A new social platform called Nexus is launching this weekend at the CrossFit central regional tournament in Nashville. The app aims to do for functional fitness athletes what services like Strava and MapMyRun already do for cyclists and runners: provide athletic insights and build a digital community.
The Nexus app is free, but to use it, an athlete first needs to buy a $299 Push Band—Nexus works exclusively with that wearable, made by its sister company. The Band can be worn using a strap or compression sleeve, and has a device that uses both accelerometers and gyroscopes to track both speed, acceleration, and displacement. Algorithms can then convert that data into knowledge of exactly which gym exercise a user is performing.
“Push is used in almost every professional sports league in the world,” said Mike Dawson, CEO of Nexus. The list of programs Push works with includes MLB’s Pirates and Texas Rangers, the NBA’s Nets, Thunder, and Wizards, the NFL’s 49ers and Seahawks, and the NHL’s New York Rangers and Stars. But the data provided by Push to those teams is designed for high end users like professional strength and conditioning coaches, and is not prescriptive. Coaches use the data to determine and adjust training plans in a way that would be beyond most consumers.
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“We’re leveraging that hardware into a new platform for Nexus that communicates the metrics more into the way that we train in the CrossFit arena,” Dawson explained. “Nexus is essentially the platform that is going to quantify the sport of CrossFit and functional fitness.” (Although Nexus isn’t working directly with the CrossFit brand.)
In the same way as a gym bike or an erg measures power, Nexus users will be able to see how many watts they are generating in each exercise. Over the course of a workout, they can track the total work, which is crucial to understand when considering how much rest and recovery they might need between sessions. Athletes can also see how many reps they complete per minute, and how much time they spend on and off.
The app also converts the metrics into charts that aim to provide athletes with greater insight. That knowledge could be useful in both increasing performance and also in reducing injury risk. Data beyond simple rep counts will give athletes a more accurate idea of how much load they are really putting on their bodies.
“If I’m doing clean and jerks beside you, and I’m 5-0 and you’re 6-5,” Dawson said, “the displacement that either of us is moving the bar in this example is far different. Your reps might take a little longer time wise, but you’re actually doing more work. Work being force times displacement.”
One CrossFit discipline missing from Nexus right now is the three-mile run. “It cannot quantify how far you run,” Dawson said, “but it can tell when you are running.”
The ability to track distance could come in the future, though, if and when Nexus integrates with wearable devices that can track GPS. Potentially, the app could also add other devices that might record similar data to the Push Band. However, Dawson said that right now, “the Push Band is the only device on the market globally that can capture this kind of data. There really is no other tool that can track your movement in this kind of wearable.”
The first external integration the Nexus team is working on will be with heart rate monitors. Tracking both heart rate and heart rate variability alongside workload might help understand how each athlete’s body is responding to their training regime.
At launch, the app already includes a global leaderboard of athletes, allowing users to see who is putting in the most work. Planned software updates will add features that might be familiar to users of other fitness apps, such as personal records for key workouts, worldwide rankings of each exercise, the ability to create and join groups or clubs, and the ability to follow different people.
Two pro CrossFit athletes who are already up on the leaderboard are Canadian Lucas Parker and American Lauren Fisher. Parker, 28, has won regionals three times, and finished 14th at the 2015 CrossFit Games. Fisher, 24, has one individual regional title, and finished 9th at the 2014 Games. Both have already been working with Nexus.
SportTechie Takeaway
The move to launch the Nexus app will broaden the customer base of the Push Band from a relatively small population of pros to a far bigger number of amateur and elite amateur athletes. Another niche pro sports wearable company, Catapult, has been trying to make the same leap through its Playertek brand.
Nexus sits somewhere between major fitness brands like Fitbit and Strava. Like Fitbit, consumers need to buy a hardware device from the company in order to be able to use its platform, thus generating a steady stream of income as the user base grows. Like Strava, the app is free to use—although Strava also has a paid version—and provides data that can provide real athletic insights.