where the vet's vibratory feedback comes in. It's not a coach or a clinician saying, stand up straight, stand up straight, stand up straight, and get the input through your ears and your brain process. It's vibratory feedback; it's a different neuro motor pathway. The sensations come from wherever you're wearing the center, your wrist or your chest or wherever, to your brain. So it's, it's a way to redirect your attention immediately at that moment, not look at the video and take a week later to decide. Oh, I guess I should have been standing up straighter. So that the real difference here is that the behavior change, the change in the motor pattern, happens during the execution of the motor pattern. And what's cool about it is that I think I'm a little biased, but what's cool about the product is that there's nobody else that's doing that in the way that we do it where it's completely customizable. So you have X, Y, and Z planes, I can have a margin of error on each side for each target for each plane. Gradient and I don't get into the details of the product, but super specific, customized instruction that you can take with you later and just work on it at home or on the field or on the pitch or your couch or wherever. And so, the conditioning comes with immediate awareness during the execution of the movement. Not like when the bell is on, although that would be cool if you could ring a bell, and then you automatically have a perfect racquetball stroke. Yes, that's one of the challenges we could do down the road.
Ronen Ainbinder 9:56
Yes, I also see that happening because so The way I'm thinking about this product and the reason why I'm so fascinated by it. As an amateur athlete that likes to practice specific sports, I like swimming. And I go. I go swimming once, twice a week. And there are certain things about my emotions that I don't know if I'm doing right. And yeah, getting a coach might be useful, and maybe but not all the time there is a coach available or you have the budget to pay or even want to be because it's something that you do once in a while, so maybe you want help once in a while. And so the thing that I like most about and I'm fascinated the most about this product is that it can provide that input immediately. You don't need the coach there. So that's one of the things that I'm looking for. Now one of them I want to discuss something also very specific about your sensor in the case, the cat prove that you developed, I want to know if there's any boundaries or any challenges that you are restricted to, for the sensor, in if you want to just maybe take it to physics, like what the sensor allows you, given the size, and the probably also the comfort, Because there are things that you can do. And there are also things that you want to do, but you can't do because there are these boundaries. So I want to just ask you if, in terms of like the product and its development, there are things that you wish you could do. Still, you wish you just couldn't do them because you're very restricted and limited to what the product is and the comfort it can allow an athlete to have.
Jo Shattuck 11:40
Interesting. Honestly, I don't see a restriction in the hardware or the capabilities except for one, which I'll detail in a minute. But I do see that one of the challenges is educating the sports tech community on our path. So we're not just another sensor company because there's plenty of sensors that collect data, and you need that data to measure the stress on the joints, to look at performance outcomes, to decide if your intervention, your treatment, your training program is working or your treatment or not. But what's interesting, Ronen, is that we did an interview with an Olympic coach. I won't say what sport, but she kept saying, does your center give kinematic data like Yes, it does. And what's the sampling rate? And she wanted to know, what's the angular acceleration of her particular athlete during a jump during a rotation? She said we'll kind of do this. And I said, Yes, it can. So Well, that would be great. And I said, Well, what would you do with that information? So Well, well, I would, if I did, I would know how fast they were rotating. And I said, Well, great. What would you do with it, then? And well, then I would know, and I said, Well, how does that help you so I could replicate it and do it, thank you. The data is not the end; it's not the goal that now I know; it's 8.8 radians per second to angular rotation. It's the action that I need to communicate to the athlete to replicate that if that's what I want or don't want. And so a bigger overview is the education of the sensor community, it's not the data is not the goal, the actual intervention, the improvement, the training, the maintenance of the motor pattern, or the changing of the motor impairment still has to happen in real-time, and that's where our product comes in. We're not anti data; it's just the feedback; the teaching component is the first component, the first feature of our product. Now back to that other one, I wish that the human body could react sooner. For example, if you wanted to know if you were swinging a bat at a certain speed, you could put the cat on the bat, and it would tell you, but you wouldn't be able to adjust that in real-time. Because that's not how close to skills work in a closed skill, you start, and then there's not much adjusting because it all happens in 300 milliseconds, or, or whatever. So the last thing is artificial intelligence. And that's huge. You're going to need artificial intelligence or machine learning. And that's very useful, of course, to find hidden patterns to detect a prediction of injuries, prediction of performance, longitudinal studies to say, if I continue on this path, my athletes will get injured in six months. But what you can't remove is the human again, person-to-person interaction, to communicate, whatever those changes in the protocol might be. Don't do this exercise this way, do it this way, or that kind of thing,
Ronen Ainbinder 14:40
Especially athletes who are probably not even coaches who are very technical. They're probably more practical. So for them, I guess, maybe this is something you already had in mind, but maybe it's a challenge to deliver the insights as digestible as possible. For them to just use in a very practical way, meaning take what happens and make it into something, or an insight that it's practical, not technical because technical is not a language they speak. Maybe,
Jo Shattuck 15:15
No, no, but I'm going to push back on you, Ronan, because I'm going to say that our product doesn't deliver insights; there's no knowledge in the cat. It all comes from the coach. So for good or bad, you can teach poor mechanics with the cat, or features, not insight, it's not data, it's not data points, it's intervention. It's real-time intervention to make you swing differently to make you aware that you're doing this and not this, or you should do this instead of this. And then you can take that instruction with you, or like the instruction whisperer, You take it home with you, and you get to have that same feedback with you. So my little rant here doesn't end with insight. It's the action, it's the intervention, that makes our product exciting.
Ronen Ainbinder 16:03
So you have to teach the coaches who will be using it to know exactly what is the best, like, what are the best metrics they need to be looking at else? Let me give you an example. Let's say I'm a baseball coach, and I want to improve my athletes. Swing swing. Okay, very, very simple. And I know I know he's doing it the way I supposed to, to like the way I think it's the best, the best practice. But what if what I think it's the best practice is not the best practice. And now, this can be like taking, taking, taking a step, taking a sample size of 1 million coaches, baseball coaches all over the world. You find the best, like the best, the best positioning, or the best. XYZ playing, you want to name it, you take the best practice, and then I want to know the best practice to apply it with my cat on my plate? So that's, that's what I mean, I want to know, I want to know, what is the best way of using it? If I'm not getting the insight, then how will I know? What is the best practice?
Jo Shattuck 17:16
Alright, I'm going to answer your question with a question. And you might push back on me if somebody asked me, well, how does the cat know what to do? And I said, well, the cat doesn't know. He said, Well, how does my coach know what to do with it? How does my coach know how to coach with it? And I said, How does your coach know? Now? How do they know without the cat? Well, they know because they study other players, look at biomechanics, have 20 years of experience, there's no knowledge, I'm holding up the cat, you can't see it, there's no knowledge in the cat, it's a tool. So if you're a good coach, you're going to be an even better coach with the cat just because you can communicate your instructions precisely to your athlete in real-time without you having to be there. And so this is part of the educational curve I was trying to push ed because I get asked, Well, how does it know a lot of other sensors, a lot of other sports specific, let's call them, improvement devices, have knowledge in them. They're based on the good average swing. Still, if you follow that, you're by definition and are training yourself to be average. That's not this. This is a tool for movement educators. If I want you to have a certain angle of your racket in space and your hip aligned in a certain way, I can teach you exactly that. And my next student might come in, and I teach him differently. And that's the way coaches teach. No coach will go to say, look at the top 10 swings. And quite honestly, there are some talented athletes out there with pretty poor biomechanics. Very interesting. And you'd be surprised how other top athletes talk about other top athletes.
Ronen Ainbinder 18:52
So but so then what is the main source of differentiation of the product if, because what I'm thinking is that it emphasizes or it creates a bigger hole? I said it just pronounces what the coach is trying to convey. But if there's an error in what the coaches' instructions want to convey, then the error will also be pronounced, I feel. So what is the differentiation in this tool? I understand that you want to give coaches a tool to pronounce or emphasize their instructions, But what if their instructions are wrong?
Jo Shattuck 19:38
Well, then you can say that about every tool, and that's a fair argument. It's the same thing about a 50-pound weight, a squat rack, or a tennis ball machine. You can misuse a tool of course now the main difference, and this is the key thing that we are the only sensor that delivers vibratory feedback based on customized instruction inputted by the code through the center; no other center gives feedback, vibratory feedback, what you do centers and they need it. They're not horrible, they got to collect data, but they'll show you visually what you're doing. We think it's better to learn by feeling what you're doing than seeing it right, the visual system, I'm a neuroscientist, so the visual system is the most dominant. That's why when you stand up, and you close your eyes, especially if you lift one foot, you cannot fall over because that horizon that has the appropriate receptive input of the horizon is not available to you anymore. But surprise surprise, you don't need your eyes to know where your body is, you could close your eyes, or you could look on your phone and walk around your living room. Because and not run into any furniture. Because your brain has a model where your furniture is in your house. It's the same with yourself and your body in the world. Your brain creates a model of you and its relation to the evidence environment, and that's how it navigates your body around the world. When the model is wrong, movements wrong when the model is flawed, the movements flawed if the maps wrong, you're not going to get there. And it's a really simplified explanation. But the point is that the cat device, there's no knowledge in it, no algorithm, no magic data that says you're going to be a good swinger or a good golf player, whatever it might be. It is a tool for moving educators to teach whatever they want through neuroplasticity, haptic feedback at the moment without having to monitor every repetition. Think of physical therapy at home. If you ever wondered, am I doing this? Right, then this is where this comes in?
Ronen Ainbinder 21:41
Yeah, yeah, I think I think that the explanation of tools being used is wrong; that makes total sense. I guess that in the future, there's going to be a lot of pushback on coaches saying, Oh, this doesn't work. But then you're going to have to explain. Well, it doesn't work because your input was wrong, not because the tool is wrong. The tool aims to help you put the message in the athlete's body in a feedback form that is different than just saying it's by feeling it. So it's not that the product is wrong; it's that your instruction is probably wrong. So I want to be very interested in hearing what kind of feedback they give you and what types of reasoning or help you provide afterward to help them improve their coaching style and be more accurate on what they want to communicate to their players. Right. So right helped me as a coach to become a better communicator. Maybe that's the catchphrase, that's the one-liner?
Jo Shattuck 22:45
No, a good point too, and to that, in that it's almost like an if you look at it retrospectively, it could be a detector of "is the coach good." And I don't mean good at coaching in general. I mean pretty coaching-specific biomechanics. It's almost like a coach skill assessor because, however, you program the cat. By program, I mean your athlete does a movement; you press a button on it that captures that. And then you tweak the three axes to make it exactly what you want. It is not that. Does the cat teach that? Is that the correct movement that you're supposed to teach?
Ronen Ainbinder 23:26
100%! Yeah, I love that. What happens next in the intersection of sports, neuroscience, biomechanics? That's your sweet, sweet spot. So what do you envision? What's next? Like the cat is the first product, but what are you thinking about next? Or what do you want to probably incorporate into that product? in the future? What are you thinking?
Jo Shattuck 23:52
So a few things we've got patent-pending, and a couple other patents in the works on other biometric sensors, force transduction force production, EMG, muscle activity, eye tracking, with the idea that with our technology, if you can measure it, you can train it in real-time. And if you know anything about motor learning theories that well, I won't, I won't go into that, and that'll be another hour. The cool part is there's a trifecta of variables that you want to get together. One is your subjective experience. How does your athlete feel when they do a movement that's biomechanically sound and powerful? You get that aha face, and every coach has had it. And if you've ever done sport yourself, you're like, Oh, that's it. I want to do that again. And then you spend the next hour trying to do it. The next thing is your kinematics, which is where the cat comes in and collects data, whatever data you want, specifically for your limb, wherever you attach it to the body. And the third is performance outcomes.
Performance outcomes, meaning how far do I hit the ball, how many spins were on my slider pitch How much topspin did I put my serve in? Was it out? Miles per hour. All those are performance metrics, performance metrics, kinematics, and subjective experience. That's the trifecta. If you can combine those and get those in real-time, you can coach just you. It's just the trifecta, To get all three of those aligned. When I do this, it feels this way. And this is the fastest pitch I have. That's fantastic. If I do this, it feels this way. And the ball goes to the left or whatever it might be in real-time. That is that's what we're going for.
Ronen Ainbinder 25:38
super interesting. Suppose there is any sport that you think because of its format. In that case, it is hard to create that trifecta, for I'm thinking maybe swimming and I'm probably wrong because swimming, I thought you'd just do it in the water. And probably things I thought were tons of things happening in the water. And so, for instance, my Apple Watch doesn't track when I'm just kicking. It doesn't know it doesn't eat. It doesn't even track the distance. It's ridiculous, But so that's one of the things that I think maybe they're limited by the things they can track. They can't but is there any other sport you can think of that could bring tons of challenges to create this trifecta to deliver? The best product?
Jo Shattuck 26:25
Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot. So sports with discrete sports or discrete movement like a vault, a beginning, and an end, a baseball swing, a racquetball swing, a race. Those are like closed sports with discrete skills within them. An open sport like soccer, Where there's tons of 360-degree movement, multi plane, lots of different moving pieces, players. I mean, that's harder because how do you quantify an hour-long performance when the score is one, zero. And there are 1000s of interactions and movements that happen in there, versus a single vault or a single baseball swing, So the open sports are constantly fluid, and you're reacting to your environment, as opposed to just you start, you finish, and you get graded on it? Those are going to be more difficult. Now the way coaches get around that is they do kinematics. They'll do. How many ball touches Did you have with your right foot? Let's say you play soccer with your left foot. How long did you possess the ball? So all these different metrics are how coaches figure out how to measure performance during a soccer game. Even when you know how many times how many minutes for your own defense or offense, even when you're even when you personally didn't have the ball. Those are metrics that are better off to other GPS sensors and those types of things.
For the cat specifically, it's almost like a GPS for your body. Your whole universe is just your body; we call it the sensory-motor space. So it helps an athlete master their sensory-motor space just by knowing where they are in time and space. Everybody says you can't forget about the time part because obviously, I'm also faculty at CU and shorts and movement disorders. One of the things we used to study is a reach-in graph for people with stroke; right, that's a movement too but if you grasp before you reach that movement is functional that so that's where the temporal component of mastery or sensory-motor space comes in. I don't know if I went off. I mean, I know I went off on a tangent, but I hope it was interesting.
Ronen Ainbinder 28:36
It was very, very interesting. I feel like I should receive a Bachelor's in biomechanics just from this halftime snack. I'm learning so much fascinated by the talk Jo, it's been super fun to talk with you about everything related to biomechanics The Cat and the value proposition that you guys are bringing to the space; I find it super disruptive and super interesting, as you said it's some it's a product that allows coaches to communicate better in what they want to convey. I look forward to the moment when you know I can even use it for my swimming when a coach or you know someone is just setting some things up before specifically for me, and then I can use it. I don't know if you guys have that plan, but if you don't, you better have it because then I'm gonna be very happy. Is there anything else that you have in mind? I know that you guys now were accepted to Denver Startup Week and that you're raising some funds. What is next for you guys in the next day, one, three, and five years? What do you think about strategy as a business Business Owner as a business, you know, running, Pantertec, what is your strategy? What are you thinking about where you want to get to eventually? Let's say five years?
Jo Shattuck 30:08
Sure, sure, absolutely. Well, we think with our patent, we have a patent in February. This will almost want to use the word revolutionize the way movement is taught. But maybe it's more revolution that waves movement is learned. Because it's based on neuroplasticity, sensory compensation, what your body does all the time anyway. So this next year, we want to launch our first flagship product, if you will, the cat kinesthetic awareness training, years two and three, we'll move on to the eye-tracking and force production insoles. And hopefully, by year five, I don't know if you said 10 or not. But we have a whole network of experts and ambassadors out there. 16 of us who have used some iteration of the cat in the last probably five or six years. And we'd like the whole network of very sports-specific, let's say guidance if you would; this is the way the cat's been used in baseball. This is the way it's been used in soccer. In fact, we're starting our first clinical trial before the end of the year in a neuro rehab center in Omaha to use it in amputees. So, to develop a database of best practices in each of these sports, let's call it. So that when you ask, you know how the coach knows, they will have a lot of experience of others that they can refer to like I used it on the left wrist of a batter because they kept dropping their hands or a boxer. After all, they kept dropping their hands. So those are those few things. My one, five and one, three, and five-year plan.
Ronen Ainbinder 31:47
Fascinating. I'm looking forward to it, Joe, before we leave, I can't go without asking you a more personal question. And I'm super, super curious to ask you. The story probably of how did you retire from professional racquetball or Why did you stop? What happened?
Jo Shattuck 32:07
Yeah, this is weird. This is weird. So for 20 something years, you wake up, and you think I need to get better at racquetball. And so you do, and you live it 24 seven; I lived in a camper without electricity to clean carpets at night for a couple of years because racquetball didn't pay much. And I was kind of a crazy person. But it was 2010. And at the end of the season, I started feeling like something was wrong. Like maybe I was getting sick or had some weird disease, or just I wasn't right. And the morning of the quarterfinals, I woke up in bed, and I'm like, I know what it is. And I turn over to my training partner. And she's like what I said, I think I'd rather be somewhere else. And, and the next, I played my match and took all my timeouts. But the next six months, I probably cried on the couch because I didn't know who I was. My whole identity was wrapped up into being Joe the Pro, which was it was just a way it was like a life-changing thing of realizing that wow, that that's what that is, was almost like a cartoon switch. In cartoons where they have a big red circuit breaker, they pull down the knob, and all the lights go; it's like that. Anyway, I went back to school and became Dr. Joe asked for good in the world again. But yeah, December 18, 2010, is when I realized I'd rather be doing something else. And I played that last match. And I never played professionally again until midseason thinking I would number six world six of the time.
Ronen Ainbinder 33:35
Yeah, well, I am happy to hear that at least you found your path in something similar to racquetball and that you're trying to bring solutions to it, given your experience and what you've learned and what you know about the sport and about neuroscience and how you apply that to your career. It was fascinating and very inspiring to see and follow Joe. I'm looking forward to what you and Panthertec will achieve together in the next couple of years. I hope that I can become one of those ambassadors or experts eventually. I want to thank you so much for coming to the halftime snacks and sharing your story and whatever you're developing with the partner deck with us. I've learned so much, and as I said, I think I should get my BA right away from my LinkedIn. But yeah, it's been fun. I appreciate you.