In the fast-changing fields of sports science and clinical health, professionals are always looking for safe ways to help athletes and patients avoid injuries while also helping them reach their full potential. VALD technology has become the gold standard in this field, mostly because it has the best normative datasets with more than twenty million musculoskeletal data points.
This huge database enables VALD systems to perform real normative benchmarking by age, gender, and even a specific sport. This gives health and performance professionals something that previous generations could only dream of: objective measurement that actually means something in context.
For too long, testing for musculoskeletal health relied on either single numbers or subjective assessments. A physiotherapist may ascertain a client's hamstring strength as 220 newtons; however, without contextualising this measurement within the 30th or 90th percentile for a 28-year-old female tennis player, the information remains predominantly theoretical. VALD changed the game by creating the world's largest living database of human performance data. This made it possible to compare every VALD test to relevant peers right away.
When health and performance professionals use VALD technology, they aren't just getting numbers; they're getting information about performance that they can use right away. For example, a dual force plate jump test on a VALD system gives you dozens of variables. But the real magic happens when VALD compares those results to data from thousands of athletes in the same sport and age group who are considered "normal." An asymmetry that could have been overlooked as "within normal limits" is now recognised as a significant outlier, given that only four percent of elite rugby players exhibit the same left-right imbalance.
Because VALD uses this level of objective measurement, thousands of organisations around the world trust it, including Premier League football clubs, national sports institutes, and top private health solutions practices. It's much more helpful to tell a player, "Your strange hamstring strength is in the bottom 10% for your position in the Premier League," than to just tell them to "work on your hamstrings."
In both elite sports and the general population, musculoskeletal injuries remain the leading cause of work missed. VALD technology tackles this directly by using standard data to create systematic screening programmes that look for problems before they happen. Health and performance professionals can monitor how someone changes over time by setting a baseline early in the pre-season or during the first consultation.
VALD systems make this process very quick and easy. VALD products like ForceDecks dual force plate systems, NordBord hamstring testing technology, and the HumanTrak movement analysis system can now perform a full lower-limb screen in less than 10 minutes, down from 45 minutes of manual testing. More importantly, every measurement is automatically compared to the right normative dataset, which gives you immediate visual feedback that shows any possible problems.
Coaches and doctors who use VALD service packages say that soft-tissue injuries have gone down a lot because they can step in months before pain starts. One Premier League team said that using VALD technology led to a 32% drop in hamstring strains after they started doing quarterly normative benchmarking screens for the whole team.
While the injury prevention side of VALD technology gets a lot of attention, the performance solutions side is just as groundbreaking. Strength and conditioning coaches have used one-rep maximums and velocity-based training for a long time, but these methods assume that all sports and positions are the same, which is not the case.
VALD's normative data uncovers intriguing insights. For instance, Australian Rules football midfielders usually show a thirty-five percent higher rate of force development in countermovement jumps than key-position players of the same age and skill level. Performance professionals can set truly individualised goals instead of using broad standards now that they know this through VALD systems.
The best thing about VALD technology is that it can keep track of progress towards both personal bests and population norms at the same time. An athlete who has had ACL surgery might be happy to be able to jump back to 90% of their pre-injury height, only to find out through VALD that they are in the fifteenth percentile for professional basketball players of the same age. That mix of information helps people make better decisions about rehabilitation and getting back to playing.
Results are the best proof of any technology, and VALD has client success stories from every continent. Science for Sport recently wrote about a case study from a top AFL club that used VALD's full testing suite and normative comparison tools to cut non-contact lower limb injuries by 41% in just one season.
A health solutions practice in Brisbane said that after starting to regularly test patients with VALD ForceDecks and compare their data to age- and gender-matched normative values, the average time it took to heal from an ankle sprain went down by three weeks. Patients liked seeing their progress compared to "people like them," which made them much more likely to stick with their treatment.
VALD technology is making high-performance insight available to everyone, even at the grassroots level. Regional academies that used to rely on stopwatches and guesswork now use the same VALD systems as the biggest teams in the Premier League. This gives young athletes real data to help them make decisions about how to improve.
One reason thousands of health and performance professionals trust VALD is that its products integrate well with existing practices. Data automatically goes into the VALD Hub, where dashboards show comparisons to the norm in just a few seconds. Coaches can sort players by team, position, injury history, or any other tag they make. Physiotherapists get alerts when a patient's condition drops below certain levels.
You can't say enough about how much time this saves. A full battery of tests that used to need several stations and manual entry can now be done with just one VALD system, which is often run by one staff member. That efficiency means that bigger groups and more cases can be screened on a regular basis without affecting the quality of care or training time.
As VALD's standard datasets keep getting bigger—adding hundreds of thousands of data points every month—the accuracy of benchmarking will only get better. New research partnerships with big universities and professional leagues promise sport-specific datasets that go into detail about positions and even playing styles.
VALD technology is already the best way to objectively measure strength, power, asymmetry, and movement quality. When you add the world's largest normative reference base, you get a platform that really makes a difference in both health and performance outcomes.
The question for any professional who wants to lower the risk of injury or improve human performance is no longer whether or not to use objective measurement systems. The question is how quickly they can use VALD technology and start making decisions based on real data that keep athletes on the field and patients moving better for longer.
VALD is a sign that sports science and clinical practice have matured into real, evidence-based fields. This is important because the industry has always relied on stories and personal experience. VALD is not just measuring performance; it is also changing what is possible with twenty million musculoskeletal data points and counting.