TritonWear is making technology that enables better coaching – which creates superior athletes. Mike Finch, the head coach of W. Ross McDonald Swimming in Brandford, Canada – a head coach in Canada for 18 years building this team from the ground up in the last 8 years resulting in 8 national level athletes – has been using the TritonWear technology for the last 4 months with his team. When Mike was asked if the benefits of TritonWear directly translates to faster swimming, he quickly stated “Without question. If you improve DPS (stroke efficiency), velocity into and out off the walls, breathing patterns, etc, how could you not see that translate to improved performance?”
TritonWear’s unique technology captures 15 key performance metrics from each swimmer and sends the data in real-time to the coach’s tablet. This is done via a small unit that hooks onto the back of a swimmer’s goggle strap and calculates metrics such as splits, DPS, stroke rate, turn time, breath count, and time underwater. The coach can see this data in real-time and analyze the changes over time.
The TritonWear system has been designed to be easy to use and not to add any work to the coach’s busy schedule. If a system takes too long to set up it will just end up in the closet after a coach struggles enough. With the TritonWear system, the coach simply turns on a device and pairs it with a swimmer in their list and that’s the only interaction required for the entire workout – TritonWear does the rest.
World renowned swimming coach Bill Sweetenham has always said ‘Measure everything that can be measured’, “but that was never practical. Now it is. Now we have something that allows anyone to be able to track everything you possibly could” states Mike referring to the TritonWear system.
During practice, each Triton unit calculates over a dozen performance metrics from each athlete. Not only that, the units automatically build out each swimmers workout with zero input from the coach. This is especially helpful for teams like Mike’s utilizing USRPT methods where “with 20 swimmers in the water we will sometimes have 20 different workouts going on so the fact that the system can track exactly what they are swimming and automatically build out each workout is perfect for this type of training.”
Mike is taking on a “Moneyball” approach with the TritonWear technology where he “isolates key variables of a swim (such as turn time, splits, time and distance underwater, etc.) and by focusing on them, you can get a lot further a lot faster.”
“It’s making it possible to do the stuff you just wouldn’t do otherwise. With one or two kids you can get really good long term tracking data but you can’t do it with an entire group unless that’s all your doing or if you bring in an assistant coach or two per lane. So the TritonWear system opens up a whole new level of ability to track in a way that will be helpful to swimmers” states Coach Finch.
“At a training camp a few years ago we had a few test sets where we would have 3 coaches collecting data for 6 kids – there is no way that can be duplicated in practice at home. Now with what you’re doing, we can get better data with one or two coaches covering the practice ” When you look at the costs of having multiple coaches strictly for data collection, this system is orders of magnitudes less expensive in comparison. The TritonWear system is very affordable with multiple payment options available.
Mike’s group of swimmers is extremely diligent about recording their metrics during workouts by writing down splits and stroke counts on waterproof paper, but there is so much data that it is not practical to manually input it into a computer every day which greatly limits its uses. The TritonWear system removes these problems by logging each swimmers practices and performance data for you by uploading it to the cloud and synchronising with each swimmers profile.
Progression tracking over time becomes simple now that all of a swimmers workout data is automatically logged in one location. For example, frequently run test sets can easily be overlaid on the same plot to provide powerful visual feedback of how a swimmer is improving (or not improving) each time that set is run. This gives the coach a large tool kit at their disposal to provide high quality feedback to each athlete to help them stay on top of their goals. Each swimmer has their own profile so they can log in to view their data and gain a better understanding and appreciation for how each metric affects their speed within their sets.
“Swimming can’t get much better just by training harder. Training smarter and making practices more perfect [is what is important] and what you [TritonWear] are doing fits perfectly into that” stated Finch. “What you’re [TritonWear] doing has the potential to make a huge performance difference .”
Check out TritonWear next week at the ASCA World Clinic in Cleveland where they will have a demo running that shows you exactly how it feels to use TritonWear in your practices.
Find out more at www.tritonwear.com.
Brent Hayden, 2012 Olympic bronze medalist.
Swimming News is courtesy of TritonWear, a SwimSwam partner.
While I’m a bit leery about the idea of having a unit on the back of my head, I like the concept a lot. I swim and coach Masters, and am a strong proponent of using data to help my swimmers, and myself, improve in the pool.
Does anyone know what the cost is per device? The site just says there’s a one-time fee for the hardware, but doesn’t specify how much it is.
Unfortunately, it looks to be cost prohibitive for my team (I’m assuming a price of at least $300 per device and then there’s the $180-300 annually for each swimmer profile). If that price came down at all, I’d jump all over it, but looks like I’ll… Read more »
Assuming I didn’t miss anything in the article, does anyone know if the data collection can be done not from the pool? For example, if I was in practice 5 miles from my house and was wearing TritonWear, could my parents conceivably see (in real time) how I was doing in practice? Or is the product made for use within a smaller radius of observers?