The Quick Board

The Athlete Lab got to test out the new QuickBoard Companion capabilities. It’s always great catching up with Dr. Trent Nessler_ACL Expert_BJJ PT!

This is a Companion Array React drill. One Companion device shows two possible targets.

The board is programmed to call for a foot response or a Companion response, and it picks randomly, sometimes back to back.

The patient can’t settle into a rhythm. They can’t guess what’s next based on what just happened. Every rep, the brain has to spot the cue, decide if it’s a board target or a Companion target, then send the right body part to respond.

That’s a discrimination task. Upper extremity and lower extremity reaction, combined, unpredictable, and scored automatically. Every rep gets saved and time-stamped. The clinician gets objective reaction time and accuracy data without writing anything down.

Here’s the part most people miss. The patient never looks down at their feet during this drill. They react to a visual or auditory cue and trust their foot to find the target. That’s the point. Real movement, on a field, a court, or a set of stairs, never gives you time to check your foot placement first. A drill that trains foot response while the eyes stay locked on the feet isn’t training transfer.

Quick Board is the only system that objectively measures combined upper and lower extremity reaction without requiring visual confirmation of foot placement. That’s the difference between a drill that looks good on video and one that rebuilds proprioception and reactive control.

Patrick Mahomes is at training camp. Eight months after tearing his ACL and LCL.

Recovering from a major knee injury takes more than healing tissue. Competitive athletes want to push past every checkpoint their medical team sets.

That drive needs a target. Without one, it becomes a liability.

Most return-to-sport protocols check three things: does the knee look stable, is strength back, do hop tests pass. Few put a number on split-second decision-making.

A pass rush read happens in under half a second. Recognizing the defense, deciding in real time, releasing under live pressure. Standard RTS testing rarely measures that.

Physical recovery and cognitive-motor recovery do not run on the same timeline. Most clearances test one and assume the other follows.

QuickBoard shows each athlete their last result and personal best before every rep. A live progress bar runs during the exercise so they know in real time if they are ahead or behind their best. Objective data gives competitive drive a target, so it becomes safe progress instead of a liability.

What does your RTS evaluation include beyond strength and symmetry?

Maybe the most overlooked aspect of returning to function!

Your ACL doesn’t just stabilize your knee. It also tells your brain where your leg is.

It’s packed with sensory receptors that report joint position and movement. When it tears, that input is disrupted. The graft does not restore it.

Dr. Trent Nessler put numbers on it in a video this month. He describes the ACL as “about the size of your pinky,” carrying “the highest concentration of proprioceptors” in it.

You can rebuild the ligament and still hand back an athlete whose brain lost its map of the limb. Nessler treats that as a return-to-sport risk factor, not a footnote.

Here is the part most protocols skip.

Proprioception drops when an athlete gets tired. That is also when ACL injuries tend to happen in sport.

So he trains it tired on purpose. Blood flow restriction cuffs on all four limbs, then reactive foot work on the QuickBoard.
Why not a light pod? With pods, the athlete looks down and touches the light. The eyes do the work. In his words, “you have to keep your head up.”

Head up, eyes on the screen, feet moving on feel alone. That is the version the sport actually asks for. And it leaves him numbers: contact time, accuracy, reaction time, and involved versus uninvolved side.

Rebuild the knee. Retrain the brain. Then measure the difference between them.

Video credit: Dr. Trent Nessler, The Athlete Lab.

Why are most exercises in training and rehab single task when sports and life demand more?

To maximize performance and recovery, we need to combine upper and lower extremity function. This is exactly how the body works in the real world, and it is how we should be training it.

In this video, I am doing a Foot Fire exercise on the QuickBoard sensor board while using our companion app capability. I am reacting with my hands to two iPads mounted on the squat rack.

The Drill: Keep the feet firing, react only to the iPad that turns RED 🔴, and ignore the GREEN 🟢.

While I am doing this, the sensor board provides real-time feedback:

✅ Total touches

✅ Ground Contact Time (GCT)

✅ Progress bar showing if I am ahead or behind my personal best

Why this matters:

This setup requires intense external focus and dual-tasking. Motor learning and neuroplasticity research shows both of these are highly beneficial for training and rehab across all populations.

We already have studies proving that QuickBoard’s external focus and proprioception demands improve agility test performance. The companion capability takes this cognitive load further. We are currently working with universities to design studies to measure and prove its effectiveness.

Streamlined Data for Clinicians and Coaches:

To distinguish this from other technologies, the data from the sensor board and the companion devices are saved together. This completely streamlines data collection and progress tracking. It makes it incredibly easy for professionals to measure dual-task demands and track patient or athlete improvement over time without juggling multiple apps.

We will be posting many more companion exercises soon.

Two reactive drills (Go 🔵 ). One gave us full data. One did not. Quick Board ran both.

Drill 1: Discrimination task paired with Foot Fire. One athlete, sensor board, iPad. Rapid alternating foot touches while reacting to the lit sensor. QuickBoard tracks touch count, ground contact time symmetry left to right, and reaction time per sensor location. Coach gets numbers in real time.

Drill 2: Single-leg reactive hops to perimeter targets. Three athletes, three rubber dot arrays, one iPad. The screen cues which dot to hop to. Athlete hops out on one leg, returns to center before the next target appears. Right leg, then left. No sensor board. No accuracy data. No metrics collected.

The tradeoff: no athlete feedback on Drill 2 (they glance down to check placement), and no symmetry data for the coach. What you get instead: QuickBoard handles the cueing for all three athletes simultaneously, and the coach is free to watch movement quality.

Galpin et al. (2008) found a 4-week QuickBoard protocol cut laser-timed change-of-direction time by 0.45 seconds in an active college student population. The 4 weeks of training transferred to real-world movement. That transfer starts in sessions like Drill 1, where every rep provides real-time movement feedback without looking at your feet (external focus). It’s how the body works.

QuickBoard works as a data tool and as a cueing coach. Which mode you run depends on what the session needs.

Sports PTs and ATCs: how do you balance individual data collection with group throughput in your reactive training?

“Athletes are eager to get back to playing but when they are challenged with these drills, it really exposes their deficits and how many of them are not as ready as they think they are.” Mike St. George PT, DPT - well said…
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Neuro cognitive Array Patterns
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Advancing reaction time on the Quick Board drills challenges the athlete to return back to speeds and demands that simulate in game situations. With injuries like ACL tears, it can be some time before the athlete moves fast again. Neuromuscular deficits, strength deficits and Kinesiophobia can all play a part in this.
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Athletes tend to forget just how fast they need to move for sports performance when being away from the sport for some time.
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The drills shown here are reaction drills with faster flash times and shorter delay times. We’re talking .5 of a second differences. They are in an array pattern which means the athlete has to find the designated color amongst other colors.

This brain processing of finding the designated color, finding its location and hitting it within the time helps to restore the brain to muscle connection of natural response efforts. The faster processing helps to train for “athletic readiness”.
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There are also crossover drills to challenge the brain to muscle connection of each leg doing a different pattern simultaneously and then a foot fire reaction drill to challenge simple reaction time when fatigued.
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Athletes are eager to get back to playing but when they are challenged with these drills, it really exposes their deficits and how many of them are not as ready as they think they are.
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These training drills help to improve confidence and demonstrate to them which movements and patterns they need to work while also providing the clinician with insight on how to curtail the treatment plan for these goals.

Criteria-based return to sport, not timeframe-based. Most criteria lists include hop test symmetry, quadriceps strength ratios, and pain scores. Three good columns. Still one short.

Jiménez-Martínez et al. (2025, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living) followed ACLR athletes through completed rehabilitation programs, measuring cognition preoperatively, postoperatively, and at the end of rehab. On Multiple Object Tracking, athletes improved early in recovery, then improvement stalled. At discharge, they still showed deficits compared to healthy controls. The gap never closed.

Getting quads firing is the right focus early. Isokinetic testing confirms the muscle is there. Force testing confirms symmetry. But open-skill sport asks for more than isolated output. It asks the athlete to track multiple players, read a defense, and process spatial cues while moving. That capacity remained impaired at the completion of their rehabilitation programs.

That is the cognitive column most criteria lists are missing, and it is what Quick Board measures. Reaction time, visuomotor response accuracy, and bilateral asymmetry. Go/No-Go, Array, and Stroop tasks load inhibition, discrimination, cognitive flexibility, and decision-making, the same demands that open-skill sport places on a returning athlete.

The clip below takes it a step further. With Companion, the athlete reacts with hands and feet at the same time, upper and lower extremities working together, the way sport actually demands.

Criteria-based clearance is the right direction. The criteria list is not complete without the cognitive column.

What cognitive criteria are you currently using for return to sport?

The patient is watching the iPad. Not her feet.

That is not incidental to the exercise. It is the whole mechanism.

Davis Physical Therapy & Sports Rehab shared a video of an older adult performing the Stagger Step on Quick Board. Eyes on the screen throughout. External focus during a task most clinicians run without it.

The stagger step is a bilateral coordination drill. Alternating foot placement, both sides working in sequence, under full cognitive load. Attention stays on the screen. Balance and proprioception emerge as outputs.

When focus goes outward, the body organizes movement. She is focused on the iPad, not managing her feet, which increases likelihood of transfer to other tasks outside of the clinic.

Why? Because it is how the body works and the appropriate pathways are activated.