Biotensegrity Is Needed in Athletic Training Professional Education

Abstract

Context: Tensegrity is a structural-organization model initially described in the architecture and design fields. By applying tensegrity design principles to biological structures, scientists have developed biotensegrity to explain a complex systems-on-systems structural-organization philosophy for integrated human movements. Objective: To provide a brief historical overview of tensegrity and biotensegrity principles, including recommendations and benefits for integrating these structural models into athletic training education. Background: Tensegrity and biotensegrity structures require constant interaction between continuous tension and discontinuous compression elements that connect through focal adhesion points. During the 1970s and 1980s, scientists applied tensegrity concepts to biological organisms to create an integrated model of human structure and interaction. Since then, biotensegrity has grown as an accepted biological structural model capable of explaining complex and integrated human movements. Synthesis: By teaching tensegrity and biotensegrity principles, athletic training educators can provide athletic training students with a basic and consistent human body structural model. With this knowledge, students can better comprehend the integrated kinetic chain, including current and future prevention, examination, and rehabilitation paradigms. Results: Although absent from the Practice Analysis, seventh edition, and the 2020 Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education curricular content standards, tensegrity and biotensegrity relate to many injury prevention, examination, treatment, and rehabilitation concepts regularly taught in professional athletic training programs. Recommendation(s): Athletic training educators should consider ways to incorporate biotensegrity models into professional athletic training programs to improve critical thinking and whole-person health care principles of athletic training students. Conclusion(s): Integrating tensegrity and biotensegrity principles into professional athletic training programs provides a structural hierarchy of human body organization that athletic training students can apply to a multitude of current and future methodical approaches.