Team,
Joining late to the party! My name is Chris I am the resident sport scientist and strength coach at PUSH. I am happy to answer any questions regarding the PUSH band. It has been interesting to dive into this thread, and I think there are a few general themes I can address to start. Let's begin with the biggest one I see reading this thread + a second topic as it coincides with it:
1) Tech adoptive vs. Tech adverse coach/athlete + HR monitoring
There seem to be two categories people are grouping themselves into - there are a decent amount on here who aren't into the concept of integrating tech into training and very against it, and a decent amount who are into it and supportive. This is to be expected, especially when introducing something new into a current model (in this case tech into a non-tech paradigm). It is also not surprising to us at PUSH as we have seen this during the 5 years we have been on the market (although we are seeing it less and less every year). We cut our teeth pro-sport and NCAA S&C strength and conditioning world, but now our biggest market is private training facilities as they see it as a way to engage more clients and differentiate from other facilities and trainers, all while tracking their progress while going paperless.
We consider ourselves the like the garmin, power meter or catapult for the weight room. We measure the external and total system mechanical loading (velocity, power, force, work, etc.) by using an inertial motion unit (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer) combined with Newtonian physics (fancy math). Whereas heart rate is the internal response to exercise, for say running, distance, speed/pace and elevation are the external load. They are not interchangeable, although can be surrogates of one another depending on the situation. These are all objective measures, while RPE and questionnaires are subjective. In an ideal training scenario, you look at external, internal and subjective to get a full picture of training.
You will not find a top performing runner, cyclist or endurance racer who doesn't monitor both external loading and internal responses in today's world. Why not bring the same mentality to the weight room I would ask those of you who are against tech? The gym is one area that arguably all humans and athletes should be spending time in regardless of sport, event, goals, fitness, health etc... No one forces runners to buy a garmin watch or cyclists to by power meters, as here there is no obligation for SF coaches and members to get a band. So those of you who aren't into tech can still train, run, cycle, lift etc. without any tech, and I'd argue the majority of people at the participation level do this. But if you goal is to get better, how are you measuring and informing that improvement. If you goal is the be the best, you need to look for ways to train better and train smarter in order to maximize gains, minimize fatigue/injury in order to increase performance.
While training velocity and power have been around for a long, long time, Velocity based training (VBT) was innovated in the modern sense in mid 1990's. Somewhat affordable commercially available tools (such as Tendo and Gymaware string pods) becoming available in the early 2000's. One of the modern pioneers (there are many) Dan Baker, an Australian football league S&C with the Brisbane Broncos for over 20 years, had one of the first commercially available machines in 1993 began doing research and modernizing the training methodologies now that he had the ability to quantify velocity and power in the weight room. Another pioneer of modern VBT (dynamic method/conjugate for powerlifting) who didn't use tech, Louie Simmons (Westside barbell), is another person we have been in discussions with as he is looking for ways to quantify velocity to take his methods to another level as he sees value and a need for it. If you want to know more about VBT training in general, Dan's work is rather easy and actionable you can use the PUSH band in a more traditional S&C sense, check out the manuals he has written for us here:
Free VBT Guide by Dan Baker
The early adopters of VBT initially, and PUSH more recently were coaches who were into tech and wanted to quantify all aspects of training. I was an early adopter VBT, having spent nearly 10 years at the Canadian Sport Institute training olympic athletes I got a tendo device in 2007, myotest in 2008 and gymaware in 2010. However these systems came with a lot of manual labour and headaches. When I saw the birth of PUSH and what they were trying to do, I was super intrigued because it was 1/10th the cost, smaller and more portable, more versatile in what it could do, and a lot of the heavy lifting was done by the software and app.
The S&C world has changed a lot over the past 5 years, and now you can't find a pro/NCAA team who doesn't have some sort of VBT tech. 10 years ago only pros runners had garmins and and pro cyclists had power meters, now everyone who competes at your local race has them. It comes down to what your goals are, what you are willing to invest in to be better, and what has proven to work. In the S&C space VBT has proven to work. Given the direction SF is heading with strong endurance, there is a place for PUSH to measure and monitor what you are doing. Further, as tech advances and costs come down it becomes accessible to the masses. This is what PUSH has done for the weight room.
HR monitors have been around much longer, and have been rather inexpensive. However the same argument could be used with HR. Heart rate correlates highly with RPE, so I could easily argue to those using HR why buy an HR monitor if you are against using other tech, why not just use RPE? Being independently objective versus human perceived subjects are not the exact same. Same in the weight room. There is always a more low-tech and cheaper option, and always a more accurate, more costly option for quantifying training. Unfortunately, the human eyes, as free as they are, are not good sensors for measuring velocity, power and their derivatives, so unlike RPE we cannot even guestimate the values in the gym based environment. As a quantitative biomechanist at the University of Toronto we have done a lot of this work, and it's surprising how bad trained coaches, physios, trainers and the like are at inferring information from watching humans move. This is where tech can help.
Now I am generalizing, but from what I have seen the tech adverse group tends to be of an older generation (>40 years old), and has gotten to where they are without the help of tech, so they don't feel a need for it. They can continue to achieve their goals regardless of it. There is also a group that didn't grow up with tech, so they aren't comfortable using it. Then there is the tech adoptive group who tend to be <30 years old, grew up surrounded by it, looking at screens for feedback, quantifying and gamifying everything. I'm 35 so I grew up in a generation that straddled these groups, with minimal tech as a child, but during my social formative years was exposed to the explosion of tech, so I completely get both groups.
What we are seeing in the S&C world, is the young group is growing rapidly as the older group is retiring and moving on. And the older group who is still practicing is having to adopt the methods of the younger group because most of the people they work with are from the younger generation, and feel if you aren't using tech or measuring stuff that you aren't current with the time, forward-thinking, etc. While this may not be the case now with respect to KB training and SF methodology, we are seeing it in every other facet of fitness, from orange theory to peloton. However it doesn't mean we need to lose our belief is sound fundamentals that we can always come back to and rely on, but instead, find new ways to enhance them.
This is where I commend SF for being open-minded and forward-thinking as they see an opportunity to improve on what they do by utilizing a tool that has proven itself in the athlete strength world. It will take years to develop and refine how it will be used to achieve best outcomes, but there are immediate ways to start incorporating that can have an impact. Send us your ideas on things you want to see or potentially measure. For example, we can already track work completed or tonnage lifted. Both of these metrics are used in the long-term planning of training, and it is large and quick increases or prolonged decreases in these that tend to lead to soft tissue injury. So with yourself or your clients you can get an accurate strain measure and you don't have to write anything down. That saves you time and hassle, all while being better planned and smarter about training.
If you are a coach who cares about bringing more clients to your business, if you care about educating SF methodologies to the masses, or if you care about capitalizing on every advantage possible to be the best, adopting tech might be something you want to consider at some point down the line. Like anything new, the innovation cycle will always have early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Tech, in general, is here to stay, and it is a way to reach new people and younger generations, so for the tech-adverse, perhaps give it a spin before you throw the baby out with the bathwater.