Smartwatches might be fashionable equipment, and new options are slowly reworking them into smartphones we supply on our wrists. However what they’re actually good at is chilly, exhausting knowledge. The hundreds of thousands of people that use them for on a regular basis health monitoring know this, however a 3 mile jog across the block is not the half of it. The health monitoring capabilities of Apple Watch are adequate that even elite athletes depend on it.
Australia’s Olympic swimming group makes use of each Apple Watch and iPad to fine-tune their coaching, based on a profile Apple did on Swimming Australia. Australia’s swimming group, the Dolphins, is among the many finest on this planet. It received 21 medals within the 2020 Olympics, together with 9 golds. It got here second solely to the US. (And one of many Dolphin’s coaches briefly went viral for his unimaginable celebrations.)
Apple Watch has supported swimmer monitoring since 2016’s Collection 2. Up to date fashions, like the latest Collection 7, can’t solely rely laps and lap tempo, but additionally auto-detect stroke varieties. The flexibility to trace knowledge is one factor, however having the ability to do it exactly sufficient for Olympic athletes is one other.
“With the ability to precisely measure my coronary heart fee in between units has been a extremely invaluable knowledge level for me and my coach to grasp how properly I am responding to coaching,” Zac Stubblety-Cook dinner, who received a gold medal in 200 meter breaststroke on the Tokyo Olympics, stated in an announcement through Apple.
“Information is the important thing ingredient relating to designing efficiency outcomes for athletes,” stated Swimming Australia efficiency options supervisor Jess Corones. “We now have seen elevated engagement from athletes sporting Apple Watch, which provides us extra knowledge factors to tell evaluation and make teaching selections.”
Apple is not the one tech large Swimming Australia has turned to in pursuit of optimizing the efficiency of its elite athletes. The Olympic group partnered with Amazon in 2019 to make the most of machine studying. The collaboration noticed Swimming Australia dump all of its knowledge on its athletes — and rivals — into a knowledge lake, which knowledgeable efficiency and coaching methods for the 2020 Olympics.
The iPad was additionally lauded as a useful software for Swimming Australia’s Olympians, although the Locker app the group makes use of to research race and coaching footage is barely obtainable for “nationally accredited swimming coaches and analysts.”