A Little To Do about SportsDo — GPS Your Sports Training
SportsDo is a GPS sports tracking system for your mobile phone which enables you to record your sporting activities while broadcasting live tracking stats to friends and family via the SportsDo web portal. Detailed analysis of your activities can be performed on our SportsDo web portal allowing you to relive the experience and continually improve your performance. Read Full Writeup Here:
How doe
s this look to you? Or, let me rephrase the question? How does this look to you in comparison to a stinky gym, weight training room or cinder running track?
Let’s call a spade a spade here … your trusty correspondent is about as athletic as a rock. he is also not much of a cell phone “gimmick” freak.
I am, though, a great believer in doing smart things with technology, and this idea is a smart one. SportsDo is online software that takes “readings” of tour current activity from your GPS-equipped mobile phone and tracks your performance, and that of anyone else who’s using SportsDo on attractive performance screens.
The uses for this puppy seem even more to me than the ones the developers list.
A track coach can remotely watch the training of his whole team, making sure they don’t over or under-train and that they practice in safe areas during hours the coach has specified.
Perhaps a track star from college wants to keep competing with some of her sister runners after graduation and jobs have separated them? Absolutely no problem, they can easily organize their own intramural competitions no matter where their careers have taken them.
How about preliminary screening for a big athletic event? Do we need to send hundreds of “also ran’s’ by bus, train or plane, or can the organizers use SportsDo to weed out the poor performers and even find those in tiny schools that hadn’t been noticed yet?
The uses of this tool are limited only by imagination, frankly> I like it
When It’s dangerous Not To “Get” Footy and How GPS and Friends Can Help
A day or so ago, here, I published a post about an Australian footballer being forced to ware a GPS tracker by his team. In my American-weighted ignorance I got almost the whole story wrong (the only part I got right was that I’m exasperated by over-paid athletes who argue with the managers and teams who pay them to play).
Australian Rules Football, or just plain “footy” to most Australians is a game combining a lot of the aspects of the soccer kind of football with a few of the aspects of the Amaer4icna style of football … ever notice that the world has too darn many games called football?. We also have a plurality of AFL’s …The American Football League and the Australian Football League… but being separated by 9 or 10 thousand miles and half a year the games themselves seldom conflict;-), An aspect of the American game that is certainly _not_ shared by the Australian Rules game is having the athletes spend the majority of their time sitting on the bench. The playing field in Australian football is often four times the area of an American gridiron, there are more players, and they move around one heck of a lot more.
As an advantage in coaching and training, and as a measure of a player’s performance and effort level, many AFL teams have adopted the practice of putting GPS units on their players. The GPS tracks during the game can then be very accurately played back and studied. The players and coaches know who ran the fastest and the farthest and if a man is, for example, consistently going to the wrong area of the field, he and the coach can see the difficulty and make corrections in future play. There’s some real science already taking place using this technology, here’s one example: and some more info here:
My apologies for getting off track. As usual, if you own right up to a mistake and find out where you went wrong you typically learn a lot more. The credit for finding the mistake and getting me on the right track goes to my online friend and fellow blogger Brendon Sinclair. Brendon (literally) wrote the book on running a web design business and he runs a very active marketing and ecommerce firm on Australia’s Gold Coast. He’s also a marathon runner, registered nurse and, it turns out, knows a thing or three about GPS too. Thanks, Brendon.