I actually welcome the initiative (and this discussion)
A few more points on data...
In order to be of any practical use data collection is only useful if it is
- clear what is measured
- repeatable (and the more objective it is regardless of external influence the better)
- well understood
- and, the above leading into this, actionable
The push band (and comparable products) is very good at the first 2!
It is a clear metric, and very objective. it measures performance output rather than input (HR suffers here for example as it is not an objective output but rather an input metric that is influenced by many factors).
Just like power for cyclists this makes for an excellent metric, it is repeatable, not prone to influences, and thus is ideal to use as a comparison and objective progress/training measure.
You can easily look at 2 workouts and compare them. You can also easily use it to create direct training goals and measure compliance against them. A change in the data over time clearly indicates something (HR again doesn’t, you need to correlate it to other metrics like speed, time, distance etc in order to infere conclusions).
Promising so far!
It is much less clear on the latter 2 points.
Well understood: above I said a change indicates something. So, what is that something?
HR is hands down one of the best studied, used, analysed etc metric there is for sports performance (where applicable of course!)
Cycling power is getting there, and after years and years of research and practical use/experience is very well understood and has revolutionized cycling training even for amateurs.
If you have the means to measure something, you need to know what it tells you, what momentary and long term increases and decreases mean, what causes it etc.
There are numerous new data points that make an entry, but gravely suffer from not being understood (running dynamics for example, or now running power. We collect the data in very high resolution but noone yet knows what it means or what to do with it!
This is where accelerometer data for power sports is in its early stages also, and especially in areas like KB ballistics! Other than possibly telling you that you might want to stop a set (based on an arbitrary % drop that might or might not have relevance to something), what else does it tell you?
This all leads to the most important one: actionable!
1) you need to be able to plan your training using the data (why collect it otherwise?). Now if this is not well understood yet, how do you plan? How do you define levels, zones, targets etc if noone really knows what makes sense for which goal/sport?
Why do you want achieve a certain level, why cap it, and how do you get there? How do you increase your max, and why? How do you increase aberage over a time period, and why?
2) it needs to be directly available to be able to react. The push band app seems to beep and buzz but how do you actually train with it? All you can do is review but there is no current good way to react (other than having a coach tell you).
If your training plan says 20x5 reps at 85% of vMax how do you know if you hit that target during each rep, or way above, or way below, etc?
All of that is a bit of a problem right now, as there is no body of work established that tells you what to do, there are no known succesful test strategies and segmentations (normally metrics are tested frequently to establish a variety of maxes, so what is that strategy for kb ballistics?)
Essentially it beeps when you should stop a set, based on a guess on when that should be
I think it is a very good initiative, and I think SF are uniquely positioned to fill in the bidy of research, IF it gets structured scientifically etc.
In many years we might not hear of it again, or we might train with it extensively (as cyclists do with power meters)
At the moment, we’re not there yet!
One additional point, the data resides inside its own ecosystem... in order to be even remotely useful it needs to feed into a full data set and be correlated with other metrics. More work for the platform developers!
Loooooong post, sorry for that