Las Vegas, Nevada – Today at CES 2018, Firstbeat revealed Player Status Analysis as the next significant addition to the Firstbeat Sports physiological monitoring platform. Keenly focused on empowering every athlete maximize their potential with minimal risk of injury, the Player Status Analysis combines cutting-edge sports science with advanced analytics to help guide the application of training loads in the most productive way possible.
With over 15 years of expertise in heart rate and heart rate variability analysis, Firstbeat Sports supports the training and development of over 22,000 athletes across 1000 teams, including teams in the NBA, NFL, over half of the NHL, national and Olympic teams, and competitors in practically every major soccer league around the world.
The success of Firstbeat Sports is the application of machine learning to interpret beat-to-beat changes in heart rate function. This vital data is transformed using mathematical models into the physiological information that athletes and coaches need to place training decisions on firm, scientific ground. It also means being able to make the best possible decisions for each individual athlete based on what truly works best for them, personally.
Key outputs of the Firstbeat Sports system include real-time training intensity and training load accumulation monitoring, performance readiness checks, fitness assessments, stress and recovery tracking, and sleep quality evaluation tools.
“Monitoring training load and recovery is vital to ensure athletes train at an optimal level to achieve their goals and to avoid overloading,” explains Tero Myllymäki, Head of Physiology Research at Firstbeat. “Based on the science, we know that a certain level of training is needed to build fitness and resilience, but for example, rapid increases of training load can challenge an athletes’ ability to recover and are associated with increased risk of overuse injuries. We are very excited to start piloting this service in the real world, helping professional sports teams easily see how sustainable the training of their athletes is for minimizing the risk of overtraining, developing illness, and injury.”
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Modern sports monitoring technology makes it easier than ever to amass large stores of data, documenting, moment-by-moment, everything that is happening with individual players. Mining these large data troves for actionable intel is time consuming. With the introduction of Player Status, Firstbeat makes it easier than ever to extract relevant information from the data.
Player Status Analysis brings streams of training load and recovery data together and interprets them using state-of-the-art applied sports science methodologies used by top trainers around the world.
In recent years, experts have increasingly used the relationship between fitness and fatigue to structure training activities for individual players in a way that reduces injury risks. This is largely achieved by placing recent training loads in the context of larger trends, known as the acute/chronic workload ratio (ACRW).
With Player Status Analysis, Firstbeat takes this approach to the next level by using objective training load data provided by the Firstbeat analytics engine.
“The role of strength and conditioning coaches is to help athletes to perform better and to keep them injury free, says Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki, Head of Firstbeat Sports. “Around the year, these coaches work to crack the body’s physiological code to best answer the question ‘How should my athletes train today?’”
“Our experience collaborating with top teams and coaches revealed that sifting through the data to find the right information requires a lot of time. And to do it effectively requires coding and spreadsheet skills, all of which takes away from the actual job of coaching. With the introduction of Player Status, we are automating that work and presenting the findings in an easily communicable form to allow coaches to focus on actual coaching work.”
Having successfully passed the development stage, Player Status Analysis is now being tested in a pilot program with a handful of teams. Final integration with the Firstbeat Sports system for universal availability will take place later this year.
Contact us for more information
For more information:
Herman Bonner
Firstbeat
Communications Specialist
herman.bonner@firstbeat.com
+358 44 343 7626
About Firstbeat
Firstbeat is the leading provider of physiological analytics for sports and well-being. Firstbeat transforms heartbeat data into personalized information on exercise, stress and recovery. Hundreds of elite sports teams, wellness professionals, and millions of consumers worldwide trust Firstbeat to enhance performance and well-being.
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