Technology has never played a bigger role in smarter training for the professional athlete than it does today. Athletes are tracked in every way possible to make sure they’re training the right way, eating the right things, and giving their bodies enough time to recover so they can continually perform at their peak. But what if athletes of any level could reach their peak without an army of trainers and team doctors or every fitness, nutrition and sleep tracking app on the market?
That’s where Logit is wanting to seize the moment.
Now, whether you’re an amateur athlete juggling competition with a day job, or an everyday athlete trying to stay healthy, you can optimize recovery just like the pros. From tech startup RightBlue Labs in Toronto, Logit is a monitoring system developed to reduce illness, injury, and burnout. Using a self-reporting digital training journal, athletes and coaches, fitness trainers and clients, and even doctors and patients and the military are able to see potential areas of concern and adjust training or treatment accordingly.
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After his swimming career ended, Ronen Benin, co-founder of RightBlue Labs, finally had time to devote to studying his training journals and decided to use his little brother as a guinea pig to test a product idea that would help athletes of all levels train smarter. Benin studied a single year of his journals to discover a strong correlation between his quality of sleep, hydration, and his irritability levels and noticed that hydration tended to be a strong precursor of injuries for him. He also did a lot of research and found many studies linking these variables to injury and illness risk.
Like any good big brother, Benin wanted to make sure his younger brother, Dan, didn’t make the same mistakes he did so he developed a lightweight version of Logit. Dan used it daily and within just a few months, they saw notable results. “Not only were we able to identify distinct patterns in his lifestyle that led to him getting sick, but we were also able to see how subtle changes in his travel and study schedule resulted in drastic reductions in training time missed,” explains Benin.
Logit asks the user a series of questions and automatically generates unique baselines based on responses over time. When an athlete begins to deviate from those baselines, the athlete, their coaches and trainers, and Support Teams are alerted so adjustments can be made to avoid injury or illness. Logit also raises flags for potential mental health issues by mapping these values against the words in the athlete’s thoughts field. While the algorithm used to identify distinct patterns based on sport, gender, and age are proprietary, Benin explains that the core variables are recovery, hydration/nutrition, psychological health and physical health.
You might be asking how Logit is better than the fitness tracker currently on your wrist or the fitness app you use to track your activity. While Logit is working towards integrating with wearable devices and apps, it is successful on its own because it relies on psychometric factors such as stress, irritability, fatigue, and overall enjoyment in addition to physical factors such as nutrition, hydration and the workout. Benin noted that studies have also shown that athlete self-reported measures based on psychometric factors are more accurate indicators of injury risk and long term well-being than the physical stats that such devices and apps track.
Logit also relies on the user inputting their information, unlike many fitness trackers that automatically track activity data. However, with comprehensive tools to make logging and scheduling simple and an intelligent reminder system, Logit boasts a 90%+ daily compliance rate, which contributes to its success as an essential tool to prepare athletes and teams for success.
Benin partnered with Daniel Lewis, a distinguished technologist and mental health activist, to co-found RightBlue Labs in January 2014. In less than two years, they have played an integral role in team success for clients like the Canadian Women’s National Hockey Team, the Canadian National Swim Teams and Training Centers, and Skate Canada Programs with their flagship product, Logit Sport.
Benin told me they developed Logit for the amateur athlete, a market that is being greatly underserved, and ‘for these teams, Logit enables better athlete performance by reducing missed training time from injury and illness. RightBlue Labs has since extended the product line to include Logit Fit for fitness professionals to use with their clients, Logit Health for doctors and patients, and Logit Defense for the military. Each system is unique to their vertical, but the overarching goal of all of the Logit systems is to help everyone achieve a healthy lifestyle.