Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
post

Specialised tech specs give swimmers a powerful push

Wed 19 Jan 2022    
EcoBalance
| 3 min read

Most of Adam Lucio’s has been in a wheelchair for most of his life. He had been playing wheelchair basketball for Oklahoma State University, he now hopes to become a professional adaptive triathlete as well as take part in Iron Man contests alongside able-bodied competitors.

A key part of his training regimen is wearable tech. When playing basketball, tennis, taking on marathons or competing in wheelchair racing, he wears a smartwatch. 

While in the pool, Lucio wears FORM Smart Swim Goggles.

It’s worn like normal goggles, the Smart Swim Goggles features an increased reality heads-up display that gives busters the ability to track their progress as they swim, giving them details on distance, and biometric data like heart rate.

“The potential for achievement with this new technology is amazing. If you can track your performance down to the millisecond, understand and correct your form, there’s no excuse not to push yourself,” said Lucio. 

He believes that professional athletes will be able to achieve new levels of accomplishment with the help of wearables. Records are going to be broken using this tech. I think you’re going to see boundaries being pushed, and you’re going to see a lot fewer injuries,” Lucio said. 

Wearable tech isn’t only being used to boost individual performance. Catapult allows coaches to monitor the performance and health of players on their teams, using a smart vest, monitoring pod and accompanying app to reduce the risk of injury.

The company says the technology is used by many teams in the English Premier League, and every NFL team in the US.

“With wearables, that data now gets really at the micro-level of what’s happening. What it’s doing is really comparing what’s physiologically happening on the inside of an athlete,” said Will Lopes, CEO of Catapult Sports. 

For coaches, this can mean the difference between understanding a player’s physical limits and pushing them beyond and risking injury.

“Fatigue is a good example. You really want to have objective data points to understand, ‘have I over-trained an athlete?’ The fact that you have great stars like Tom Brady and Neymar playing much longer in their careers than they would have only 20, 30 years ago, is really because the scientific program is allowing them to really stay in the field longer, be healthier longer,” he added. 

Simon Barbour is a sports performance analysis expert at Loughborough University, in the UK. “Wearable technology in sport can give a non-invasive form of data collection and an accurate depiction of what is happening in a game or in the event. In essence, you are able to capture multiple data sets without interfering directly in the athlete’s performance,” he said. 

“In terms of the scale of use of wearable technology, every elite sportsperson and sports team uses wearable technology, because it can be the difference between winning and losing,” Barbour added.

Among the most exciting innovations in the field is the TESLASUIT (which isn’t connected to the car manufacturer) — a full-body smart jumpsuit that captures both motion and biometrics and provides haptic feedback to the wearer. For example, if it detects that a boxer is swinging punches with a poor technique, it will deliver an electric pulse to let them know.

Las Vegas-based Australian professional boxer Ben Stanoff, 26, tried it out and believes that wearable tech like the TESLASUIT could offer boxers a crucial edge in their training to take them to champion level.

Athletes can replay training sessions where they wore the suit, and the addition of a VR headset creates an immersive environment to review the techniques from the session.

“You can only train so much — but wearing this suit, you’re able to go home and then redo the whole training session again in your mind, watching it on a screen, but with that virtual reality, and it’s just going to make all the difference. I think this is the future of training,” Stanoff said. 

Source: Agencies


Leave a Reply