PUSH into the FUTURE
New technology from Toronto-based company targets training efficiency
A Toronto sports-technology company, partly owned by the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, aims to help revolutionize the way sports coaches around the world both train and evaluate topend athletes.
Its innovation? A small device that straps onto the wrist or waist, or any training-room weight bar. With an accompanying digital app.
In the NFL, for instance, embracing such technology could one day result in completely reassessing the way draft prospects at this time of year are gauged and analyzed.
This year’s NFL draft is only a couple days away (Thursday to Saturday). League talent evaluators, devout fans and media alike again, this winter and spring, obsessed over prospects’ times in the 40-yard dash, or number of bench-press reps they could push, and other ultimately imprecise or subjective means of determining position-specific speed, agility and power.
Should we consider alternate, better and far more specific measures? Yes, says Rami Alhamad, founder and CEO of PUSH, a fast-rising sports-tech company of 16 employees based in downtown Toronto.
One of the top quarterbacks in the NFL, whose name PUSH is not at liberty to reveal, already has been testing himself “on a weekly basis for the past season,” Alhamad said in an interview.
In addition to the 49ers, with whom Alhamad developed this technology over many months a few years ago, other PUSH clients around the world include NBA teams, Major League Baseball teams, Canadian Sport Institute, U.S. universities, prominent soccer clubs, Australian rules football and the Irish Rugby Union.
“We have it in the hands of over 30 pro teams worldwide,” Alhamad said, “and many more athletes across private training centres and facilities, including ones that train athletes for the (NFL) Scouting Combine.”
The only U.S. pro sports team Alhamad is contractually permitted to reveal is the product co-owning and co-developing 49ers.
“In the U.S., I find that across the major leagues the top teams are using technology, and they’re incredibly protective at this point. This industry is still in the nascent stage.
“We do have NFL team clients and individual clients. We don’t really target individual athletes. We target coaches. Our technology and software is really geared toward coaches.”
What piqued the interest of the unnamed NFL quarterback?
“His primary reason was to look at and study different throwing techniques, and variations of the output based on each technique,” said Alhamad, who has university degrees in mechatronics engineering (from Waterloo) and engineering systems and computing (from Guelph).
Alhamad founded PUSH in 2013, with the primary goal of helping to tackle “one of the biggest unresolved problems” facing coaches with regard to their athletes. That is, as worded in PUSH marketing materials: “How to ensure that what I’m doing at the gym is improving my athlete’s performance without exposing them to higher risk of injury.”
There are actually two PUSH products: The thin device named PUSH Band, which is about half as small as a smartphone and straps on with Velcro; and the PUSH Vital, an athlete readiness monitoring system. Together these products can allow a coach hundreds or even thousands of miles from dispersed athletes to monitor, in real time, the effectiveness of their workouts.
“What’s inside of the Band is an accelerometer and a gyroscope. It’s basically just measuring movement,” Alhamad said.
Then, it’s simple math. Well, simple if you didn’t bomb out of engineering, as I did a generation ago.
“Power is work over time, and work is force times distance,” Alhamad said. “So we have all the key elements to calculate power.”
A former rugby player and still a devout runner, the 32-year-old said he “thought it would be awesome to combine my two passions — sports and technology — and be able to build motion sensors that quantify the weightroom environment for athletes and coaches. Because throughout my training I’ve always had to go off my gut feel of how I’m doing, and that’s pretty much how everybody does it to this day — not really getting any objective data.”
Or, more to the point, relevant data.
Eventually, Alhamad said, he’d like to see PUSH’s products be aimed at all who are physically active, not just elite athletes, as now.
In the short term, he hopes to open more coaches’ and talent evaluators’ eyes as to what they instead should, or at least could, be physically asking of prospective players, in order to better (a) project their on-field abilities and (b) physically prepare them.
“Why do you need to be so good at running the 40-yard dash?” Alhamad said. “How often in football do you ever run 40 yards at full speed?”
The answer, for most players, is almost never.
“One of the biggest frustrations I’ve heard from NFL coaches,” Alhamad said, “is you have all these training facilities at college programs that are preparing athletes for the combine, not for the NFL.
“With modern sports technology we can so much better quantify athlete training performance.”