By: AJ Leonard, CSCS, Spooner Performance and Personal Trainer, and Derrick DeBenedetto, PT, DPT, CAFS, Clinic Director

You’re stronger. You’re moving better. So why doesn’t it feel that way?

When you first start physical therapy or a new training program, progress can be easy to notice. You move better. You lift more. Things that were difficult start getting easier.

But as you improve, those changes can become harder to feel.

You may be told you’re stronger or moving more efficiently, but the difference isn’t as obvious as it was in the beginning. That’s where having objective data can help.

Force plate testing measures how your body produces and absorbs force during movements such as jumping, squatting, balancing, and pushing. The data can provide objective measurements of strength, power, balance, and differences between your right and left sides.

For athletes and active adults, those measurements can help establish a baseline, identify areas to work on, and track whether training is producing measurable change over time.

What is force plate testing?

A force plate is a piece of technology that measures the forces your body produces and absorbs as you move.

At Spooner Sunnyslope, Clinic Director and physical therapist Derrick DeBenedetto, PT, DPT, CAFS, uses force plate testing as one tool to better understand how his patients are progressing.

Professional observation and hands-on assessment remain important parts of physical therapy and performance training. Force plates add another layer of information by providing objective measurements that can be compared over time.

“Manual muscle testing can be very subjective to the provider,” Derrick says. “Force plate testing gives us a lot more specificity—real data instead of just a feeling. When you tell someone they’ve improved by 20 pounds of force, that means something to them in a way a grade on a scale just doesn’t.”

AJ Leonard, CSCS, Performance and Personal Trainer at Spooner Sunnyslope, has seen the same benefit with training clients and athletes. Objective measurements can help establish a baseline, track changes over time, and give people a better understanding of how their training is affecting their performance.

Now, that technology is available outside of physical therapy through standalone force plate testing sessions at Spooner Sunnyslope with AJ Leonard and at Spooner Sports Institute with Head Performance Coach Ernie Atkins.

What does force plate testing measure?

Force plates measure the forces your body produces during movement. Depending on the movement being tested, force plate data can provide insight into:

• Strength: How much force you can produce.
• Power: How quickly you can produce force during explosive movements such as jumping.
• Balance: How you control your body while standing or moving.
• Side-to-side differences: Whether one side of your body is producing or absorbing force differently than the other.
• Force absorption: How your body handles force during movements such as landing from a jump.

No single measurement tells the entire story. A trained professional can help interpret the results alongside your movement, training history, goals, and other relevant information.

Who can benefit from force plate testing?

You don’t have to be a professional athlete to benefit from understanding how your body produces force.

Force plate testing may be useful for:

• Athletes who want objective benchmarks for strength, power, and symmetry.
• Active adults who want to better understand their current physical performance.
• People returning to activity who want to establish and track performance benchmarks.
• People who have reached a training plateau and want another way to measure progress.
• Anyone starting a new training program who wants baseline measurements they can compare against future testing.

The value isn’t simply getting a set of numbers. It’s understanding what those numbers mean and being able to compare them over time.

What happens during a force plate testing session?

During your session, a Spooner performance specialist will guide you through a series of movements that may include jumps, squats, and balance tests.

The force plates collect objective measurements of how you produce and absorb force during those movements.

After testing, you’ll review your results one-on-one with a Spooner performance specialist. They’ll explain what the numbers mean, answer your questions, and help you understand where you stand today.

Your results can then serve as a baseline to compare against future testing, giving you a more objective way to track changes in your performance over time.

A Success Story: How force plates help track progress

Sometimes progress is easier to understand when you can measure it.

One of AJ’s clients, an older adult managing arthritis in her knee, had been training with him for approximately two months. AJ could see improvements in how she moved and how much strength she was developing, but she wasn’t convinced.

She didn’t feel like she was making progress.

Rather than simply telling her she was getting stronger, AJ used force plate testing to give her another way to evaluate her progress.

The results showed more than a 10% increase in the force she was producing, along with improvement in the difference between her two sides.

“Not only did her squat assessment show an increase in her total force output, but a decrease in asymmetrical force output,” AJ says. “Her ability to produce force in the affected leg was getting stronger—and most importantly, she was doing it without pain.”

For her, the numbers provided something she had been missing: objective evidence that the work she was putting in was producing measurable change.

That gave her additional confidence to keep training.

Can force plates measure upper-body strength?

Yes. While many force plate assessments involve lower-body movements such as squats and jumps, force plates can also measure upper-body force production.

For example, during a push-up assessment, each hand can be placed on a separate plate. The system measures how much force each arm produces, making it possible to identify differences between sides.

Force plates can also be incorporated into shoulder-strength assessments to measure force production in different arm positions.

This can provide useful information for athletes in throwing sports, including baseball players and quarterbacks, as well as other athletes who rely heavily on upper-body strength and power.

Just as with lower-body testing, the goal is to establish objective measurements that can be tracked and interpreted alongside the rest of an athlete’s training and performance.