Technology in sport preventing athlete injury says expert

Speaking exclusively with T3, Nike's Paul Winsper has claimed technology in sport is helping to prevent athletes from picking up injuries

Fitness and training technologies help prevent athletes becoming injured as well as improving their performance possibilities once recovered, industry experts have told T3.

With the sport and exercise markets adopting individual performance gadgets with increased vigour throughout 2011, the fitness and wellbeing tech sector has risen to prominence with professional and enthusiastic amateurs alike now able to monitor and enhance their personal performances with the assistance of specially designed gadgets.

Far from simple training aids, however, industry insiders have told T3 that a number of technologies introduced into sport are allowing athletes to avoid serious injury and enabling them recover quicker from the knocks they inevitably pick up.

“I think technology and gadgets are actually helping modern day athletes stay healthy,” Paul Winsper the SPARQ Performance Director at Nike told T3 in an exclusive interview. “We were always trying to look at the next best thing to help recover our athletes.”

“By quantifying things on the field through GPS, like how far did you run, accelerometry, how many accelerations and decelerations an athlete made and their heart rate fluctuations, it gives us the ability to not ask players to do more, but to tell coaches to do less.

“We don't use technology to tell players to do more, we actually use it in a way to say 'you've actually done enough, and you should maybe do something else'.”

Have you adopted fitness gadgets in to your work outs and training regimes? If so let us know which products you are putting to use and how you are getting on with them via the comments box below.