Last week 25.4 million people watched the United States Women’s National Team win a record third World Cup with a 5-2 victory over rival Japan. One of the unsung heroes of the US women’s success was the team’s fitness tracker that helped prepare them through a physically demanding World Cup schedule.
The Women’s National Team’s fitness, strength and health were clear factors in the team’s successful run. Those important traits were aided by wearable devices made by Finish company Polar Electro.
The World Cup winners wore Polar’s M400 fitness watches before and after games to track player vitals and supply fitness coach Dawn Scott with quantifiable workout metrics. These metrics use a number system specific to each player’s profile – height, weight, gender, age, and sitting and standing heart rate are all taken into account to give an estimate as to how hard each individual should work out before and after games.
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“It is a number that starts at zero and works its way up,” Josh Simonsen, training specialist at Polar told us. “Say the athlete earns 450 points in the game. They can say ‘I want 75 percent of this game load to be a hard session.’ A good example is that 10-0 game that Germany had early in the tournament. If you look at the data and say the defenders only did 80 percent workload we can make sure we maintain that, while the attackers would probably need a full recovery. It is about understanding your athletes and how they respond to everything.”
The M400 has a compatible heart rate strap that wraps around the player’s chest and sternum. It transmits electrical impulses and heart rate signals to the wrist unit allowing spontaneous heart rate measurements.
And while the collegiate level has recently allowed live telemetry, FIFA does not allow for trackers to be worn in games. The Women’s National Team relies on the devices during training and when the players are away from the team.
“When they travel away from the team, Dawn can create training sessions from her computer and send it to their [players] computer,” Simonsen said. “They can download and complete the sessions and send them back to her computer. Everything downloads via Bluetooth. It is really instantaneous.”
Polar’s systems are able to track speed, heart rate, distance, pace and just about every other metric an accelerometer, GPS and compass can track. This allows trainers not only the ability to track player fitness, but to ensure athletes do not pick up stress injuries and they can bring players back from previous injuries in a more timely manner.
“The value is taking a younger athlete and having them train at maximum outputs and not over train them,” Simonsen said. “You hear about the overuse injuries and the single sport athlete with their repetitions. It is about being able to model them at a younger age and putting them in the best sporting environments.”
The company’s Team Pro system was released last week. Simonsen says it is the most convenient fitness tracking system yet, “Essentially it takes the M400 and Team2 system and smashes them together. Now we have the world’s smallest GPS, accelerometer tracking device that uses the cloud to bring data directly to an iPad.”
Simonsen said the Women’s National Team has been using the Team2 system and chose not to adopt the Team Pro system before the World Cup, “It was just a matter of – they had what they had and they liked it.” But he believes adoption rates will be high, and that soccer teams will be some of the first to adopt the new system, “I think we will have a fairly high conversion rate. We are not adding a ton of cost, but we are giving a ton of features. The first ones we will come across will be women’s soccer, men’s soccer and go from there.”
And that should be no surprise. Soccer has been at the forefront of wearable technology. The English Premiere League fit Polar watches on their referees to make sure they can keep up with the pace of a game. Soccer provides the majority of Polar’s 450+ systems in the United States, but hockey and basketball are making strides, said Simonsen.
But do not expect to see the Team Pro or Team2 systems available to the average consumer. A 30 player subscription of the new Pro system costs just under 13,000 euro. That is a figure only the wealthier clubs around the world can afford.
Thankfully for them, the United States Women’s National Team is one of them.