At first glance, it did not exactly look like the future of bull riding.
One after another, riders stepped into a circle of eight cameras.
João Lucas Campos went first in boots and jeans.
Then came Cassio Dias, the World Champion and Monster Energy rider, getting into position in his Monster socks.
Another rider followed. Then another.
At the computer, biomechanics and sports performance specialist Kait Jackson watched each rider move while PBR Director of Rider Development Joe Ernst helped facilitate the testing, giving each rider a thumbs-up to begin once everything was ready and ensuring the data was recorded correctly, while coaches translated instructions for Portuguese-speaking athletes.
And because asking a group of professional bull riders to repeatedly squat in front of their teammates was never going to remain completely scientific, the Kansas City Outlaws and others provided their own soundtrack.
Fart noises included.
Making the five minutes fly by.
On Jackson’s computer screen, the rider standing in front of her had been reduced to something resembling a blue stick figure, a digital skeleton mapped over his body and moving when he moved.
Every squat, jump, shift, wobble and subtle difference from one side of the body to the other was becoming data.
For the first time ever, biomechanics testing is mandatory across PBR Teams, introducing another analytical layer to a sport historically measured by something much simpler: stay on for eight seconds.
The goal is not to teach computers how to ride bulls.
It is to better understand the athletes who do.
“We're trying to essentially get a foundation of, okay, how do you control your body in space when you're on stable ground?” Jackson said. “How do you transfer force through your body?”
That means the evaluation is intentionally simple.
Riders move through tests measuring coordination, balance, power and vision without breaking much of a sweat or surrendering much of their day. Jackson said keeping the process minimally invasive is critical as PBR works to build athlete and coach buy-in, with the long-term possibility of expanding into more detailed shoulder, spine and movement evaluations.
Squatting or jumping on a force plate may appear to have little connection to controlling a 1,800-pound animal.
Biomechanically, that is not really the point.
The cameras and force plates are looking underneath the movement — how efficiently a rider absorbs force, how he redirects it, whether one leg is doing more work than the other and whether his body remains organized when his visual or vestibular system is challenged.
The testing itself has already evolved. Early biomechanical evaluations included a grip-strength test, which seemed logical in a sport built around hanging onto a bull rope. But Jackson found no meaningful correlation with peak grip strength and riding performance, so the test was discontinued. At the end of the day, a rider is not trying to win an arm-wrestling match with a bull. He just needs enough strength to keep his hand closed for eight seconds, with rosin playing its part as well.
One test looks almost too easy.
A rider closes his eyes, lifts his arms to shoulder height and marches in place.
A few wandered dangerously close to Jackson’s cameras or the desk directly in front of them.
Most barely went anywhere.
Try the same thing with athletes from some other major sports, Jackson joked during testing, and they might march out the door and halfway down the hallway.
Professional bull riders possess an unusually developed sense of where their bodies are in space — proprioception — along with strong vestibular performance, or inner balance.
“They are just generally speaking very aware of where their body is in space,” Jackson said.
Compared with athletes in other sports, bull riders are also extremely strong pound-for-pound. They are not necessarily elite in pure explosiveness, but their job requires something different: force absorption and redirection rather than simply creating maximum force. Jackson said that combination tends to produce strong, stiff athletes who can also show reduced hip mobility and greater susceptibility to groin and hamstring issues.
Her early findings put numbers behind some of those differences.
Among the riders tested, the top 10% produced 18% greater force absorption and a 12% higher core strength score. Fifty-eight percent of riders showed at least one injury flag.
And Jackson often does not need to wait for every number to populate before she has an idea of what the data might show. With a trained eye, she can watch a rider move through an exercise, notice a subtle weight transfer or slight imbalance from one side to the other and ask something as specific as, “Does your right knee hurt?” The answer is usually “yes.” Then the data helps quantify what she has already started to see.
Vestibular weakness was associated with a 3.1-times greater risk of twisting injuries. Vision issues corresponded with a 2.4-times greater risk of upper-body injury. And 78% of riders displaying more than a 15% left-to-right imbalance also showed elevated injury risk.
That is where five minutes of squatting starts becoming considerably more useful.
Force plates do more than register how hard someone pushes into the floor. Jackson examines the shape and timing of the force produced as a rider lowers, changes direction and drives upward, breaking the movement into metrics that show how effectively the athlete absorbs, decelerates, transfers and produces force.
Poor propulsion, for example, can correlate with groin and hamstring problems, while certain movement deficiencies can point toward anterior knee pain, ankle issues or low-back problems.
And some things that look perfectly normal to the naked eye are not normal at all.
A rider can know how to squat correctly. He can make both legs look even. He can, in Jackson’s words, effectively know how to “pass the test.”
The force plates are not fooled.
An old knee, hip or ankle injury can still appear in the amount of force being driven through each leg, revealing asymmetries that may suggest an athlete never completely finished rehabilitating an injury from years earlier.
The same applies to vision.
Ask a rider to change where he looks and there may be no dramatic stumble. Instead, Jackson might see a knee collapse slightly, one hip dip deeper, the torso twist or force distribution change by only a few degrees.
Tiny movements matter when the athlete’s workplace is moving beneath him.
Jackson compared it to driving a car: turn your eyes and head toward the left and, without realizing it, the vehicle can begin drifting the same direction. The testing asks how well a rider can separate where he is looking from where his body is going.
For bull riders, who frequently “spot” the bull’s head while the rest of their body reacts in another direction, it becomes especially relevant.
The sport, Jackson agreed, demands something like the reactive power of a gymnast combined with the balance of a ballerina.
Once the testing ends, teams do not receive pages of biomechanical calculus.
They get a report card.
Each rider is graded in areas including vision, inner balance and lateral balance, with results presented in plain categories such as clear, mild, moderate or severe. Reports identify a primary training focus, potential injury-risk flags and recommendations designed to turn Jackson’s data into something a coach can actually use.
A sample rider, for example, might show moderate visual impairment, clear inner balance and a mild right-side imbalance. The report then explains what that could mean while riding and recommends exercises such as anterior-chain strengthening, core-stiffness work and full-range extension movements.
Jackson said creating something simple enough to immediately understand but detailed enough to act upon is one of the biggest challenges.
For the New York Mavericks, action has already started.
General Manager Chris Pantani said the value became apparent before his team even had the completed Oklahoma City report in hand.
Jackson’s testing — and, importantly, the questions she asked when the numbers suggested something was wrong — pushed riders to acknowledge nagging injuries or old problems that might otherwise have been dismissed.
If the data showed someone protecting a knee, for example, the conversation changed from “I’m fine” to figuring out why.
From there, so did the training.
“What it did was it allowed us now to start targeting their training based on the results from what we saw during that testing,” Pantani said.
New York still maintains core exercises it believes every bull rider needs, including work centered on the core and neck. But Pantani said the biomechanics information has added what amounts to individual homework.
One rider may need additional work in an area that another does not.
“So yes, there’ll be core exercises for the entire group that we still believe in,” Pantani said, “but then there will be a portion of it that’s tailored to each individual athlete.”
That distinction could be especially important in bull riding, where an exercise traditionally considered good for riders might actually aggravate an existing injury in one particular athlete.
Pantani said the objective is to stop treating every rider — and every injury — exactly the same.
Sometimes the problem is recent. Sometimes it happened years ago. The testing does not particularly care when.
It shows what the body is doing now.
New York already plans to test again in Ridgedale and then in Kansas City before the PBR Teams Championship, giving the Mavericks multiple snapshots across the season to see whether deficiencies improve, new injuries appear or rehabilitation is actually working.
That longitudinal piece may eventually become one of the program’s most useful tools.
Instead of looking at one test in isolation, teams can begin stacking results.
Baseline. Midseason. Late season.
Then they can see trends.
Bull riding may never become a sport in which riders stop saying they are fine when something hurts.
Pantani knows that.
The numbers simply make it harder to hide.
“Just be honest with us and tell us that, hey, my back is hurting, my knee is hurting, or my hip,” he said. “And we can put a program together to help you.”
For now, Jackson needs riders on stable ground to collect that information.
Eventually, she may not.
Motion-capture technology is approaching the point where sufficiently high-resolution cameras positioned around the arena could identify a rider’s joints while he is actually aboard a bull. The challenge is coverage: enough angles to continuously see both sides of the rider and maintain multiple views of the same body part despite the bull, the rider and everything else moving at once.
Ideally, Jackson would have roughly three angles of the same body part throughout the ride.
Get there, and the blue stick figure currently squatting in boots and jeans could someday be riding a bull.
Then biomechanics would no longer be telling PBR Teams only how an athlete moves before he climbs into the chute.
It could show them, joint by joint and degree by degree, exactly what happens after the gate opens.
And perhaps help them find one more thing.
One more adjustment.
One more percentage point.
Or, as Pantani sees it, maybe one more second.
“They're all Ironmen. They're amazing individuals for what they do,” Pantani said. “But if we can help them maintain that or get that one extra jump or that one extra second, there's a difference from riding, you know, 30% of your bulls to 35% of your bulls.”
That is ultimately what all those cameras, force plates and blue stick figures are chasing.
In bull riding, there are not many sports where one second — or five percentage points — can mean that much.
Here, it can mean the difference between winning and losing.