Article on Orthotics

[rainbowgirl28]

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/sports/11952680.htm

Sometimes getting to the heart of a problem starts at the feet

By Josh Kendall

Telegraph Staff Writer

GREENSBORO - Three years ago, Dr. Lou Pack walked into Victor Bergonzoli's door and got the same reaction he gets every time he goes forth to spread his vision.

"The first time I met him, he was this strange doctor coming to my office telling me he has a revolution for sports enhancement," said Bergonzoli, the president of Dartfish USA, a Swiss company generally recognized as the world leader in sports video enhancement. "I met him, and I was skeptical like everybody else."

Pack's claims that day were wild, and they still are. The 58-year-old chairman, CEO and staff member of Precision Sports, Inc., is selling something revolutionary from his spacious office just outside the entrance to Reynolds Plantation.

"I think you can take - and this is a hell of a statement - but I think you can take any athlete, in any sport, and make them better on the spot by looking at their tires," Pack said, referring to an athlete's feet. "That's a pretty profound statement, and the reason I feel that way is not - I want to underscore not - because I have all the answers, but because nobody is really doing it."

What Pack is doing is called biomechanical structural analysis. In his case, he works specifically below the knees, checking basic elements like leg length, foot arch and movement and calf tightness. If one leg is longer than the other or one foot turns inward more than another or both feet flatten too much on contact with the ground, some measure of performance is being lost, and he can give an athlete that performance back with just an insert for their shoes, he believes.

"Everyone has some degree of abnormality, and any degree of abnormality decreases athletic performance and increases the risk of injury," he said.

"There isn't a race car driver in the world who would take their car and race it without making sure the wheels and tires were balanced and aligned, but, in sports, I don't care what sport or what level, we don't do that.

"We ain't checking the tires on these guys."

Bergonzoli might never have bought into Pack's spiel if he hadn't been a competitive weightlifter as a teenager. He never reached his full potential because one of his knees always bent inward during squats.

"(Pack) looked at me and in five seconds told me what was wrong with me," said Bergonzoli, whose knee problem was caused because he had one leg shorter than the other. "I was very impressed."

Bergonzoli, whose company provides training videos for some of the world's top athletes and recently won an Emmy for its work with the Olympics, has seen Pack preach his message and pedal his inserts to athletes across the world.

"The reaction has always been the same," Bergonzoli said. "They're always amazed."

Start at the bottom

Pack is out to convert as many believers as he can. Give him an hour, he says, and he'll give you performance you never thought possible. Olympic medalists Tim Mack and Terrence Trammell and many others, some under the cloak of secrecy, have taken the time and are glad they did, Pack said.

Pack is now starting to make inroads at the University of Georgia, where he helped the men's golf team win the NCAA Championship last month. Golf coach Chris Haack heard of Pack through a friend and invited the doctor to Athens in April. It was more than two-thirds of the way through the season and just two months before the NCAA tournament.

"He's kind of like a mad scientist almost," Haack said. "He had these guys going through a few tests. As he would do it, he would show everybody how, as they would go down, their feet would move out or their knees would bend in, just different things."

Then, using a mouse pad to correct balance issues, Pack showed the Bulldogs how they should feel when they address the ball.

"You'd do it so much better because you were in balance," Haack said. "It just kind of made sense."

The golf team signed on for custom shoe inserts that day and all five golfers wore them throughout their NCAA tournament win in Maryland.

"All the guys, they like them," Haack said. "When you talk about persnickety golfers, if you have anything they don't like, they're not going to do it. They all still have them."

Former UGA golfers Nick Cassini and Franklin Langham use Pack's inserts on the pro tour, Haack said.

"Those guys basically swear by them and say, 'I wouldn't play again without them,â" Haack said.

Pack is scheduled to meet with Georgia gymnastics coach Suzanne Yoculan later this week, he said, and he would like to work with every Bulldogs athlete.

"I could take the UGA football team and make a dramatic difference in them, and I could prove it to you on the spot," he said. "I think I could take every player on every team at UGA and make them play better. Not because I have all the answers, but because nobody is paying attention to structure."

Why that is, he doesn't know.

"It's so simple. For 40 years, I've been banging my head against the wall with this," he said. "What drives me crazy is you have to find somebody like Coach Haack who says, 'You know what? This makes sense, do it.' Not, 'It can't make sense, nobody has said it before,' or, 'It makes sense, but we have too much politics to institute this.'

"Sam Snead said, 'All good golf begins at the waist, all great golf begins at the foot.â But nobody ever followed through on that statement. It makes no sense, the foot is the foundation of the whole system. If it's off, everything is going to be off."

All about balance

The argument made enough sense that Mack and Trammell tried it, and they're both believers. Mack, the 2004 gold medalist in the pole vault, has been wearing inserts since 1995. He found Pack in 2001 and hasn't gone back to another brand since, he said.

"Really, it does help," he said. "I know that there are some weaknesses in our (physical) chain. The body kind of gets out of whack, and it seems like they do help."

Unlike Mack, who wears inserts only in his training and warm-up shoes, Trammell wore Pack's product during his silver medal-winning sprint in the 2004 Olympics. Pack's inserts not only improved Trammell's performance but may have saved his career, said Trammell's longtime coach, Napoleon Cobb.

"I don't totally understand how they operate, but I did observe a significant improvement in Terrence's performance," Cobb said. "I don't understand all of the scientific ramifications, but I was tremendously impressed."

Trammell began to seek out custom inserts after he struggled with injuries throughout the 2003 season, Cobb said. He and Pack worked for months fine-tuning his inserts and Trammell received the final version just before the Olympic trials, Cobb said.

"Terrence just exploded," he said. "He just ran his best ever. I personally thought there was some correlation with that final adjustment coming at that time."

Pack, who started his medical training in pharmacy and then graduated from New York College of Podiatric Medicine, first became interested in inserts when he began running in 1972. The only thing he could find to help a slight stress fracture in his leg were inserts. As he built his medical resume - becoming a clinical instructor at the Emory University School of Medicine, a founding fellow of the American College of Rheumatology (arthritis), a board certified foot and ankle surgeon and the director of certification in functional foot orthotics at the United States Sports Academy - he added more and more expertise to his interest, he said.

"When I look at somebody, I look at them from many different angles," he said.

He has developed a way to make an imprint of a person's foot that measures the foot the way it should be rather than the way it is. He is in the process of patenting the system, which allows him to build an insert that maximizes athletic performance, he said.

"I have the technology to make a device that's so precise that it brings the ground up to meet the foot instead of having the foot go through wasted motion," he said.

For instance, if he can reduce the amount of time a sprinter's foot is on the ground by 5/100ths of a second, he can decrease a 40-yard dash time from 4.8 to below 4.6, he said. It seems like such a simple thing that it's amazing every high school kid who wants a college scholarship doesn't have one, but Pack struggles to get his message out.

"The biggest problem I have is what I do makes such a difference that top athletes don't want anybody else to know anything about it," he said.

Simple success

One of Pack's golfing clients has won the U.S. Open, British Open and the Masters, he said, but won't let the doctor use his name because he doesn't want any more of his competitors to start using the inserts, Pack said. There's at least one major league pitcher familiar to all Georgians who falls in the same category, he said.

Atlanta resident Roald Bradstock, a former British Olympian in the javelin throw who later gained U.S. citizenship, had his career revived by a pair of Pack's inserts. Last year, at the age of 42, he became the oldest man ever to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Trials.

Former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Steve Bartkowski, now a regular on celebrity golf tours, uses Pack's inserts and told the doctor, "'Doc, there's no comparison in how much better I would have thrown the football if you had seen me,'" Pack said. "One leg was so much longer than the other, he was always out of balance."

Pack's system has the most straightforward impact in golf, where balance is such a vital element.

"We want to know why is golf so difficult," he said. "It's difficult because it requires such great balance and every single person who gets up to hit the ball is out of balance 100 percent of the time to begin with. You're supposed to consistently swing a club in balance and you're out of balance to begin with."

But it has implications far beyond just golf and sports. Human joints and replacement joints will last longer and stay healthier longer if a person is in better balance every day of his or her life, Pack said. He helped Bergonzoli's mother with severe foot pain, Bergonzoli said, and he has helped at least one patient confined to a walker support herself on inserts and braces alone, Pack said.

"I keep telling him," Bergonzoli said, "that he's a genius that not enough people know about."

[FlyerChick4]

My coach recommended that i get orthotics because i had horrible shin splints and after i got them they went away. it really works. Our other girl polevaulters have them too, most of us have far fewer leg injuries.