By the time Helen Glover graduated from university in Wales in 2008, she had played a variety of competitive sports but had never rowed a single stroke. In advance of the London 2012 Summer Olympics, however, the United Kingdom had launched Sporting Giants, a talent-identification program seeking to bolster the national team ranks in rowing, handball and volleyball. The only mandatory prerequisite: height, 5 feet, 11 inches for women.
Glover, however, was nearly two inches too short and found herself looking up at the other applicants. She stood on her tiptoes to gain entry. Four years later, after arduous fast-tracked training, Glover and her rowing partner, Heather Stanning, won a gold medal in London and repeated at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.
The experience of making such rapid gains helped Glover appreciate the importance of proper coaching, but not everyone has access to world-class mentors. That idea led her to join the startup asensei that uses artificial intelligence to guide training in what its cofounder and CEO, Steven Webster, calls a new category of sports tech, connected coaching.
“Tracking isn’t teaching,” Webster said, “and counting isn’t coaching.”
Asensei, whose tagline is “Practice Perfected,” plans a public launch in the coming months with rowing as its first sport. The industry-standard machine, the Concept 2, generates a large quantity of back-end data about the workout, which the app ingests, analyzes and offers coaching advice in real-time.
Ultimately, asensei’s broader goal is to offer guidance through motion-capture apparel. The company has designed chips that can report back its 3D orientation in space hundreds of times per second. Asensei will license the kinetic-capture technology royalty-free to apparel manufacturers so users can wear a network of bluetooth sensors to provide feedback on posture, form and movement.
“I was fortunate enough to have great coaches from the very beginning of my rowing career,” Glover wrote in an email to SportTechie. “This meant I wasn’t taking thousands of bad rowing strokes, ingraining bad habits. The potential for asensei to provide quality feedback before bad habits are formed is really exciting for people starting out in new sports.
Glover has calculated that she takes four million practice strokes in every Olympic cycle. That’s more than 16,000 practice strokes for every one she takes in a gold medal final.
“One of the most important things in rowing is the ability to replicate a stroke time and time again with the smallest margin of error,” she wrote. “At the end of a 16-kilometer session Heather and I would often refer to one or two particular strokes in the last hour and a half! Making a stroke repeatable means you are more likely to race reliably. Instant stroke-by-stroke feedback could be hugely beneficial.”
Webster is a native of Scotland where he coached the Edinburgh University Karate Club to 10 consecutive Scottish national championships while embarking on a professional career in technology, with experience working at Wolfson Microelectronics and later starting teams within Adobe and Microsoft. At the latter stop, he worked closely with the team that invented Kinect, informing his view that voice and gestures would replace screens as the dominant interface for technology.
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Rather than continue to build within the established realm of connected fitness, Webster and his co-founders, Bill Burgar and Ross Arnott, sought to take a coach-first view of the space rather than technology-first. Connected coaching means focusing on biomechanics rather than biometrics; on technique (the athlete’s input) rather than effort (output); and on having the AI coach watch and interact with the athlete rather than have an athlete watch a coach on a screen.
Webster considers Glover’s experience a best-case scenario for what his company can provide.
“That story, that’s the vision for what we want with asensei — that we can help athletes realize their potential in a sport and then have access to the world-class coaching that they need to reach their potential,” he said.
“For so many of us, our potential isn’t realized because we don’t have geographic access to the coaching that would be best for us. With asensei, we’re really on this mission to democratize access to world-class coaching and to help people find the sports that they’re good at. Helen’s story is a great archetype for what we hope our customers’ stories will be.”
Rowing’s growing participation numbers were a key reason asensei started with that sport, with yoga, weightlifting and running among the next projects. (The first rollout will include pre- and post-practice strength training for rowers.) Golf, karate and skiing could come after that, as Webster calls the technology “agnostic of sport” with a straightforward path to adapting and training the AI for new biomechanics.
The name, asensei, harkens not only Webster’s martial arts background — he got to know Burgar through a series of regular karate coaching seminars — but also the company’s mission. (Webster and Arnott went to university together and worked at Wolfson together.) Webster notes that sensei is often misrepresented as “the master” whereas its really meaning more closely translates to “someone who has gone before.”
“It’s a nod to our pedigree,” Webster said, “but it’s really just this idea that for everybody, no matter the level, we can find somebody a little bit farther along the path than us.”