We are less than two months away from the Opening Ceremonies of the 2016 Rio Olympics. From a tech perspective, numerous storylines are already starting to play out about the execution of the games. But with the athletes themselves, there is an increasing trend of them turning to hi-tech training products and techniques to prepare for the competition of a lifetime.
We are excited to announce that Kelsey Robinson of USA Women’s Volleyball will be consistently writing guest articles for SportTechie from Rio. She will be sharing how technology is impacting her preparation, training, recovery and overall experience as an elite athlete at the Olympics.
Kelsey is a professional volleyball player in Italy for Imoco Valley in which she helped lead the team to the Italian league Championship and was named MVP of the Italian Women’s Volleyball League tournament. The league is regarded as the best in the world and a preferred destination for Olympic volleyball players before the Olympics. Before turning pro, Robinson made her U.S. Women’s National Team debut in 2014 and played at the University of Nebraska where she was the Big Ten Player of the Year in 2013. She also contributed to Team USA’s first ever gold medal at the 2014 World Championships.
Volleyball, like many other sports recently, has gone through a technological evolution in regards to game preparation and athlete recovery. The US Women’s National Team has a 10-person sports science staff that performs a multitude of important services. Monitoring athlete sleep schedules, advising and implementing nutrition plans for the players as well as monitoring practices and making adjustments on the fly based on data is just the beginning of what the staff brings to the table.
From a data gathering perspective, VERT, an inertial measurements unit (IMU), allows players and coaches to see real-time jump height and jump count anywhere, any time. The product, which Kelsey’s team is using during practice, is clipped to a player’s waistband so it doesn’t interfere with play. It records data that is particularly important for Volleyball, with its repeated vertical movements through the course of competition.
In Olympic preparations that involve heavy travel before competition, sleep tracking and jet lag recovery are highly important for making sure the Women’s National Volleyball team is ready for competition. There have been more and more studies on the connections between adequate sleep and athletic performance. This coupled with the continued progression of sleep wearables has given coaching staffs additional information about their athlete’s sleep patterns and potential sleep troubles that previously went undetected.
“Overall, once you become profession your body is your job,” Kelsey Robinson shared with us. “I must be always looking to improve and performance at the highest possible level. As technology has continued to enter Volleyball, it enables me to have clear insight on what I did well and things that I need to continue to improve on. It gives me access to the information vital to my recovery as well as performance, which makes a big difference for any professional athlete.”