Knowledge translation was the theme of this year’s Bodies of Knowledge conference, an annual event organized by graduate students from the University of Toronto Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education.
“Knowledge translation is a lot more difficult than people think,” says Marcus Waskiw-Ford, a PhD student at the Faculty, who chaired the conference. “It’s really an important skill to be able to share the research you’re doing, especially in a multidisciplinary field such as kinesiology.”
Waskiw-Ford is studying about exercise nutrition with Assistant Professor Daniel Moore and says it’s easy to get ingrained in your own research.
“This conference exposes you to different kinds of research and that starts to open your mind a little bit and brings new perspectives to your own research,” he says.
Jessica Caterini, president of the KPE graduate student society (KPEGS), helped organize the conference in previous years and was happy to lend her expertise again this year. Like Waskiw-Ford, she appreciates the multidisciplinary nature of the Faculty.
“Often when I go to conference, I find a lot of people saying similar things, iterating on different types of research, but here you get such a big, broad idea of different types of research - from biophysics to sociocultural to behavioural sciences,” she says.
“I also really enjoy seeing how supportive and kind and curious the graduate students are in our Faculty. I think the broad, multi-disciplinary nature lends itself to that type of student,” says Caterini, who is in her final year of a PhD degree in kinesiology, looking at how exercise can be used as a physiological stressor to look at changes in metabolism and blood flow.
Close to 70 students from across Canada participated in the conference this year, but these three were deemed best presenters by a committee of peers.
Danielle Carnegie, a PhD student studying in the Musculoskeletal Biomechanics and Injury Prevention Lab at KPE under the supervision of Assistant Professor Tyson Beach, presented her research on low back injuries.
“We’re all busy lifting things throughout the day, for example, picking up our socks off the floor or picking up groceries,” says Carnegie.
The trouble comes when lifting leads to low back injuries.
In an attempt to reduce low back injury risk, many safe lifting recommendations encourage people to avoid rounding their low back when reaching down for objects. However, lifting behavior and low back injury rates remain largely unchanged. Carnegie worked on a study that used a custom-built spine harness that was designed to prevent rounding of the low back during lifting, to examine the effect this had on how people moved their bodies during lifting.
“We found that when lifting with the spine harness on, people increased the amount of motion coming from their ankles, knees and hips. This suggests that people who lack sufficient flexibility in their ankles, knees and hips may not actually be able to follow current safe lifting recommendations,” says Carnegie.
Instead, the study suggests targeting lifting interventions to meet the individual needs of the lifter, for example poor ankle flexibility, may be a more effective approach to reducing low back injury risk associated with lifting.
Daniel Eisenkraft Klein’s presentation focused on the community engagement strategies at Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) Launchpad, a self-described ‘living lab’ located in Toronto’s Moss Park neighbourhood, that explores and measures how sport can help improve the lives of youth facing barriers. One of the key findings of his research is that existing sport-for-development frameworks for recruitment don't fully encapsulate the nuance of what is occurring at Launchpad.
“Whereas sport is frequently theorized as the "fly-paper" that brings hard-to-reach youth in, we are seeing the development activities - mental health services, tutoring, cooking - as a significant flypaper, especially for older youth,” says Eisenkraft Klein, who is in his final year of a master’s degree in Exercise Science under the supervision of Assistant Professor Simon Darnell.
“This reveals a real appetite - particularly in the context of increasing cuts to social services in Moss Park - for social programs wherever the community can find them.”
Eisenkraft Klein will be continuing his education in kinesiology by pursuing a PhD degree in the Faculty next year.
PhD student Malinda Hapuarachchi, co-supervised by Beach and Associate Professor Luc Tremblay, looked into how different types of instructions may result in different movement behaviours within an athletic assessment context.
“Previous research has demonstrated that certain instructions can sometimes lead to better jump height performances,” says Hapuarachchi. “For example, athletes tend to jump higher when asked to think about overall effects of their movements instead of thinking about their specific body parts or coordinating their body parts while moving.”
To quantify how the athletes were potentially changing their movement behaviours, Hapuarachchi used a force plate, a measuring instrument that measures the ground reaction forces generated by a body standing on it, to look at what, if any, differences could be seen between the different instructions provided when athletes jumped. The results varied across all the participants, proving different people interpret information differently.
“This has direct implications for how coaches or strength and conditioning practitioners evaluate the athletes they work with,” says Hapuarachchi. “They need to consider using a variety of cues or instructions to make sure they are targeting all the different ways of interpreting information because this can directly influence someone’s movement mechanics and behaviour.”