When it comes to fitness training, Chris Chapman has done a little bit of everything. He has trained gymnasts, freestyle skiers, basketball players, and most recently, athletes for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Now he works for the PUSH, a sport technology company that designs performance monitoring tools. He says that now that he has been through it all as a trainer, he is working to make the job of a strength coach easier.
“I’ve been in the training world for a decade, and it got to the point where I was I was doing a lot of teaching and educating giving back,” Chapman said Monday. “And it was at the point where I needed a new growth opportunity.”
That new opportunity came with PUSH and helping the company to develop its latest tool, Free Movement. Free Movement is an update for PUSH’s existing app that allows coaches to measure an athlete’s explosiveness — Chapman calls it “speed X strength” — using the wearable PUSH Band, which is used by more than 50 pro teams including an investor in the San Francisco 49ers.
The Free Movement feature allows coaches to add custom movements, like a baseball pitch or a squat, to the app which will then measure the explosiveness of that movement. Originally, the team was trying to measure how explosive a person was when throwing a medicine ball in the gym.
“From there this tool evolved,” Chapman said. “The whole idea was going beyond the medicine balls and just apply it to sport activity. So now coaches and athletes can measure their explosiveness or power outside of the gym setting. And that was the main goal: to make it more versatile.”
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Chapman says that strength coaches can use Free Movement to compare one athlete’s explosiveness to another athlete. While it has been designed to be used by both elite athletes and a more casual athlete, the tool works best when working with a strength coach.
Free Movement is expected to be released in mid-February.