Until now, CrossFit and functional fitness athletes have been repeating the same workout after a given amount of time and measuring if the completion time has decreased or number of reps have increased, as the best way to track their progress. But now, Toronto startup PUSH has come up with a way to eliminate that need. Their digital platform Nexus provides users with crucial analytics and feedback, delivering real-time workout insight to help athletes increase their performance and reduce risk of injury.
Read more Heart Up Smart Glove: Track Your Cardiovascular Fitness During Workouts
Push has been developing technology for elite athletes and their coaches in the weight room for the past five years. Their PUSH Band is a true plug-and-play solution, improving the quality of a training program and ultimately making a better athlete. Their Nexus, which debuted on Kickstarter, is a compression sleeve with a pod resting inside. It is targeted at new and experienced CrossFit athletes who are looking for real-time insights into their workouts, reports Wareable.
With a price tag of $209, the wearable device is set to land in September, providing users with repetition count, automatic exercise detection, cadence, round-by-round splits, a work-to-rest ratio figure and even a power metric which calculates intensity into a raw figure.
PUSH CEO Rami Alhamad, who will be speaking about NEXUS at the WT | Wearable Technologies Conference in Singapore on August 30-31, said they describe Nexus to people as the first GPS running watch for the weight room. “There’s quite a bit of overlap with CrossFit and elite sports, so naturally what happened as we launched the Push Band, and it went into more facilities and more teams, was that we started rubbing shoulders with a lot of the coaches. And we always used to get asked by them, ‘Is it possible for Push to be used in a CrossFit workout?’” he said.
“Constantly getting asked that and seeing coaches use it in a limited sense made us explore it further and want to address that need. There’s nobody really bringing any technology to CrossFit, and there’s a demand for it.”
Read more Wearable Technology: The Latest Trend in Professional Sports
PUSH not only has over a half decade of experience in building technology, it has also put its wearables in the hands of professional teams, such as the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, NBA’s Washington Wizards and MLB’s Detroit Tigers. Also, according to Alhamad, Nexus’ design is very simple; he said his company aims to bring a Strava-like feel to users, whether they’re just beginning in CrossFit or competing in CrossFit Games.
