As the United States women’s national team advances further into the knockout stage with last night’s win against Columbia, the U.S. must cope with the grueling World Cup process of having games every few days. This time around, the team has three days rest before their quarterfinal matchup against No. 16 China PR.
Wired’s Megan Logan interviewed the team’s strength and fitness coach Dawn Scott to learn about one of her tricks of the trade—wearables.
Scott has implemented Polar wearables for every member of the team during training. For Scott, it helps to gather certain data so that the coaching staff can optimize a training session based upon a player’s level of fitness or positional needs.
“The key factors I focus on are time and load in certain heart rate zones based on an individual’s maximum heart rate, then from the GPS the amount of high intensity running (running above a certain speed threshold), as well as total player load (an accumulation of the impacts in the three planes of motion), the work rate for individuals as well as an analysis of the speed profile for each player,” Scott said in the interview.
While Scott did not reveal the exact model that the U.S. team is using, based upon the features that Scott enjoys, the team most likely uses the V800 GPS sports watch.
With a retail price of $519.95, the watch comes with a slew of built-in features such as a GPS, a heart rate sensor, a speed sensor, etc. But most notably the V800 has a “smart coaching” feature that most of Polar’s other watches do not have. This allows someone like Scott to access how a player’s fitness and running performance is developing, how strenuous a training session is on a certain player’s body and how much rest a player’s body needs, among other features.
After the 2014 Men’s World Cup in Brazil, it was revealed that one of the keys to Germany’s success was their use of Adidas wearables. The U.S. women will hope that using similar technology will help them hoist their first World Cup since 1999.