Analyzing the Hysteresis of the Lumbar Spine

Significant advances have been made in the field of spine biomechanics with the introduction of continuous testing machines and new testing protocols. [1] Despite all the technological achievements, range of motion (RoM) continues to be the only widely agreed upon, standardized metric for data analysis. In load-controlled flexibility testing, displacement is typically recorded over three loading cycles between established limits in specific modes of loading. The first two cycles are intended for preconditioning, and the data from the third cycle is used for analysis. [2] Plotting displacement versus load defines the hysteresis inherent to the motion segment.