Everyone knows the impact that technology has on every area of our society. Its progress is unstoppable, and increasingly can be seen in high performance sport with the use of different apparatus, software and apps. With these advances we have data at our fingertips, which in the past was only possible to obtain in sophisticated labs. This information is accessible to everyone at comparatively little expense and means that virtually anyone who wants to, has the tools to start training at a high level.
Among these advances are the mobile applications (available in IOS) MySprint and MyJump2, developed by Spanish and French researchers – one of them being Dr. Pedro Jiménez Reyes, a national trainer of athletics and professor at the Faculty of Sports Sciences of the UCAM. These applications, created to be used by anyone thanks to its totally user-friendly design, take advantage of the mobile phone camera to record the athlete and provide different data on the user’s running or jump.
In the case of MySprint, the application allows you to know the times achieved by an athlete in a distance of only thirty meters, simply by placing cones five metres apart. The app then shows the momen at which the athlete reaches each cone by recording the runner. Thus, by running a mere thirty meters at maximum intensity and with only six cones and the app, the trainer can have access to tremendously useful information about the athlete’s performance regarding power, force and speed. This data can be vital in optimising these three variables, and needless to say, with a precision that has been validated scientifically.
As for MyJump2, an application created by Dr. Carlos Balsalobre -Universidad Europea de Madrid, it is an incredibly useful app which can be used in the vast majority of sports, as it calculates with scientific precision height, strength, speed, power, ground contact time, reactive force index, leg symmetry and force-velocity profile simply by recording the athlete’s jump and selecting the exact moment in the recording when the athlete leaves the ground and the time when he makes contact with it again, as well as the power used in the jump and the height of the spring board (if used).
These tools, along with other cost-effective tools such as «encoders» or contact platforms, are a great help for coaches in order to obtain maximum information about the athlete and his/her development during the season. They are extremely simple to use and they are a step forward for both sport and science and all of this thanks to the technological advances that we are living through nowadays.