In Toulouse, the rugby capital of France, we often hear "who doesn't jump isn't a Toulousan". In the laboratory, the work of the Gepetto team, which specializes in research into the movements of anthropomorphic systems, is more concerned with pushing mechanisms.

Zoé Pomarat, the team's doctoral student in the second year of a Cifre (Convention industrielle de formation par la recherche) thesis, is working on the instrumentation of the rugby scrum in partnership with the Stade Toulousain.

The aim of her work is to simultaneously quantify various mechanical parameters (kinematics and mechanical actions) of a player within the scrum.

In this first phase of experiments, she was able to evaluate 13 subjects on a push-up against an instrumented yoke. Subjects wore instrumented insoles in their spiked shoes, and had each foot on a force platform. 5 cameras completed the experimental set-up, enabling markerless motion analysis.