Hyperice Founder and President Anthony Katz brainstormed his products with a little help from some of the league’s most influential players.
Main image courtesy of Hyperice
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During the NBA Playoffs , TV cameras constantly caught marquee players wearing futuristic massage wraps around their backs and knees. It was not to hold their shorts up.
Hyperice and its latest heat + vibration wellness technology has cornered the NBA market more than ever, even though the relationship goes back to an inspirational conversation with the late Kobe Bryant in 2011. The company’s new Venom 2 product has swept through the league this past season with its reverberating, pliable, granulated copper-like material that generates up to 130-degrees of heat — with a who’s who of all-stars on board.
The Lakers’ LeBron James and Anthony Davis and the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum are investors, but that’s not why their respective teams have faltered — the surging Kentavious Caldwell-Pope of the NBA champion Denver Nuggets wears it, too.
“Well, 130 degrees is the maximum heat allowed in a commercial product,” says Anthony Katz, Hyperice’s Founder and President. “Athletes, they always want to push it. If it’s something hot, they want it hot. Or they want it really cold. And if it’s pressure, they want a lot of pressure. If it’s vibration, they want a lot. They want to push their body.”
Hyperice’s journey to the top only proves that everyone’s an entrepreneur at heart and that Katz is open to any and all suggestions. His products — from an original ice simulator to a novel Hyperice X hybrid device just out of the lab — were in part brainstormed by NBA players.
Back in 2011, in an era when players wore sloppy bags of ice late in games on the bench, Katz had already devised a proprietary Velcro cold wrap for his own balky knees. At the time, he was constantly playing pickup games alongside college players at UC Irvine and inevitably would see guys eye-balling the knee contraption. One of his former high school teammates, who happened to be a UC Irvine assistant coach and was charged with letting Kobe Bryant into the gym for 4 a.m. workouts, had a superlative idea.
Show it to Kobe.
Bryant liked Katz’s concept but made suggestions on how to improve it and — if applied — promised to wear it/flaunt it on the Lakers bench. “Inspired me to start the business,” Katz says. “That gave me the motivation to say… I gotta do this now because if he’s gonna wear it, that will trickle down. And if it’s good enough for him, it’ll be good enough for anybody.”
Soon, it was good enough for Blake Griffin and LeBron James, who showed it to his buddies Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul. Before long, Katz never had to pay for a game ticket again. Griffin and Paul regularly invited him to Clippers games — back when Paul was playing there — and that’s how Katz had his next entrepreneurial moment.
Given access to the Clippers training room, circa 2015, Katz saw how players relied on three modalities: foam rollers, soft tissue massage and vibration. His revelation was to combine them, and he launched the Hyperice Vyper, a product that fitted high amplitude and high frequency vibration into the core of a foam roller. “We went from a company doing not even a million in sales to almost $5 million,” he says.
The next year, in that same Clippers locker room, came his company’s seminal moment. Paul and teammate Matt Barnes told him to think heat, not ice. They said players were now wearing damp hydrocollator pads to stay loose during games, but problem was, they said the pads were “nasty” and would “stink.” They suggested he devise an alternative.
Voila, he developed a vibrating heated pad product, the Venom, that wrapped conveniently around backs, knees and shoulders. The battery, however, would dissipate or detach during games, which was a problem. But Katz was always unafraid to go back to the drawing board. He purchased a company called RecoverX and had engineers incorporate RecoverX’s seamless heating technology into a new completely redesigned vibrating Venom 2.
That product officially launched in August of 2022, in time for this season, ensconcing Hyperice’s role as an official NBA product. During the 2020 Bubble, players were openly using the Hypervolt percussion instrument on the sidelines during games, especially big names such as Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo and James. James was also the most prominent proponent of Hyperice’s Normatec air compression system, a lower torso covering that is essentially a lymphatic circulation pump. Post-game, James commonly wears it at home in an easy chair while sipping a glass of wine.
But it was the power-plated Venom 2 back pad that gained the most steam throughout the 2022-23 NBA season. The combination of heat and vibration helped players loosen up swifter — and stay loose. Nearly the entire New York Knicks team took the court wearing it every night. Stars such as Atlanta’s Trae Young couldn’t function without it, while Tatum, Griffin, James and Davis went one step further: they helped bankroll it.
But Denver’s Caldwell-Pope may be the face of the product this June. Or the voice of it. Mic’d up by ABC/ESPN during the NBA Conference Finals, he was on camera wildly exhorting his teammates up and down the sidelines.
Venom coming out of his mouth, Venom 2 wrapped around his back.
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
Perch’s 3D camera has become a feature in the weight room of the college football champion, the Bulldogs.
Main image courtesy of Perch.
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The days of walking around a weight room with a clipboard are long over. At Georgia — not to mention other SEC schools such as Auburn, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Mizzou — Bulldog players got stronger and stayed fresher last season through an automated velocity-based weight training platform from the fitness tech company Perch.
Saturdays were the gamedays in Athens, Georgia, but every other day of the week for the national champions was a Perch day. The school’s 24,000 square-foot weight room contains a ‘DawgTron’, a 25-foot-by-10-foot digital screen that displays a strength and power leaderboard. That meant players could lift, but not hide — which created a competitive environment that Georgia’s lead strength and conditioning coach Scott Sinclair attributes to Perch.
“Our players now see who’s moving the bar fastest,” Sinclair says.
Perch’s premise — and now about half of the NFL teams are on board, as well — is that computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence can inform players of their lifting data and consequently how hard to push themselves. In theory, it’s all about the speed of a lift, which is what Perch is able to quantify and display in real time.
The company’s co-founder and CEO Jacob Rothman is a former MIT baseball player who herniated his disc while squatting in a weight room — not realizing he’d been overexerted — and brainstormed a smart gym that could reduce the risk of injury. After internships with the virtual reality company Oculus and the corporate behemoth Apple, he entered the business world as an entrepreneur and made it happen.
“This is like 2016-ish,” Rothman tells SBJ. “Wearables were really, really popular. Apple Watch had just come out. Fitbit was popular. But there was nothing that collected a similar type of data for the weight room. So how do you complete the picture? How do you provide a similar experience for the people that prefer to strength train or who are augmenting their cardio with strength training? So we kind of set out to build an experience, and we discovered that elite athletics is an amazing use case for that product. So we just started building in that direction. And you know, the rest is history.”
Perch would solve the problem of athletic load and the inherent risk that comes with it. If a player or a team had a physically taxing game or practice the day before, typically their strength coach would assign perhaps a lighter day of lifting. But with Perch, that would all be determined by lift velocity. If Perch’s numbers prove a player can’t move a barbell fast enough, it means the weight is too heavy or they’re too tired to do so. The decision can then be made to back off. But if the player is moving the weight too swiftly, then they are alerted to add more weight to optimize what can be a sterling day.
“So basically, what [Perch does] is we tell the coach how the athlete is performing, and the coach can make real time adjustments based off of that,” Rothman says. “So it really is closing that feedback loop, and what that results in is reduced risk of injury and basically like athletes getting stronger, faster. You can get a lift in, and you can guarantee that you’re not over training or under training.”
Image courtesy of Perch.
Computer vision cameras are attached, or “perched,” on top of the weight equipment, and through the machine learning and AI, can recognize and calculate the number of reps while charting the corresponding speeds of each lift. The analytics then emerge in real-time, and players can see their body outputs on a small screen or, in Georgia’s case, on the DawgTron.
MLB teams such as the Phillies leaned on it last season because, over the course of 162 games and cross-country travel, the team’s strength coaches were concerned about both muscle atrophy and exhaustion. To balance that properly — lifting without overexerting — the team leaned on Perch’s metrics.
“They wanted [Phillies] players to maintain strength or even get stronger and do that safely while in-season,” Rothman says. “So I think one of our huge benefits for baseball is managing fatigue.”
Other endurance-conscious teams such as the NBA’s Miami Heat and Orlando Magic and the MLS’s L.A. Galaxy and San Jose Earthquakes are also clients for similar reasons. But football players are still Perch’s most prominent use case. And as the season was starting last September, the company closed what Rothman called a “$4 million Seed Plus” round to help them hire a larger staff to keep up with demand.
For instance, NCAA schools such as Wake Forest, Maryland, Virginia, Duke, North Carolina, Boston College, West Virginia and Stanford have all gone public with their Perch usage, while NFL teams such as the Chargers, Patriots, Jaguars, Dolphins and Titans are also on board. Rothman hopes that perhaps the Philadelphia Eagles, Georgia’s football subsidiary, can end up joining next.
With one caveat, though. DawgTron is sold separately.
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
Leaders Performance Advisor Rachel Vickery explored breathwork and ‘default breathing’ in the third and final session of her Performance Support Series.
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Part one, which looked at better understanding athletes’ physiological responses under pressure, is available here.
Part two explored how you can train your athletes’ physiological responses to pressure and can be found here.
We moved into the third and final session where the focus shifted to thinking around:
Relationship between breathing & performance
Before exploring some specific elements around how effective breathing can help to control arousal state and support performance, do we actually understand how pressure can influence breathing and vice versa?
In high pressure environments, inevitably we will see changes in breathing mechanics. If we want to be intentional and strategic in setting teams, organisations and ourselves up to be able to execute really well under pressure, efficient breathing is a powerful tool to support the control of operating state and to optimise physical, mental and emotional performance under pressure.
We need to avoid situations where things fall apart and then try to fix the problem – we will talk about the importance of front loading below, but to witness positive developments in this space, it takes time to become effective and second nature. We are seeking to keep our arousal state below the threshold for performance where you can perform well and in your sweet spot, as opposed to ‘crossing the red line’ where performance starts to fall apart. Approaches to breathing and other physiological support mechanisms can help to calm the nervous system for a more sustained approach to performance.
A really critical piece that’s often missing for teams and for individuals, is that we don’t get the chance to work with the arousal state in an environment that is not actually the performance arena whenever – whenever it is practised, there tends to be other things to be thinking about.
Importance of ‘front load buffer’
Throughout this series, we have reinforced the notion that performance under pressure is less to do with what you do in the moment of pressure. The concept of ‘front loading’ is something Rachel has woven throughout the sessions – it’s something she believes is a key determinant in controlling the pressure that will inevitably occur around competition time.
When we consider ‘front loading’, we are talking about the techniques and tools that can be used before a game or away from competition. Around ‘go time’ there is always going to be an increase in arousal state, driven by uncertainty, the unknown, high consequence, responsibility of outcome, being outside of the comfort zone and, even from a physiological perspective, the respiratory response to exertion.
A technique that can have a real positive impact is the ‘Theory of Fours’ breathing technique. This is a technique lasting four minutes, and includes breathing in for four seconds and out for six seconds across the four-minute period. There is strong evidence behind the science around its ability to bring the heartrate down. In high performance environments, it can be a useful practice to be used in the locker room both before and even after a game to reduce arousal. It’s also important to understand that the biomechanics of performance can be supported through effective breathing – there are more performance factors to be impacted than just heartrate control.
Front loading and giving yourself ‘buffer’ techniques can also help to manage arousal state in other instances, for example managing difficult conversations or other interactions away from the field. In the moment, if you are breathing calmly, your shoulders will relax, tone of voice lowers and the body doesn’t give a signal of stress. If you are able to do this, the other person you are interacting with doesn’t perceive the interaction as a threat and the communication is going to stay calmer and a lot more open. If you are carrying a lot of stress, you can carry it into a conversation with someone else.
Distinguishing breathwork & default breathing
Breathing isn’t just a key part of controlling arousal state, but it plays a significant role in optimising the physical and biomechanical aspects of performance, alongside mental and emotional performance under pressure. When it comes to breathing, there are two types to consider: breathwork and default or automatic breathing.
Breathwork in Rachel’s words is the ‘vitamins’, helping to give you a boost to more effective breathing. Default or automatic breathing is the ‘nutrition’, day-to-day breathing which is going to have the most impact in terms of optimisation – ‘if you have good nutrition, the vitamins can give you an additional edge’. There are huge performance gains through optimising breathing, which is different from breathwork.
If you have an athlete or are an inefficient breather yourself, you can miss out on the three factors below:
The final point in this section is the potential parasympathetic backlash that can occur for people operating in high pressure environments consistently. This is more commonly known as burnout. This is a downside of high performers who are typically very emotionally, mentally, physically, and virtually resilient. They can keep pushing a long way down the road before their physiology finally goes. Effective breathing, starting with default and topped up through breathwork, has been shown to help control the possible parasympathetic backlash that can occur.
Getting the basics right: what are the non-negotiables?
We have discussed the effectiveness of breathing techniques in helping to control responses to stress and pressure. There are a number of other factors that are important to get right to optimise human performance – they are the basics and non-negotiables which need to be focused on consistently. If we have these foundations well squared away, we can operate in a calmer nervous system state.
How can we de-escalate arousal states intentionally?
Rachel encouraged the group on the call to think about the importance of consistent de-escalating, especially in sports where there are repeat events, which is most. If we don’t strategically de-escalate between each game or aspect of the game, the arousal state will continue to creep up. This is where we can begin to see more mistakes occur. We can also do this for post-game to bring the arousal state down.
What are some of the things you can consider or implement to support this process:
De-escalate, don’t distract / escape.
All MLS first team clubs, as well as MLS Next Pro and MLS Next teams, will have access to the platform to scout players who can upload videos and metrics to the app for free.
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“That’s why we think this technology is so powerful because all you need is this [smartphone],” MLS SVP Emerging Ventures Chris Schlosser said, “and suddenly, you can be scouted anywhere at zero cost. You can go do drills in your backyard or your driveway or local park, and that would allow you to get on MLS’s radar.”
MLS and ai.io will begin collecting data this fall to create appropriate benchmarks for evaluating players at various levels before all players gain access to aiScout in January 2024. The aiScout app uses Intel’s 3D Athlete Tracking computer vision technology and assess users’ physical and technical skills. Premier League clubs Chelsea and Burnley, which recently clinched a return to the top tier next season, are both R&D partners.
Fred Lipka, the Technical Director at MLS Next, helped champion the use of technology to eliminate the barriers of cost and geography from talent identification.
“Players’ pathways, as they journey through youth sport, is not necessarily soccer first,” Richard Felton-Thomas, aiScout’s COO and Director of Sport Science, said of the US. “And they didn’t just want to be an organization that’s picking up talent because they haven’t made it somewhere else. They want it to be at the forefront of talent identification, and he very early saw that the way to do this is to be able to make sure we can look at everybody in the country simultaneously and fairly.”
The founding story of ai.io originates from the experience of Founder Darren Peries and his son who, after being released from Tottenham’s academy, had no digital CV — data or video — to share with scouts of other clubs. And that was the case for a promising player who had been competing under the purview of a top-flight club. Many multiples more youth had even less access to the typical sporting infrastructure.
Perhaps the best case study of aiScout’s efficacy is its use by another early client, the Reliance Foundation Young Champs, a leading academy in India. During the pandemic when its scouts were unable to travel, RFYC used aiScout to evaluate 12-year-old players. AiScout was used to whittle down the number of candidates for a tryout — and led to the academy inviting four players from rural areas who weren’t even playing organized soccer at the time and thus never would have been on the radar.
“The nature of talent development can be a bit random,” Ben Smith, formerly Chelsea Football Club’s Head of Research and Innovation, told SBJ last summer before joining BreakAway Data full-time. “So if we can have a technology to work at scale across vast areas, then that our scope and our reach is potentially very substantial.”
MLS clubs will be able to search for talent globally, but the primary goal is to consider continental talent, given some of the regulations around homegrown players and international visas.
The aiScout app was part of FIFA’s innovation program and underwent validation testing at Loughborough University, London and Kingston University. A revamped version of the app was released last year to include more gamification and more content geared toward player development, as opposed to just evaluation.
“We wanted to prove that we were a trusted tool first with the clubs,” Felton-Thomas said. “What the new app does is it brings in more of those elements that players get to see, ‘OK, how do I get better if I’m not good enough today?’ We’ve got a bit more player focus to that journey of development, not just trialing.”
The aiScout app will be the focal point, especially early in the partnership, but the company also maintains mobile sport science centers, aiLabs, that has additional evaluative tools for biomechanics and cognitive function.
As the partnership progresses, each MLS club will be able to customize their use to include additional tests, datapoints and benchmarks that are bespoke to their needs. Schlosser said, to his knowledge, none of the league’s clubs have harnessed computer vision at the amateur level before, but he said they are eager to get started.
“The system is up and running in the UK,” he said. “They’ve done some trials with a couple of UK-based teams, so we have some confidence that this isn’t just fly-by-night stuff. This is real. And we’re excited to roll up our sleeves and then roll this out across the country. We think there are many, many kids that we haven’t seen yet.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
The man who helped save Steph Curry’s ankle explains that there are times when athletes can train their movement patterns in the name of performance.
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The Director of Performance at Uplift Labs was on the pod to discuss how the company’s AI can reduce injury risk in athletes.
There is no better candidate to delve into injury prevention and mitigation than the man often credited with saving Steph Curry’s ankle.
We made a whistlestop tour of his work at the Minnesota Timberwolves, Atlanta Hawks and, of course, the Golden State Warriors.
Also on the agenda were:
John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn
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The company’s Virtual Greens demonstrate that golfers not only win majors with the clubs in their bag, but with actuator modules, infrared line scan cameras and proprietary apps.
Main image courtesy of Full Swing
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Leading up to his four-stroke victory in Augusta in April, Rahm relied on a trio of tech-savvy products from Full Swing that helped turn his borderline weaknesses into strengths. It only goes to show that golfers not only win majors with the clubs in their bag, but with actuator modules, infrared line scan cameras and proprietary apps.
“I had been looking into the best way to practice all aspects of my game at home,” Rahm has said of his decision to install Full Swing’s devices, and, as a result, his sprawling home in Arizona is now one of the epicenters of golf.
In one corner of his house sits an approximate 4-by-8 sliver of sophisticated turf that is actually a high-tech “Virtual Green” simulating the quick 12 to 14 breaks of Augusta National. Immersed with dozens of actuator modules — which move to recreate downhill, uphill, right breaks, left breaks, crests, valleys and hills — the interactive putting green enabled Rahm to zero in on one of his main concerns heading into the Masters.
“Jon just wanted to work on little short left or righters,” Ryan Dotters, CEO of Full Swing, told SBJ. “Because that’s what he kind of struggled with in the past. So we put a smaller Virtual Green in for him. He wanted a nice little square one.
“That’s just what he wanted to focus on to get better: these four to five foot putts that are left or right breakers. And we got [the Virtual Green] down to where it’s super fast, it’s Augusta fast in there…We got that one to the 14 [break] that he needed for the Masters.”
Other adaptive putting greens on the market can tilt left and right or forward and back. But none are said to have Full Swing’s patented actuator modules that can simulate any break on any course in the world with the click of a button. The Virtual Greens, which vary in size and are priced between $70,900 and $95,400, are equipped with an accompanying computer, whose software can replicate subtle, moderate or severe breaks on request.
Only about 400 of them have been on the market so far — “It’s expensive to make, expensive to ship, expensive to install,” Dotters said —but Rahm, Tiger Woods and Jason Day actually own three of those 400 — and have all become Full Swing ambassadors. Woods, in fact, has equity in the company.
In another corner of Rahm’s basement is what had Woods originally buying in: the Full Swing simulator. The company, in fact, was birthed circa 2019 with simulators in mind, and early iterations that included highspeed ION3 cameras drew the interest of Rahm’s tech-centric coach Dave Phillips.
As co-founder of the Titleist Performance Institute in Oceanside, Calif., Phillips began offering his insights to Dotters and the company’s engineers on how to advance their Full Swing simulator further. At around the same time, Rahm was living in his home overlooking an Arizona golf course, baking through 110-degree practice rounds. Looking for a cooler, indoor solution, Phillips steered Rahm to the Full Swing simulator, as it continued ideating the latest technology.
Then, last September, the company released its Pro model simulator that leveraged infrared line scan cameras to create virtually a latency-free experience. The overhead ION3 camera tracks the golf ball on impact, and as the ball crosses the infrared line, it triggers the computer to instantly mimic the shot — producing ball speed, launch direction, launch angle and a visual of the ball flight in real time.
Other simulators generally do not have the ability to track a ball without delay because the devices first calculate ball flight, then rotate the screen to where the ball should land and then provide an image. The difference in elapsed time may seem minor, but to a pro like Rahm the Full Swing Pro was a breath of fresh air…less than 110 degrees.
As a result, he was able to replicate Amen Corner at Augusta over and over to prepare for the Masters, and when the weather was amenable, he’d then retreat outside to train with Full Swing’s third and most recent innovation, the KIT Launch Monitor.
Released originally in December of 2021 with incremental input from Woods, the KIT Launch Monitor — placed in close proximity behind the golfer — used a dual radar system to track a ball from impact-to-landing-to-roll while also identifying the dimple dispersion off the front face of the ball along with rotation and seam. The litany of metrics included spin rate, spin axis, ball speed, attack angle and more. But the statistic Rahm most cared about was: carry.
Dotters asked Rahm questions such as: “How can we make these better? What does the interface look like? What’s the app looking like?” Rahm provided feedback, and a new, improved version. “[It was] a 3-to-4-year project that took a lot of testing and a lot of capital to get right,” Dotters says. It was delivered to Rahm months before the Masters.
“The screen was a big one for Jon,” Dotters says. “He wanted to just turn around look and see what the numbers were. But it really came down to carry numbers for him. He needed those to be exact. And we’ve done a really good job of being pinpoint accurate with carry. Whether it’s 350 with a driver or 60 yards with a wedge, carry is just Jon’s biggest metric.
“Sometimes he doesn’t need to hit it 320, he needs to back it down. So he needs to know those carry numbers and we’ve learned we are really good at this. So I think what I can relay —through his conversations with me and his testing — is that it gave him a leg up at the Masters.”
And a certain green jacket.
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
