In my continuing effort to document things I tried before surgery, here’s a post on bioprinting.

I can’t recall exactly where I saw the information on bioprinting, but at any rate, it led me to a local rolfer who does it. I eventually did 10 rolfing sessions with her as well as the bioprint, and I’ll post on rolfing at some point.

The official web page for bioprints is www.biotronix.com.

After reading about it, I thought I’d give it a shot. Basically a bunch of sensors are placed on your body, several digital photos are taken, and then those photos are uploaded to biotronix, and a report is sent back. The report contains an analysis of where you are “off” and exercises you can do to try to correct some of those problems. By where you are off, I mean structural imbalances, such as a pelvis that tilts too much, a center of gravity that is off, etc.

You can view my report here.

Overall it’s a quick process and I thought the analysis was pretty accurate. It also (mostly) matched up with the analysis my PT had given. Since I had done yoga for a long time, I already knew several of my problem areas, and the bioprint found all of those, plus a few. The major area that it was off compared to what my PT said was my anterior pelvic tilt. My PT had me working on that extensively, while the bioprint said I was within range. However, I was just barely within their 10% guideline, so this was not really that far off from showing up as a problem on the bioprint.

The bioprint gives you a 10 week program of exercises to follow, and I don’t think anything other than very minor issues would actually change in such a short time. But I am a big believer in the power of yoga to fix alignment issues and strength imbalances over time, and the bioprint’s combinations of stretching one muscle while strengthening its opposite, is really not that different. Yoga of course is a whole body approach, although I think there are times when a yoga teacher will have you concentrate on one set of poses to solve a particular problem. But bioprints are very specific to the problems they find.

While I did the majority of the exercises in the program, and either combined them with or added them to, my PT exercises, I didn’t see the changes I had hoped for. I probably didn’t do them quite enough, because at times I was overwhelmed with the number of PT + bioprint exercises, while still wanting to get back to running and riding. However, I will start to do several of them again, once my knee heals enough from surgery.

I would like to see bioprint include a follow-up visit at the end of the exercise program, to re-evaluate your body and see if any changes have occured. You can always spend $150 for another print and report, of course, but it would be nice if they included that up front for an extra $50 or so.

If you are a person who does not know where your potential problem areas are, I don’t think the $150 would be a waste of money. It will show you some biomechanical issues that may be contributing to your knee (or other) problems.