The Australian Women’s cricket team will be hoping technology will give them the winning edge when they kick off their Ashes campaign after using the Apple Watch with an activity monitoring app to optimise their performance.
Using an app developed by the Australian Institute of Sport, the team has been able to track and share their all-day activities so coaches can monitor and modify their workload.
The information is gathered by the Apple Watch in real time and includes training load, heart rate, mood and sleep data.
The coaches then use this data to make meaningful modifications to help each player reduce their injury risk and enhance performance.
Coaches are able to use a real-time dashboard to monitor player data from anywhere even when the team is travelling.
“Apple Watch delivers highly accurate and instantaneous data, which has helped us overcome previous challenges where player data reached us too late to be leveraged,” said Cricket Australia’s David Bailey, performance coach.
“Now we can analyse player data in real time and put interventions in place to manage player fatigue and mitigate the risk of injury.
“Since the team has worn Apple Watch and shared activity, we’ve seen players become more accountable and engaged in the training process, more motivated by the data, and have more fun along the way.”
The app developed by the Australian Institute of Sport to offer complete athlete management and offer coaches powerful data tools to make informed decisions.
The Apple Watch app can measure training load and fatigue to reduce the possibility of overtraining and reduce the risk of injury.
“We’ve always known that speed, breadth and accuracy would be critical if data was going to make a difference to a team’s performance,” said Australian Institute of Sport’s Ian Morrow, applied technology & innovation project manager.
“We also knew we could get performance benefits by having athletes obsessed with their data, and Apple Watch has helped us do this.
“The ability for the AIS to utilise the powerful sensors within Apple Watch gave us an opportunity to deliver on our ambition to innovate within performance management and create something literally game changing.”
Players are now wearing the Apple Watch all day and night to provide a more comprehensive data set.
And the ability to share their activity rings with each other also keeps them motivated and feeling like they’re part of the team.
“Within elite sports there’s often not huge differences or margins between the best teams in the world, so being precise and insights-led with the way that you train can make a huge difference when you’re on the field,” said Meg Lanning, Australian captain.
“Data is not only motivating from a personal perspective, it can create a competitive edge as well.
“Using a device as personal as an Apple Watch has enabled everyone in the squad to communicate better and take ownership of their own training preparation, giving them a clear understanding of what they’re doing and why. It’s brilliant.”