Gretchen Oliver

Gretchen has a primary research focus on injury prevention and performance enhancement. She is particularly interested in youth overhead throwing, baseball pitching, and softball pitching. She has a special interest in the area of fatigue in extended performances in baseball and softball pitching and throwing. She is considered one of the elite biomechanists in sports medicine who examine youth overuse injuries in baseball and softball.

The Sports Medicine and Movement Lab studies sport biomechanics and provides evidence-based injury prevention protocols. Gretchen and her doctoral students specialize in kinematics, motion analysis, functional assessment, and injury prevention. Gretchen’s research focuses on injury prevention in youth, collegiate, and professional athletes, and provides strengthening, stretching, and performance feedback to participants who may be at increased risk of injury. 

Through Gretchen’s research efforts and training, she has come to recognize deficits in performance that can lead to injury. The Sports Medicine and Movement Lab is involved in outreach through the Injury Prevention & Performance Enhancement Program. It assesses youth mechanics and postural abnormalities to recognize deficits in performance that could lead to injury and correct them. The Sports Medicine and Movement Lab is an affiliated Professional Health Organization collaborator with STOP Sports Injuries. The STOP Sports Injuries campaign emphasizes the expertise of our coalition of experts, including the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, American Academy of Pediatrics, National Athletic Trainers’ Association, National Strength and Conditioning Association, American Medical Society for Sports Medicine and SAFE Kids USA.

Gretchen has been using The MotionMonitor since 2008 for biomechanics-related research and we have enjoyed working with her and her students! Gretchen was instrumental in the development of The MotionMonitor for Baseball application by providing her expertise and knowledge of pitching analysis.

To learn more about her lab and research visit her lab: https://www.sportsmedicineandmovementau.com/

See Gretchen’s Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ae6HxHgAAAAJ&hl=en