As endurance athletes have come to take for granted their heart rate monitors, GPS units and ergometers, strength and power athletes (and their coaches) have been on the outside looking in at the digital space. Strength and conditioning (S&C) coaches prescribe and monitor load, volume, rest and percent of maximum capacity, but these factors do not reveal the athlete’s mechanical output. The lack of quantitative data leaves it up to the skilled – but still human – eye of the S&C coach to spot the subtle changes in an athlete’s movements that indicate fatigue and are crucial for high performance and injury prevention.
Push Strength is a Toronto-based startup that will end S&C’s digital drought. Push’s founder and CEO, Rami Alhamadi, was working out at the University of Toronto gym in 2012 when he saw several U of T athletes doing their strength sessions. After a few conversations with them about their training regimen he recognized the technological void in S&C. With a background in mobile development, programming and robotics, Alhamadi set out to solve the problem of quantifying resistance training.
Bringing the Lab Into the Gym
Push Strength requires only 3 inputs from the user: the athlete’s weight, the exercise to be performed (selected from a menu in the app) and the weight to be moved. A sensor worn just below the elbow detects the athlete’s movement, and uses exercise-specific algorithms to compute the force, power output and velocity of each rep. After the set is complete, the athlete presses a button on the sensor and the data is displayed graphically and numerically on the user’s mobile device.
All of Push Strength’s metrics and algorithms are validated against data obtained from force platforms. “Force platforms are the gold standard in sports science,” Chief Operating Officer Matt Kuzdub said. “Force platforms measure ground reaction forces, or the amount of force someone is putting into the ground. From there, we’re able to extract other metrics like velocity and power.” When Push Strength brought Kuzdub on board the focus was on traditional exercises like the bench press or back squat. Kuzdub quickly expanded the menu to include Olympic lifts such as the clean or snatch that are critical for strength and power athletes. Push is now crowdsourcing new exercises through their network of beta-users who are among the top strength & conditioning coaches in North American professional and collegiate sports.
Push Strength Enables Velocity-Based Training
Kuzdub sees Push Strength as a way to quantify – and therefore mainstream – velocity-based training (VBT). VBT emphasizes the speed of movement rather than the load or volume of training. “Instead of telling an athlete to do 5×5 power cleans, the coach will ask the athlete to move the bar between a certain range, such as 1.0 m/s – 1.5 m/s for power and speed-strength development,” Kuzdub says. VBT takes into account an individual’s level of rest or fatigue, as a “fresh” neuromuscular system will facilitate a higher speed or more reps. VBT also enables new ways of comparing athletes, who can now be evaluated – or can compete against each other – through their speed of movement.
VBT is not a new development in S&C, but it has never gained widespread usage. A large factor is the difficulty of accurately measuring an athlete’s performance and progress. Kuzdub believes Push Strength will make VBT a viable option for the most data-driven and performance-oriented coaches. “Although many coaches have been employing VBT for decades, it hasn’t been studied too extensively. I attribute this to a lack of affordable and easy-to-use tools that can measure velocity. By offering a wireless solution and eliminating the need for force platforms, more researchers will study VBT and more coaches will implement VBT into their training programs.”
What Coaches Are Saying about Push Strength
Sports professionals who have seen Push Strength in action see nearly limitless ways to incorporate this data into their training. Major league baseball pitching coach Scott Lando of Sharp End Athletics in Austin, TX, believes that Push Strength will validate the work done by S&C professionals by providing quantifiable, trackable performance improvements over time. He also expects Push to illuminate the full range of adaptations athletes gain from functional power training. “I’ve had pitchers leave our training programs and put 4 mph on their fastball, even though we didn’t do anything specifically targeting pitch speed. Push will show us how the whole kinetic chain is being developed, which will explain the collateral benefits athletes get from their training.”
In addition to outright performance metrics, Push Strength will also play a key role in injury prevention. Coaches can prescribe a range for any of the metrics the system tracks. The system will alert coaches and athletes when the athlete is over-working, and also when there is a significant drop in output – a sign of fatigue, reduced training adaptations and increased injury risk.
Alhamadi cited recent research indicating that there is a significant drop in the velocity of movement one rep before there is a visible compromise in an athlete’s movement patterns. This disparity between when the athlete is fatigued and when even a well-trained coach may notice it means that athletes are routinely doing one rep too many, placing them one rep closer to injury. Lando, who is renowned for keeping his athletes injury-free throughout their careers, calls this feature “game-changing. We’ll now be able to know exactly when an athlete is getting the adaptations we want, and exactly when we need to stop the exercise. Any athlete using this is going to have a one-rep advantage keeping them in their performance range and further away from injury.”
Keep Pushing to the Future
Push Strength sees a day in the near future when sports performance gyms will have tablets at every lifting station. Coaches will enter each athlete’s workouts into the athlete’s Push profile. When athletes arrive at the gym they will grab a Push armband, call up their profile in the Push dashboard and sync the armband to the network. At each station, the tablet will tell them everything they need to know about the set they are about to perform, and will provide instant feedback to the athlete and coach (who may be elsewhere in the gym with another athlete, but tracking everyone on his tablet). The S&C coaches can then share the data with the rest of the coaching and sports medicine staff, while the athletes can tweet and post screenshots of their workout to let their fans know what they were up to in training that day.
With 30 beta units currently in use in Canada, the US and the UK, Push Strength is continually expanding its list of exercises and sports served. Much of the existing data comes from hockey, football and baseball S&C staffs. With sports like running and volleyball on the horizon, as well as CrossFit, Push looks to expand into ground-contact and horizontal force data, open-chain exercises and integration with heart rate and other cardiorespiratory metrics.
Visit Push Strength’s blog to learn more about how S&C coaches are already applying the technology and preparing to integrate Push into their work. And if there are any exercises, sports or activities you’d like to see in a future version of Push Strength, leave them in the comments below or tweet them to us and we’ll make sure they get to Alhamadi and his team!