Real Salt Lake used Wahoo’s TICKR X hardware for the first time during the 2015 off season to make sure their players were healthy and fit come the start of the Major League Soccer season.
TICKR X is a heart rate and motion sensing device that straps around a player’s chest and monitors their fitness patterns during personal workouts.
This allows the Real Salt Lake trainers to keep tabs on their players during the off season and make sure they work out enough to be fit and injury-free by season’s kickoff.
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Dan Barlow, director of sports and science at Real Salt Lake, previously experimented with Suunto’s Memory Belt to track players during the off season, but durability issues and software limitations forced the team to look elsewhere.
“At certain points in time in the off season they’d FedEx it all back to me,” Barlow said to Sports Illustrated about the Suunto Memory Belt. “I would then have to download the data from the belts onto my computer, and then FedEx the belts back to them.”
Suunto discontinued their device and Real Salt Lake’s transition to TICKR X has been a success. The only players who have been injured during the off season were those who joined the team late and did not benefit from using the technology over an extended period of time.
For the regular season, Real Salt Lake uses STATSport’s Viper Pod, a device worn around the chest which uses four processors, a heart rate sensor, 3-D gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS module to track players’ conditioning levels.
Viper Pod gathers metrics including speed, distance, acceleration, heart rate, stress load and step balance to track a player’s fitness and help prevent injuries during and after the season.
Real Salt Lake are not the only MLS team to use technology tracking hardware. In March we reported that Opta, a leading data analytics company, was involved in some capacity with every Major League Soccer team by providing data which helps monitor player progress.
And just last month eight other MLS teams also partnered with STATSports to use their Viper Pod System. They are now with the likes of European powerhouse teams Barcelona, Juventus and Manchester United to use this technology.
We would not be surprised to see these technologies expanded to other teams and leagues if they help prevent a player from a season, or even career ending injury.
So while it is easy to understand why some might want sports to be left to chance, we can all agree that, if it can be helped, the health of a player should not.