This is a guest post by Paulo dos Santos, CEO of Kinematix.
Runners are a smart and motivated category of people. They are committed to their sport as a way to keep healthy, enjoy physical activity, avoid injuries (from the sport and in general), and if they are competitive, to improve their running times. Wearable technology has promised to help with some of these areas, but smarter wearables are coming to help close gaps that a research study discovered.
So what if a smart wearable could enhance running knowledge, assess overall health, and help achieve fitness goals?
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With a rapidly growing market for wearable devices, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston decided it was time to analyze devices that monitor or track, such as those made by Fitbit, Jawbone or Nike, to compare how each one helped to motivate the user. They did not want to simply track time, but to see if a wearable could change physical activity.
After analyzing 13 devices, they found a whole range of positive results in their study, but some very important areas were lacking:
“Several tactics associated with successfully increasing physical activity were uncommon in or absent from the monitor systems, including action planning, instruction on how to do the behavior, commitment, and problem solving.”
Let’s look at four ways that smarter wearables can help improve our running.
Action Planning: Smart Wearables Improve Your Training Time
If you don’t have a coach, smart wearables should be able to provide a personalized running plan based on your profile and your run data. In essence, your running plan becomes your time management tool to help you control and get higher value from what is scarce for most of us: Time to train.
If you are training for a half-marathon, you might engage with a coach to improve your performance. However, let’s say you can only meet with the coach two times per month. By collecting smart wearable data, you can share information your coach can use to track your progress and give you more value in your coaching sessions.
Instruction on how to do the behavior is, in essence, more complete training knowledge, at your fingertips.
The UT Study researchers alluded to a device that would do more than provide a simple, one-size-fits-all exercise plan. In order to maintain or improve physical activity, any person performing an exercise might need instruction on how to do a particular exercise behavior, sometimes a preventive stretch, for example, in order to optimize their workouts (training smarter, not harder).
Wearables can track our pace, our stride rate, stride length, runtimes, distance, and speed, but without more details on our form, we may be wasting time in our daily and weekly training runs. Today’s wearables do not monitor the most crucial part of the body used for our run: Our feet.
Problem solving is what we do to avoid injury or train differently to improve. It is also part of what we do in setting goals that keep us on track in our training.
Problem solving can help us do two things quickly: Avoid injury, which we look at below, and improving our overall running experience.
There are many studies that have demonstrated that runners who experience excessive heel striking are more likely to develop Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome (PFPS), also known as “Runner’s Knee,” and that heel strikers experience greater impact shock than midfoot strikers.”
Using the heel strike example, what changes would help a runner stop or avoid excessive heel strike and prevent PFPS. Smart wearables can track your running form, for example, in the following ways:
- How much is your foot in actual ground-contact time?
- Specifically, how long is your heel in contact with the ground?
- Does your foot strike heel first?
- Numbers of steps per minute
- Symmetry – are both feet behaving similarly when on the ground? If they are not behaving the same, then knowledge of that asymmetry helps us fix problems.
The results of this study can also be seen in the first-hand experience of Olympic Silver Medalist, Vanessa Fernandes of Portugal. Throughout her entire career she equated more training and harder training with achieving her goals and milestones. But was this the only way? “I always wondered whether it would be possible to obtain equally good results with less amount of training, through a serious commitment to qualitative factors,” said Fernandes.
Vanessa worked closely with a coach to overcome some performance issues, and found alternative ways to enhance the quality of her running through selecting the right exercises, stretches and the most effective workout routine. Even with all this, Vanessa still felt a slight imbalance in her running.
“My coach has always insisted on the need to work in the same way with both sides, i.e., that the support of my left and right feet, become more similar, or even that my step cycle be more identical. Sometimes I feel these differences in such a manner it seems that one of the legs slows my run.”
Vanessa and her coach could see this imbalance in video footage, but that was just one small segment of her run. She needed something that could track her symmetry throughout her entire run and provide detailed information on other parameters such as heel contact time and ground contact time.
“I have found the ideal partner [with TUNE] to give me the kind of information and feedback that any runner would like to have to improve parameters, at the level of technique improvement and biomechanics that they ideally should apply in their running,” said Vanessa. “On the very first training session, I realized the huge difference that existed between my left and right foot, in the number of steps in which the ground contact was made by the heel. Finally, I realized that, in fact, I was more asymmetric than I ever thought!”
One interesting aspect of Vanessa’s use of TUNE is that she started to play a game with herself, challenge herself with every run to improve certain parameters, even in the slightest way – just slowly rebalancing and improving her form.
“The truth is that with this technology I added a kind of reality game to my training in which I find myself playing with the data of my feet, supporting and learning in a way that I never expected before, something completely new. In this manner, I was able to get more balanced, realistic measurements between the supports of both feet, and having a tool that allows me to realize to what extent I am able to correct something so important.”
Commitment is another way of saying that you are motivated to maintain your health.
Armed with new training knowledge from smart data, we decrease the risk of injury. Further, by using smart wearable data to get personalized training tips, we can expect a greater motivation to continue physical activity. The added bonus is we can run with better consistency and use our time optimally.