Hytro is a company working in the training and rehabilitation space, with a particular focus on blood-flow-restriction equipment. Although the BFR market is growing and the company has already spent significant time testing and validating the physiological effects of their garments, they wanted to understand something more mechanical: does the structure of their garment actually influence how people move when running or cycling? That was the central problem they came to me with, and the one this project set out to answer.
To answer it, I designed a 3D motion capture study comparing their garments with standard shorts and competitor products. Twelve trained runners and cyclists completed a series of short running and cycling bouts while wearing different garments, with each participant fitted with twenty eight markers and recorded by a twenty four camera Qualisys system. After collecting the data, I manually cleaned and labeled the trials after abandoning an AIM model that did not perform well, and then built a Python workflow to fill gaps, estimate joint centers, filter the trajectories, construct local coordinate systems, and calculate lower limb joint angles across all planes of motion. Finally, I used statistical parametric mapping to test for differences between garments.
Because of occlusion issues and the time required for manual labeling, I was only able to analyze the running data from six participants. Within that limited dataset, there was only one significant difference between conditions, suggesting that the structure of both pneumatic and practical blood flow restriction garments does not meaningfully change overall running kinematics. A few small, non significant trends appeared, but nothing strong enough to support confident claims.
The main takeaway is that these garments likely do not substantially alter running mechanics, but the reduced sample size and data quality challenges mean the results should be interpreted cautiously. With cleaner data and a full participant set, future work could provide a clearer picture of how or if garment structure influences movement.
