Discover the app permitting teams across sports to finally interrogate their data in ways previously unavailable due to various constraints.
A common refrain permeated his experiences and conversations, prompting Schuster to start Gemini Sports Analytics. In partnership with Snowflake’s cloud computing and DataRobot’s artificial intelligence, Gemini adds a no-code layer of predictive analytics on top of a team’s existing data infrastructure, whether it be an athlete management system or bespoke team dashboard.
“In those travels, what I saw reinforced what I’ve seen in my career up to that point, which is that teams have way too much data than they know what to do with,” he says. “They don’t have the bandwidth or the capacity to wrangle it. It’s not for lack of trying, it’s not for lack of talent.”
Gemini was working with beta partners — the UFC, as well as teams in MLB, the NBA, international rugby and European soccer — in continuing refining the product in advance of the baseball winter meetings in December.
Among its key executives are a pair of former developers in the Houston Astros’ analytics department, Chandler Evans and Nate Verlin, as well as former Catapult Senior Business Development Manager Mathew Young and former Oklahoma City data architect Troy Carter. Miami-based GSA is a recent graduate of the leAD Sports & Health Tech accelerator in Lake Nona, Florida, and raised a $1.5 million seed round co-led by Florida Funders and the Florida Institute.
The pain point for so many clubs has been that, despite the relative ease of deploying new data-collecting cameras and sensors, the management and interpretation of those end products is a more onerous task. The soccer partner, despite have an above-average data science pedigree, didn’t have the personnel or resources to employ machine learning. So much time was spent cleaning, organizing and visualizing the raw data.
“They actually hadn’t run a single predictive model in a year and a half, and we ran 168 in under two weeks,” Schuster says, adding, “Our engineers are a force multiplier.”
Duncan French, the VP of Performance at the UFC Performance Institute, understands the issue acutely. Of the UFC’s 650 fighters, he says 87% work train with PI programming, and about 250 are in residence in Las Vegas at any given time. His team has distributed more than 500 Oura rings for sleep monitoring, accounting for more than 60,000 nights of data.
“Having aggregated a pretty significant amount of information and data, having built out a pretty decent data architecture to this point, the next iteration of that development was into our ability to harness the power of the data in a more automated fashion,” French says. “One of the things that we have is a capacity issue. We don’t have data scientists on our team, right? So it’s either our own staff, or it doesn’t get done.”
French was happy to be a testing partner for Gemini, in part because he says the UFC’s innovation mantra is “be first.” He also had gotten to know Schuster through his S&C travels over the past decade, with French crediting the GSA team for understanding the daily workflow and reality of applied sport science in the elite environment.
“We’re providing, hopefully, a pretty robust performance infrastructure, which can challenge and interrogate their software,” French says. “And hopefully in return, we’re going to get access to a system that will allow us to ask some high-level questions and harness the power of our data, perhaps more so than we have been doing.”
At all the most heavily resourced sports clubs, data science staffing lags behind what’s needed to make proper use of all the information collected. Whether it’s evaluating the soccer transfer market for a good tactical fit or building activity and recovery profiles based on the type of match play, GSA is seeking to empower everyone in the organization to utilize AI for insights.
“These non-technical stakeholders like assistant general managers, strength and conditioning coaches, high performance managers, they want to work with data, they’re the right generation to be working with data, but they’re not coders,” Schuster says. “They’re not going to write Python and R scripts. They need to have a tool to do data queries with, to ask questions of the data.”
Another differentiating factor for Gemini, Schuster says, is his academic background. While some AMS providers provide some concierge model building services, he says GSA puts the tool into the teams’ hands and, importantly, won’t produce an opaque solution without showing its work. Schuster and collaborators have prioritized publishing research papers explaining some of their models, such as two using NBA data, about effective use of force plate testing and on injury forecasting.
“We are never going to hide behind a black box,” Schuster says. “We’re going to put the tool in users’ hands, and the model should be open source because scouts and GM should understand why things are happening the way they are in their team.”
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.
Meghan Klingenberg of the USWNT and the Portland Thorns would no longer play without the device.
Meghan Klingenberg of the NWSL’s Portland Thorns FC cringes at the thought of it. She has been taught, as a defender, to circle under even the most towering kick and head it away from her goal, which is basically tantamount to getting kicked in the skull.
“Have you ever stuck your face in front of a ball that’s going 60 miles an hour?” Klingenberg asked Wednesday. “That’s what it is.”
“It’s spiraling down out of the top of the stadium, and you know it’s going to suck, but you have to [head] it. It feels scary. It feels like shit when it hits you, and it’s not something anybody wants to do. Like the worst thing ever. I get so mad at those goalkeepers.”
That, in a nutshell, explains why Klingenberg is practically on a crusade to promote the Q-Collar, an FDA-approved [US Food and Drug Administration] device worn around the neck that gently compresses the jugular vein to increase blood flow to the skull — theoretically limiting the brain from shifting around dangerously on contact.
The Q-Collar, a neck-worn device that provides stability to protect the brain from head impact, has gained popularity among the Portland Thorns as Meghan Klingenberg along with teammates Emily Menges and Rocky Rodriguez.
During the NWSL championship game in late October — when Portland defeated the Kansas City Current, 2-0 — it’s no coincidence that Klingenberg’s teammates Emily Menges and Rocky Rodriguez also wore the Q-Collar. The technology, developed by Q30 Innovations and first available on the US Market in September of 2021, is being deployed in physically volatile sports such as football and lacrosse. Dallas’ running back Tony Pollard and tight end Dalton Schultz are among those wearing it this season in the NFL, and every player from the men’s Premier Lacrosse League has been equipped with the device, as well.
But Klingenberg, who organically heard about the Q-Collar while watching a biomimicry special on Hulu about five years ago, is taking it all a step further. She wears it proudly during games, dives on the field like a banshee and will advocate the device to anyone and everyone who asks.
“We block shots with our heads, we go up and take elbows to the face to try and get a header before another player — it’s a very physical sport,” she told SportTechie. “And so whenever I’m defending in the box, I might not head a ball, but I might be bumping attackers and making sure they can’t get to the ball. And you might fall over, you might run into the goalkeeper. It’s all of these things.”
“What I like most about the Q-Collar is I don’t have to worry about that ever. I just throw it on, and then I know that I’m protected, and then I can just go out and be me. And, honestly, that’s the most valuable thing it does is allowing me to be me. Because when I’m me, I kick ass. And when I kick ass, my team does well.”
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Klingenberg’s quasi-campaign to inundate the sports world with Q-Collars is partly subtle, partly fear, partly — and this is her word — synchro-destiny. She is a vegan who drives a hybrid car or e-bikes, takes long walks through Portland’s Washington Park and has always been “environmentally conscious.” And when she saw on that 2017 biomimicry show that the Q-Collar was inspired by the odd behavior of woodpeckers knocking their heads against trees, she knew this was a science for her.
“I just don’t believe coincidences are coincidences,” she says. “I think they’re like little winks from the universe, and I try and like follow them whenever they happen. And this just seemed to be too great of a wink from the universe to pass up.”
Aware that she had been crashing on soccer fields since she was six and figuring she’d suffered a myriad of minor concussions throughout her journey from the U.S. National team to the pros, she “cold-called” Q30 Innovations for a demo of the device. Because it was still being researched in 2017, they told her: ‘sorry, another time’.
That time came approximately a year later when she wrapped it around her neck for the first time. She wasn’t sure if it would choke her, cut off her circulation or set her free. Turned out to be the latter.
“Well, anything around the neck feels weird,” she says. “We’re not used to that kind of pressure being around our necks. And I think for some people, at the beginning at least, can be a little triggering. Like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got this pressure around my neck. I don’t like that.’ But… after wearing it for about a week, I barely noticed it.”
“I haven’t noticed any concussions or any dizziness since wearing this, and, honestly, I don’t even notice that I’m wearing it at all. I actually notice it more when I don’t wear it now. When we have a run-through practice where we’re not kicking any balls and we’re just literally stretching and things like that, it feels weird to be on a field without it on. That, to me, is the best part — that I get all that protection without thinking about it for one second.”
It’s never been her plan to shove the product down (or on) people’s throats. But ever since she began wearing it, she’s found that a popular Google search query has become: Meghan Klingenberg’s neck. As for her teammates, they don’t have to Google her; they just started asking about the technology straight to her face.
“My teammates are like, ‘What are you doing? What are you wearing? And they’re very skeptical at first because anything new in soccer is like, ‘Nah.’ But honestly, the best analogy I give them is: if you take a plastic water bottle and you fill it up halfway and you put a marble in there and you shake it around, it hits the walls of the bottle really hard. But if you fill it up all the way and put the marble in and you shake it around, it doesn’t hit the walls as hard. And that’s what I tell people the Q-Collar does for my brain.”
“And the light bulb goes on immediately. And they understand. They’re like, ‘Ohh, that makes so much sense.’ So I just really encourage my teammates to try it in the offseason and see if they like it. Honestly, I say, ‘Give it two weeks. If at the end of two weeks, you’re still noticing it, then it’s not for you. But if at the end of two weeks, you haven’t noticed it, then this is definitely for you.’”
Her two teammates — the defender Menges and the midfielder Rodriguez — each wore the Q-Collar this past year, and defender Becky Sauerbrunn has promised to try it this current off-season. And that’s not to mention the dozen NWSL opponents who have sauntered up to Klingenberg to ask about the device, as well.
“Oh yeah, they’ll ask me in the tunnels, after games, when they’re just chatting,” Klingenberg says. “They want to know. Some people are like, ‘What is this?’ They’re like, ‘Is this a way for your coach to communicate with you during [games].’ I’m like, ‘There’s no frigging chance I would ever wear something like that. There’s no way I want somebody chirping in my ear in the middle of a match. No chance.’ But then I give them the quick spiel about the water bottle and just chat about that, and they seem really interested. I would say probably like 30 to 40 percent of people want it.”
“I mean, I would advocate this for every kid in the entire world who’s playing a sport. Because, I mean, I wish that I had this since I was 6 years old. I’m serious. It really bothers me that I have 20 years of experience of heading a ball without the Q-collar on.”
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 former US Open champion discusses Hawk-Eye’s use in tennis, using Whoop to further research on women’s health in sports, and how the WTA is supporting the mental health of its players.
You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. This series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.
A native of Fresno, California, Stephens also returned from a foot injury to win the WTA Comeback Player of the Year in 2017 and was a finalist at the 2018 French Open. In February, she beat Marie Bouzková at the Abierto Zapopan tournament in Mexico to capture her first WTA title since 2018.
Stephens, 29, has earned more than $17 million in career prize money and is currently the 37th-ranked singles player on the WTA Tour. Earlier this year, she partnered with Icy Hot, joining Shaquille O’Neal, NFL tight end Darren Waller and USWNT soccer star Rose Lavelle as ambassadors for the company. She recently promoted the new Icy Hot PRO cream and dry spray pain-relief products while attending a pickleball event in New York City alongside the National Athletic Trainers’ Association.
“If you’ve used Icy Hot, you know what it’s like, but this version is just little bit stronger, it works faster. It’s for that everyday person who’s training, getting massages with their trainer,” Stephens told SportTechie at the John McEnroe Tennis Academy.
Stephens is also a member of the Women’s Performance Collective, the research initiative from wearable fitness leader Whoop to study female athlete performance. She is also a proponent of tennis expanding its use of Hawk-Eye, the electronic line-calling system that replaced line judges at the 2020 US Open and 2021 Australian Open. Hawk-Eye’s camera system remains limited to video review challenges in most ATP and WTA Tour events, and it isn’t used at all at the French Open.
On supporting Hawk-Eye but being conscious of the jobs that could be lost . . .
I grew up with line judges, with referees. Just a few weeks ago in Guadalajara I had a terrible line call against me. We were using Hawk-Eye and the chair [umpire] made a mistake. That was a human error. Hawk-Eye didn’t make the mistake, but the linesperson made an error. We reviewed it on Hawk-Eye, it was a mistake. Then the umpire made another bad call, and I ended up losing the game. There’s a lot of human error element that we no longer need. We don’t want it either, but we don’t need it because there is automatic calling. We don’t need people to be on the court.
Mind you do that does take away jobs, it takes away livelihoods of a lot of people. But I feel like in sport, there’s too much money on the line, ranking points on the line, contracts on the line, for people to be making human errors in the sport where we’ve advanced so much that we can see line calls live as they happen. We shouldn’t have any errors in our sport, especially when you’re playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars. That little bit can change the course of a match. And that makes all the difference in the world.
From a chair umpires’ perspective, you have to be ranked super high to be a gold badge level umpire, which people work their whole careers for. And now we’re being like, ‘Okay, we don’t need you anymore, because we have automatic calling.’ So it’s kind of a double-edged sword. You lose jobs, but you gain a lot of clarity in the sport, which I think is important. But obviously, tennis is a very traditional sport, any change is always very hard to make. It’s always something that has to be thought of for like 10 years before we actually do anything. So we’re in that phase now.
On her partnership with Whoop …
It’s great because it’s for sleep, recovery, it’s to track all of those things. There’s been fitness trackers before and all those things before but this one is a little bit more advanced, tracking your menstrual cycle, your HRV [heart rate variability]. In sport, every little bit matters, especially when you’re at the top of your sport, the top of your game. So being able to monitor your sleep and your routines, like if you didn’t get enough deep sleep, or your sleep [score] decreased because you slept more. All those things matter when you’re performing at a high level, especially day in and day out whether you’re training or you’re competing in tournaments. So being able to partner with Whoop is amazing, because it helps not only me, but all of the players — men and women on the tour, it helps everyone.
On data ownership and using Whoop to further women’s health research …
We don’t have a union. We have our Tour, which owns the data because the partnership is with the Tour. But we own I believe all of our own personal data. They can use it and have access to it and can do research on it. But we own all of our own data. We’re all technically independent contractors. So we own all of our stuff.
But obviously, we use it to help other athletes. We use it to help monitor menstrual cycles of top performing athletes and then help people who are just weekend warriors or people training for tennis. And women just don’t have enough data and enough science behind all of these things. There’s not enough research. So being able to contribute to that has been super helpful. Just helping the next generation of athletes because we are collecting data for women in sport, we’re trying to make it more advanced and we’re trying to move the needle a bit. All of these things and all these things that we’re monitoring help a lot
On strides the WTA has made to support mental health….
There’s always work to be done everywhere, but I think the WTA does a great job. We have people on the road, therapists on the road that we can talk to in person and make appointments with. There’s a lot of support on the road just because we are all isolated and by ourselves most of the time. A lot of us do need that little extra support, we travel 40 weeks out of the year away from family, friends, husbands, wives, whatever it is, and it is difficult. The WTA has done a good job to support us to make sure that we do have those people on staff and on hand week in and week out.
And I think that’s been super beneficial, especially because COVID through us all for a loop so we are kind of getting back to normal but in a way that we feel more supported and have more access to things that we didn’t before like Modern Health and the Calm app. All of these things are just extra little things that we can use to help self-soothe ourselves and whatever it may be whatever we need in that moment. So the WTA has done a good job at trying to make that happen for us.
On how she uses Hyperice’s massage and recovery products …
I am an investor in Hyperice. I use NormaTec, all of the Hyperice gadgets — the Hyperice Go, the Hypervolt, which has been super helpful. It’s something you could travel with, be on the road with. I use [Hyperice products] for warmup and then I just use it when I’m sitting in my bed, laying around. It’s good post-match, too, but post-match, I’m getting more manual massage with my trainer, my physio so that’s a little bit different. But you can kind of use it wherever, I just did it on an airplane.
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
Data gleaned from college football may help to shape equipment upgrades and even rule changes in the future.
Programs at the Universities of Alabama, North Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin were the inaugural college teams to begin wearing the NFL’s impact-monitoring mouthguards last fall, meaning the league is now doubling its research efforts to eight universities and more than 250 college players. NFL sponsor Align Technology, the maker of Invisalign clear aligners, conducts dental scans of all participating college players. Those digital models are then sent to Virginia-based Biocore to build the personalized sensor-embedded mouthguards for each player.
An engineer demonstrates on a player’s mouth mold where the sensor will fit once installed into the mouthguard.
The NFL’s mouthguards calculate the force and location of each impact through measuring linear and angular acceleration. Mechanisms for how football players typically get concussed can vary by their position. For example, quarterbacks tend to sustain hits to the back of the head on plays where they brace themselves against incoming defenders, according to the NFL’s SVP of Health and Safety Innovation Jennifer Langton.
“The mouthguard will tell you the frequency and the severity of impact for each player. If you have enough data in aggregate, you can have it by position,” Langton says. “We have the insights to provide to helmet manufacturers so that they can start to design helmets to mitigate that impact that we are seeing from the data for that position. We want to really stimulate the helmet marketplace.”
Studies of data from the NFL’s mouthguard program is led by Biocore CEO Jeff Crandall and Dr. Kristy Arbogast of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, both of whom serve on the NFL Engineering Committee. Players on at least four NFL teams have worn the league’s smart mouthguards since the 2019 season, after the devices were developed as part of the league’s $60 million commitment to its Engineering Roadmap. Each participating NCAA program receives statistical analysis of player mouthguard impacts specific to their team, but the identity of the players is protected.
There are control and charging cases for the mouthguards instrumented with sensors.
“Data collected across the mouthguard sensor program is anonymized and analyzed by NFL and NFLPA’s independent engineers,” Langton says. “Only our engineers have access to that data, it does not come to the league office. So when they do the analytics, they provide it so that we can put injury reduction strategies together. But it’s only the independent engineers that have access to any of the mouthguard sensor data, whether NFL or university.”
The 2021 season saw players on 10 NFL teams wear mouthguard sensors, but the league decided to scale back the program to four NFL teams this season. In September, the NFL said it’s recorded a 25% reduction in concussions in each of the last four seasons. Other recent health and safety efforts from the league include the Guardian Cap worn by players during training camp, medical marijuana studies, pre-season load management wearables, and the Digital Athlete system created with AWS that uses computer vision to detect player head impacts during games through video analysis.
The NFL is not the only professional league implementing smart mouthguards. World Rugby outfits players with impact-monitoring mouthguards from Prevent Biometrics, while soccer’s English Premier League does the same through its collaboration with Wales-based Sports & Wellbeing Analytics. Medical leaders from the NFL and English Premier League met in London last month to share their latest findings around soft tissue injury reduction, mental wellness, concussions, and head impacts.
“The mouthguards is a program that we could roll out to the EPL,” Langton says. “And then in addition, with our digital Athlete Program, we are able to identify and track players and their impacts on field, so there is an open opportunity for them to collaborate to use some of those technologies as well,” she says, adding, “there is a huge opportunity to collaborate with other sports so we can share with them what we have built as far as technologies, how we’ve collected the data, and how we’re measuring head impacts in our game so that they can do the same for their sport.”
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
The wearable infrared performance clothing brand wants to make the interaction with recovery and performance technologies as simple as getting dressed.
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KYMIRA, on the other hand, would like to turn such thinking on its head, as its Founder and CEO, Tim Brownstone, tells the Leaders Performance Institute.
“We’re creating products that can be taken anywhere,” he says while pointing to a selection of KYMIRA’s products on a rail over our shoulders. We are onsite at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Twickenham Stadium in London where KYMIRA are exhibiting.
The rail contains a range of KYMIRA’s sweatshirts, leggings and tracksuits. All are designed with the company’s infrared-emitting fibre technology which is designed to enhance performance, accelerate recovery and reduce injury risk. It is a small selection of KYMIRA’s apparel, which is medically certified – an important detail given that those certifications prevent potential conflicts with a team’s contracted kit supplier – to assist athletes with recovery and rehab.
“Because it’s clothing; whether the athlete is sleeping, on a flight or a bus, they can gain the physiological benefits. They can also be used in the practice facility too,” Brownstone continues. “Our core ethos is making the interaction with bio-responsive technologies as simple as possible.”
KYMIRA’s sweatshirts, leggings and tracksuits are designed with the company’s infrared-emitting fibre technology which is designed to enhance performance, accelerate recovery and reduce injury risk.
KYMIRA’s sporting clients include numerous teams from across both NFL and NCAA colleges covering 15+ sports and counting in North America as well as elite soccer and multiple international rugby union teams in Europe. All these teams are tapping into a well of expertise born of ongoing medical research and certifications.
Just days earlier, KYMIRA completed a fitting with an English Premier League team, which turned into an education session for the players. “The club identified the products that they want to make available to their athletes, we visited their training centre, and set up a pop-up KYMIRA area. We also had a microscope so we could demonstrate some of the biological effects to help the athletes visualise what is going to happen and we were there to answer questions such as ‘what does it do for me? Does it fit? What colours do you have?’ Some had already been using our products, been on the website, and come with some scientific questions. But the important thing for us is getting that face time with the athletes, so that they can ask their questions, they can be curious.”
Brownstone is a biochemist who specialises in photobiological wound healing. He is also a former competitive rower and is well-placed to explain to athletes how KYMIRA’s clinical research translates for their benefit.
“It’s reducing injury probability, it’s making sure that you’re more available to be in more games and help your team win,” he continues. “It’s extending your career; we have a big population of aged athletes and I think we’ve given the biggest an extra five seasons. Their agents like that, their families like that, and they’ve been able to keep doing the sport they love for longer.”
Such visits as the one described above are a valuable opportunity to build rapport with athletes and practitioners. One individual, an NCAA performance director, reached out with a series of questions. It is also not uncommon for athletes to post online about their use of KYMIRA products. “They’ll post something on Instagram, we’ll share it saying ‘thank you’ and then we use that chance to engage. Then when athletes are buying directly through our website, we’ll typically follow up and say ‘we’re pleased to see that you like the product. We’d like to know more’. Building that rapport enables us to collect honest feedback.”
Brownstone again points to the rail of KYMIRA clothes. “Each of those has been developed because teams and athletes have said ‘hey, I sleep in my recovery tights but I’d rather be in pyjamas – can you do pyjamas?’ or ‘I don’t really want pyjamas – can you do bedsheets?’ or ‘can you do tracksuits, or tights, or loose-fitting garments?’ We’ve evolved that range with demand and that close back-and-forth during the developmental period to make sure that fit and style is on point.”
KYMIRA has developed a range of sleepwear that can improve sleep quality by 15.8%.
Functional and applied benefits
Brownstone divides the benefits of using KYMIRA into the functional and the applied, with data drawn from case studies with the company’s clients.
“From a functional standpoint, they will stimulate nitric oxide production, which will increase circulation,” he says.
“There’s a pain relief response, which is actually the same pathway as taking an opiate. Not as potent as morphine, for example, but it can help with chronic pain relief, which is where we get that 25% reduction in pain scores coming from. There’s an improvement in sleep quality of 15.8% based on research that’s been conducted on the products. Cells respire more efficiently so they’re consuming less oxygen to achieve the same work output; that, plus the circulation, you’ve basically got an increased supply and a reduced demand, which yields a 20% increase in tissue oxygen levels, which means there’s more oxygen there for the cells to use from a recovery and performance standpoint.
“From an applied benefit, we have an ecosystem. So preparation, performance, recovery, including travel and sleep, and rehabilitation. The ring around all of that is injury mitigation. So from a preparatory standpoint, wearing the products before a game setting, for example, allows you to accrue some benefits. So if you wore a KYMIRA product for 60 minutes, for 90 minutes afterwards you’re still going to have accelerated nitric oxide production, which is boosting circulation, helping the muscles to become more supple and less prone to injury.”
KYMIRA has evolved its range with close back-and-forth during the developmental period to make sure that fit and style is on point for athletes.
The benefits sound remarkable, with one user – a British SAS operator – wryly enquiring if KYMIRA deal in ‘black magic’. Sceptics naturally abound and Brownstone welcomes their questions.
“Sceptics are really important because everyone should be sceptical of confident claims like ours because they’re quite bold. They’re substantiated but they’re bold because they’re substantiated. I don’t think anyone should look at the list of benefits that are on the wall over there and just go ‘that’s fantastic’. They should ask ‘how do you do that? Why do you do that?’
“The sceptic often becomes the biggest advocate because they’ve made us work harder for the reward, in essence. In dealing with sceptics, we just let the data speak for itself. We’ve got tens of case studies, tens of clinical trials, there is a mountain of evidence.”
As we head into 2023, Brownstone and KYMIRA are optimistic given their own plans for the new year as well as the increasing levels of education around all aspects of recovery in sports. Some teams are even using their athletes’ experience with KYMIRA to underline their fundamentals around sleep, nutrition and recovery.
“That’s quite cool and we hope that trend continues.”
The catcher discusses his use of the Trajekt pitching machine, heat maps, raw data, iPads and much more besides.
His 2022 season with the Mets was slowed by injuries — a fractured hamate bone and strained oblique — but McCann caught the team’s combined no-hitter on April 29 in a game started by Tylor Megill. McCann helped to anchor the pitching staff along with teammate Tomás Nido as New York made its first playoff appearance since 2016.
McCann, 32, is a California native who starred at catcher for the University of Arkansas. The Tigers selected him in the second round of the 2011 MLB Draft, and he made his big league debut in September 2014. McCann was also the club’s nominee for the Roberto Clemente Award, an honor for community service.
On his use of video and data to prepare for opposing pitchers . . .
A little bit of both. You watch previous matchups against them that you’ve had individually. You watch how he’s pitched other hitters from the same [side] ± whether you’re righty, lefty — and then you also just pay attention to tendencies. You try and see if there’s any tendency to pick up on, whether there’s a certain time in the game, certain count, where you can [expect] a certain pitch.
It’s almost like a poker game. You got to play your odds at times. When you’ve got a guy — and Darvish definitely has the capability to do this —who can be on his game and not being missing spots, you got to take a shot [at guessing]. You might look foolish at times, but other times it turns out to be a big reward.
On whether he prefers to review heat maps or the raw data . . .
Probably a little bit of variety. I like to at tendencies, and then I like to see the actual video just so I can see pitch shape. Obviously, there’s nothing quite like standing in the box and seeing pitch shape. But if you can watch it on video and see, ‘Hey, this is what it looks like when it’s really good. Here’s what it looks like when there’s a mistake.’ Hopefully then you can hunt the mistake or and lay off the really good one.
On trying WIN Reality or the Trajekt pitching machine . . .
I’ve never tried [VR]. I have tried our pitching machine, Trajekt. The way I compare it for guys is, if I’m hitting off of a guy that I’ve caught for an entire season, it doesn’t mean I’m going to have more success off of him, but I know pitch shapes. I know what his pitches are going to do. And it gives me that background information to know what to look for. And that’s exactly what the Trajekt does.
[I’ve used Trajekt] just a few times. It’s not a ‘feel good’ machine. It’s just different as far as timing. So it’s hard to get in there and take swings. I like it to just go in and just track pitches and see pitch shape. It’s still just popping out of a hole. It’s timed up with the release point, but the thing that’s interesting about it is, you don’t really realize how much your eyes tell you at release point. You’re actually picking stuff up in the angle of the wrist and different things like that, that you don’t get from just a hole spinning the ball out.
On the vision of hitting . . .
I’ve heard Manny Ramirez used to look at the backdrop because you want to go from big focus to small focus. If you’re focusing real hard, you can’t focus on a small area for an extended period of time. So going from a big picture to a small picture is what most guys try to do.
On how he prepares for other hitters as a catcher . . .
A little bit of everything, honestly. Looking at the numbers, looking at heat maps. Looking at trends, the most recent things that are going on, and watching the video. Does the video — what I’m seeing with my eyes — match up with what the numbers are telling me?
For example, this is why heat maps are good because then you can have heat maps that have expected values [of contact] versus actual values. You might have a guy that looks like he’s struggling on sliders, and then you pull up his video against sliders and every ball he hits is on the money but just going right at somebody. So in that case, is he really struggling on sliders or is he just having bad luck? That’s why I like a little bit of everything: numbers, heatmaps and video.
On balancing opposing hitter tendencies with his pitchers’ arsenals . . .
[Deciding to] go with pitcher strengths vs. hitter strengths, hitters’ weakness, pitchers’ weakness. At the end of the day, you don’t want to lose on your worst pitch, right? If you’re going to get beat, you want to get beat on your best pitch, but how does that match up with the hitter? So it’s the cat-and-mouse game, it really is.
On working with each individual pitcher’s interest in this info . . .
That’s exactly it, every guy’s a little bit different. Some guys are really hands-on, and other guys are just, ‘Let’s just go with the rhythm of the game.’ So that’s part of getting to know each guy and knowing what makes them tick and having a relationship with them.
On using the dugout iPads during the game . . .
I like to look at them defensively more than offensively. I like to be able to go back and look at pitches that we may have gotten [called a strike] or not gotten, see where the strike zone is being called to know, Can we go keep going there defensively? Or do I need to make my hitters aware that, ‘Hey, he’s giving a little bit off the plate, he’s giving a little bit down, off the plate — whatever it may be.’
Offensively, yes, I like to look, just like maybe a quick check and balance, but I don’t like to sit there and study something in the game because, in the game, if you’re trying to think about your hands or your feet, you’re missing the most important thing and that’s seeing the ball. So it’s a touchy subject in the fact that I think it’s really good, but it can also be paralyzing at times.
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
The organization’s biosensing technology has the ability to take wearables to the next level in high performance.
Forget the subjective messaging and, well, more than a few teams still use that urine color chart as a hydration monitoring tool. In 2022. While there have been advances in the space, many are either still low-tech — weighing a player in and out of a session to track sweat loss — or are hard to scale beyond a single moment in time, such as the use of a pen refractometer in a urine sample.
In the coming weeks, however, a continuous hydration monitor will be commercially available as Nix Biosensors launches its first product. The sensor-laden patch — which has already received in excess of a half-million dollars in pre-orders — will calculate sweat rate and composition, providing users data-driven feedback of how much fluid and electrolytes they need to replenish.
The biosensing wearable analyzes sweat and prescribes a personal hydration strategy in real time.
“Hydration for us is just the first of many applications that I think fall into that category of health and wellness data that consumers might like to have without having to go to the doctor and that they can act on — on their own — with that personalized data,” Nix founder and CEO Meridith Cass says.
Over the past few years, Nix has been conducting pilot programs with MLB, NBA and NFL teams as well as athletes in motorsports and tennis. It was a finalist in the 2021 NFL 1st and Future Competition and, in August, for instance, 14 IndyCar drivers wore the biosensors in practice sessions prior to the Bommarito Automotive Group 500 in St. Louis, with the research done in conjunction with PitFit, a motorsport performance group. Nix partnered with fitness industry creative agency SweatWorks on help with the hardware and UX development.
Nix Biosensors has also assembled a formidable team of advisors. The scientific counsel includes Bob Murray, the founder of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute; Brad Wilkins, the former director of the Nike+ Performance Lab and lead physio on the Breaking 2:00 project starring Eliud Kipchoge; and Doug Casa, the CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute. Sports advisors include Olympic and Paralympic marathoner Shalane Flanagan and Tatyana McFadden as well as ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes.
What a Bluetooth-enabled patch can do is individualize hydration monitoring, which is challenging to do with endurance athletes traversing large distances or in large team settings because of the numbers. Nix added Pratik Patel as its director of human performance this year. Patel most recently was director of performance nutrition and an assistant strength coach with the New York Giants and previously worked for several major college programs.
“[The goal] is to empower the practitioners and the athletes to understand what their information is, and drive that behavior change,” Patel says. “I think that’s one of the biggest things that we’re trying to do as a company, instead of playing this guessing game where we have blanket recommendations for everybody.
“I’ve been in that space, I know how difficult it is trying to wrangle 90 to 110 athletes at one time, and you want to do right by them because all of them have very varying levels of educational knowledge and background with sports, nutrition and hydration,” he adds.
Football training camps are typically held in the summer, with players wearing heavy pads in high heat and humidity for two sessions a day. Add in the size of the linemen, and Patel says some could lose 15 to 18 pounds of fluid in a practice despite regular drink breaks. Cass told a SportTechie Pro Day audience that athletes are 29% slower when in just a mild state of dehydration, among other impairments. Nix cites studies indicating that 87% of endurance athletes are afflicted with some degree of dehydration, with a 2% loss of body weight a threshold for significant performance depletion.
The Bluetooth-enabled patch allows endurance athletes to individualize hydration monitoring.
“When it gets past 2%, you start seeing decrements in speed, power, accuracy, cognitive function,” Patel says.
The founding story of Nix stems largely from Cass’s own experiences. She played basketball at Bryn Mawr College and took up marathon running in her 30s, where she struggled with her own hydration. At the time, the Harvard Business School graduate returned to campus as an entrepreneur in residence. Her charge there was to build something with broad health care implications.
“For me, that was what has now developed into what we define as biosensing,” says Cass, who had been the principal of the Children’s Hospital Boston technology development fund. “That word didn’t really exist as much at that time, but it was this concept of, ‘Let’s borrow what we can from the healthcare industry of real, true, validated electrochemical biomarker data and marry that with what we think wearables have done right and leave behind what they have done wrong.’”
The experienced led to Nix Biosensors, whose wearable weighs less than a half-ounce. There are integrations with Apple Watch and Garmin, as well as some bike computers. It can be set to send customizable push notifications. The user can ask the app to say how much fluid he or she should consume every 10 minutes or to receive a prompt to drink another predetermined volume — say, four ounces — whenever the body needs it, no matter if it’s been five minutes or fifteen.
Nix also builds a sweat profile — the Nix Index — for each individual, combining fluid and electrolyte losses, sweat rate and environment to build a personal predictive model that can given recommendations for expected hydration needs in future workouts. The electrolyte information of popular sports drinks is pre-loaded into the app for reference.
“Because whether you like Gatorade or Skratch or Maurten or Tailwind or whatever your product is, you can then compare the exact composition of your sweat to the exact composition of that beverage,” Cass says.
Patel has seen the power of data in informing his athletes’ decisions. Referring to other wellness wearables such as Whoop or Oura, as well as blood panels, he discovered that the players respond to concrete information on inflammatory markers and other nutritional deficiencies.
“It’s like a light bulb in their head saying, ‘Oh, I’m not as healthy as I thought I was,’” Patel says. “And it became that much more empowering and easier to actually educate them say, ‘This is why the recommendation is for you to eat this, this and this and supplement with this, this and this.’ It’s because you have levels that aren’t optimal for where we want them to be for you as an athlete, and you potentially could be teetering on the lines of exposing yourself to be more risk for injury.”
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
AWRE Sports uses camera vision, cloud technology, skeletal tracking and streaming to create automated film clips.
If only the numbers could all be aggregated onto one simple video.
Then again, that’s the goal of AWRE (pronounced Aware) Sports, a startup that relies on camera vision, cloud technology, skeletal tracking and streaming to create automated film clips that can be overlayed with any baseball player’s wide swath of personal metrics.
The company is currently deploying its hardware and software at the Division I level with the University of Maryland, at the DII level with Erskine College, at the DIII level with Keystone College, at the JuCo level with Eastern Oklahoma State College, at the prep level with IMG Academy and, yes, even at the youth level with Brick Little League in New Jersey.
The result is an application that serves as part recruiting platform, part training platform, part game-stream platform and, down the road in an absolute dream scenario, as perhaps a competitor of the scoring app and automated highlight company GameChanger.
“Obviously, GameChanger’s literally everywhere – that is a monster,” says Ken Spangenberg, AWRE’s chief sales officer and older brother of the St. Louis Cardinals’ Cory Spangenberg. “But I think there are differences that kind of separate us from anyone else. One, the fact we’re trying to capture everything, not just games. Hopefully, people are ultimately going to choose: ‘Do I want to watch on GameChanger or do I want to put it on AWRE?’”
If nothing else, AWRE has a vision…as well as computer vision. It doesn’t intend to be the scoring app that GameChanger is, although it does stream games. Instead, it wants to elevate its streams to another stratosphere with radar and sensor integrations.
The company’s roots are in golf. CEO and co-founder Chris Clark, a former college baseball player at DI Wofford, is married to the former Vanderbilt golf coach Holly Clark and saw his wife struggle trying to organize the team’s data, scorecards and spreadsheets. Circa 2012, he developed software that allowed her players to store all of their vital golf analytics on their iPhones, giving birth to a company he called, “Birdie Fire.’’
But his passion remained baseball, and he went on to develop a predictive spray chart model that appealed to most of the college programs that demoed it. One of those schools, Oregon State, went on to win the 2018 College World Series, claiming Clark’s spray chart predictor helped them position their defense and strategize pitch location during their title run. From there, Clark had no choice but to expand.
“I’ve got this [Oregon State] coach wanting to give me a testimonial,” Clark remembers. “I’m like, ‘Hell, now I’ve got to figure this out. It may never get better than this. How do I leverage turning this into a business in the baseball space?’”
He ended up having a purposeful conversation with his Wofford college roommate, Steve Johnson, who ran a New Jersey baseball training academy named Invictus with business partner Rob Corsi. The discussion turned to the smorgasbord of baseball technology out there: the Pocket Radars, Stalkers, TrackMans, Blasts and so on. Johnson mentioned how his facility’s travel ball players needed those sorts of data points to be recruited but often had no way to afford or gain access to such high-end tech.
Clark then talked about how college programs could afford all those devices but could barely aggregate it. He mentioned how graduate assistants were always tasked with writing down launch angle, exit velocity, spin rate, bat speed — arduous and imperfect tasks.
The outgrowth of those discussions became the genesis of AWRE. Clark and Johnson — with the help of a chief technology officer Dave Johansen, COO Corsi and later Spangenberg — debuted the company in their comfort zone: college baseball. Due to their connections from their days at Wofford, Clark and Johnson made a decision to reach out to universities large and small to trial their hardware and software.
The hardware involved the installation of six cameras at each college’s baseball field: a centerfield camera, a camera above home plate and two more cameras on each dugout so both a hitter and pitcher could be filmed from their open and closed sides. Meanwhile, the software involved camera vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence that enabled each pitch or swing to become an automated video clip.
Next was adding the video overlay. Integrating with Pocket Radar, for instance, started with a pitch speed being uploaded to the Pocket Radar cloud, where it would then be synced with the AWRE cloud. With other apps, such as the Stalker radar gun, the overlay vehicle may be Bluetooth instead of a cloud, according to Johansen. He says for the TrackMan V3 ball flight tracking, there is a listening device that marries the data with the video. With Blast Motion, the data is overlayed through separate downloads and uploads, and the same with Yakkertech.
“We started to sell it to colleges,” Spangenberg says. “The reason for that is it’s the cleanest target. You know what the fields are going to be, you know they’re going to pay their invoices on time, you know they’re going to be receptive to the technology. And we’re full. So at this point, we have a waiting list.”
In other words, anyone streaming a Maryland Terrapins baseball game this season through AWRE will be able to toggle between the six cameras, but also see the metrics of each pitch and swing on company’s game center. But streaming games isn’t the platform’s long term goal: streaming analytics is.
The company will soon trial a platform on smart phones that will enable parents or fans to log in, start streaming any game through the AWRE app and immediately have automated clips of every pitch or swing that can be found on player profiles. If the fan or parent can bring a Pocket Radar or Stalker or Blast with them, or if the venue is equipped with AWRE software, the metrics can be overlayed onto every clip – turning every swing or pitch into a video that can be sent to a college or shared over social media with verified analytics.
GameChanger has begun to do the same during games, but AWRE’s hardware and software can be deployed in batting cages or bullpens for just as valuable training data.
“We’re democratizing recruiting,” says Spangenberg, a former head baseball coach at DIII Arcadia University. “The one-percenters have the high-end platforms like like Yakkertech or Track Man. It’s the Power 5 schools. But I think what we’ve built and why it’s interesting is it can also service an 8U team. So we’re not looking at 1 percent of the market, we’re looking at the entire market.”
AWRE’s longer term goal is to eventually use its skeletal tracking — which is currently part of its machine learning — to measure metrics like pitching velo and exit velo on its own…without integrating all the grab-and-go technology.
“Then our app can give people feedback on their swing mechanics or pitch mechanics in real-time,” Johansen says. “Our product can say ‘Your swing is most like Mike Trout. Or Aaron Judge.’ How cool would that be?”
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
Ben Williams of Ineos talks to James Morton about the true nature of innovation as he perceives it and managing change when people are instinctively reluctant.
An Industry Insight Series Podcast brought to you by our Partners
“One thing I do believe is: to harvest a culture of innovation we need human engagement and we need collaboration.”
Williams, who serves as the Ineos Grenadiers cycling team’s Integrated Performance Lead and the Ineos Britannia sailing team’s Head of Human Performance, is our very special guest on this Science in Sport Industry Insight Series podcast.
He sat down with SiS Director of Performance Solutions, James Morton, to discuss his varied professional background and the approach to innovation he has cultivated in each of his roles in sport and beyond.
Also on the conversational agenda were:
James Morton LinkedIn | Twitter
Ben Williams: Twitter | LinkedIn
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
Olympic runner Alexi Pappas discusses working with Oura on bringing meaning to the metrics in a why that benefits training, preparation and recovery.
Before that, Pappas was an All-American runner at Dartmouth, from which she graduated magna cum laude, and then completing her NCAA eligibility at Oregon while pursuing a graduate degree, helping the Ducks win indoor and outdoor track national titles.
Now with her eyes set on the marathon — she recently ran Boston and London as a guide for visually impaired runner Lisa Thompson — Pappas aspires to set the Greek national record. Her personal best is a 2:34:26, which set in 2020 at the Houston Marathon, less than a minute from Maria Polyzou’s national mark of 2:33:40.
Alexi Pappas is a multi-hyphenate: Greek-American Olympic runner, writer, filmmaker and actor. She is the Greek national record holder in the 10,000 meters (31:36), which she set while competing at the 2016 Rio Games. Before that, Pappas was an All-American runner at Dartmouth, from which she graduated magna cum laude, and then completing her NCAA eligibility at Oregon while pursuing a graduate degree, helping the Ducks win indoor and outdoor track national titles.
Now with her eyes set on the marathon — she recently ran Boston and London as a guide for visually impaired runner Lisa Thompson — Pappas aspires to set the Greek national record. Her personal best is a 2:34:26, which set in 2020 at the Houston Marathon, less than a minute from Maria Polyzou’s national mark of 2:33:40.
On her introduction to Oura . . .
I used to train in Oregon with a very closed professional group where everything was pretty micromanaged by a coach. There was a lot of guidance and hand holding, as I think a lot of athletes require, especially early on in their career.
I was exposed to Oura once I moved to Los Angeles and started training in different environments and not in the context of like one of those Olympic training groups. Because in these groups [like Oregon], you have a coach that has eyes on you, and they can see sometimes what you can’t about yourself, especially because my coach was an Olympian himself. He could see fatigue, where I couldn’t.
But once I moved to LA, there wasn’t always consistent eyes on me. So I needed to keep better eyes out for myself. And I learned about Oura from a friend of mine named Blue. He was wearing it, and I met him at the Chicago Marathon. And so I just started to learn about this and how it was different than the watch I was wearing, which wasn’t as accurate for the data about recovery.
On the metrics she finds most meaningful . . .
The readiness and sleep scores are more useful to me than anything else, as well as obviously the period tracker. To be perfectly honest, the sleep score has helped me figure out what of my habits will lead to the most restful sleep. I think the sleep score is something that I’m more dynamically interacting with—if I have had, you know, red meat for dinner, or if I’ve eaten at this time, or if I’ve eaten out versus cooking at home, or if I’ve gone to bed at this time, or different habits—so the sleep score is helping me get better sleep because that data is pretty consistent and my life is changing, if that makes sense. Then the readiness score is something that I use to adjust my actual training and activity for that day.
On how Oura data helps her make decisions . . .
It has really helped me because I live a very multifaceted life that I’m excited about. I’ve tried to see everything in my life as a choice rather than a sacrifice. For example, if I make a choice to drink, I now just have a better understanding of what it’s going to do to me, and therefore I’m making more informed choices.
And I’m someone who really values my time. So if I’m going to do something, whether it’s training or socially, I want to understand why and what I’m doing. I have adjusted specifics in my routine and been very amused and interested in how it affects my sleep. And it’s not always in the way articles that I read reflect because everybody’s so different. What affects my sleep might be different than what affects somebody else’s sleep. But it has allowed me to make adjustments in my life and be better educated.
The whole thing is that it’s information. What you choose to do with it is up to you, but to not know it at all is really disempowering. I’m a creative person—I make films and I write—and I sometimes like to think about criticism or feedback with my creative work as data that you can either choose to pay attention to or not. Just because I don’t ask for feedback on my book from my editors doesn’t mean my book is good or communicating, it just means I refuse to look or ask them the questions. And I think it’s like that with bloodwork or with Oura data where, just because you don’t want to know, it doesn’t mean it’s not true. So I’ve just found the information to be empowering, and I keep it in balance with, also, how do I really feel? It’s not the only information I use, but it’s an additional piece of information that I didn’t have prior.
On her current running career plan and goals . . .
It’s possible that I go to New York [for the marathon], but I think competitive-wise, I’m looking at a race in January. What I’m trying to do in my life is generally move in a direction of everything supporting everything else.
I would like to break the Greek record in the marathon as an overall goal. I think it’s like ‘should be broken, can be broken.’ It’s in the low 2:30s. And I have not had the opportunity to run a fully healthy marathon yet because I had this post-Olympic depression and did not realize what toll that took on my body.
For me, I don’t have anything to prove to myself or anyone else. I’m very happy with my career, but I have curiosity and fascination with the marathon that I think hasn’t been fully expressed yet as it was in the 10K. So, yeah, I think a winter marathon would be fun. I’m thinking about Houston, which is a really nice race, but we’ll see.
On balancing running with life . . .
I think this sport is evolving. If I’m being really honest with you where, before Covid, I think the world wanted this sharp, hard motivation of get out and grind, the world just got a little bit worn down by Covid. Generally in sport, but in running in particular, the energy has moved towards just be enjoying your sport and doing your sport. And I think that’s something that I see myself increasingly filling the role of in other people’s eyes and giving them permission to actually enjoy and lean into whatever form the sport takes for them.
Girls quit sports at twice the rate of boys by the age of 14. I’m very aware that that number, I think, is because, when they see female adult athletes, I don’t think they see themselves in it as much as it’s more common to see men playing sports in adulthood and pick up tennis, basketball. I think part of my privilege in this world is to be someone who shows that you can have a full life and still play your sport as a woman. It’s not why I do it, but I’m seeing that it is affecting people in that way. I think that number could shift if girls see more women in sport living a full life and still playing sports.
It’s not that I need these things for myself. It’s just that I love running, and I want to keep doing it. And it might take different forms—guiding, flying through like a fairy, racing, occasionally trying trails—but mostly I just really like the sport. In my creative career, a lot of the projects I’m doing are actually athletic in nature. I’m really embracing my identity as like an athlete in Hollywood, and I’m realizing that I actually don’t have to hang up my shoes like I thought I would. I can be an athlete and be a creative person. And that’s a strength, it’s not a weakness. I just haven’t fallen out of love with the sport, and I don’t think I ever will.
On the potential for wellness data to benefit young women . . .
Men and women obviously have different development timelines. And I think what has been really difficult is, when a young girl is going through puberty, for example, isn’t able to see the word ‘development’ as a really positive step in a really healthy life. I think the word ‘development’ is something that we generally don’t embrace. During those years, for example, to have a different vantage point about your health besides what a coach might say and also what social media might tell you is probably wise.
That’s because, as athletes, we’re really hard on ourselves and, to have some permission to be as kind to ourselves as we are hard on ourselves, is what we need. It can come from a coach and it can come from a book, but if it comes from data that’s specific to our bodies, I think we’re more likely to allow ourselves the chance to recover and therefore develop during those developmental years.
For me, personally, I didn’t run during those puberty years. It was because I had a coach in high school who wanted us to specialize in just running. And I was playing soccer and doing theater and student government. And this was before social media. So I wasn’t able to be like, ’Is this messed up?’ I just thought I was de facto not allowed to run unless I only ran. And I didn’t run because I wanted to have a well-rounded life. What the result was, I went through puberty very normally during the years when some people overtrain.
For someone who doesn’t happen to be kicked off their running team, and therefore develop normally, they should still be given data that shows that they’re healthy during a time when they might be self-conscious about an evolving body. So this Oura data can give you confidence. And it can give you ease where that time in life is so uneasy.
On why she likes Oura’s customizable dashboard . . .
There’s a new feature that you can remove the caloric [expenditure]. Here’s a more metaphorical way of putting this: Everybody receives information and inspiration differently. You might tell a kid ‘enjoy the journey,’ and it might not resonate with them. But maybe if they hear it from the right person or they hear it said in a different way, it resonates. And I think the fact that you can toggle and change the way the data speaks to you also acknowledges that people receive information differently. What’s useful to everyone is unique, and so I was always taught to focus on what’s useful. And something that might be useful for me might not be useful to you.
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
