How Personal Training Apps Have Forever Changed Sports
Many of us looked to the locker room for the pregame and halftime motivational speeches so eloquently delivered by our coaches. The whistle stopped our plays on the soccer field and the sound of the starter gun launched us off the diving block. If you needed to make weight for a high school wrestling match, you were ordered to eat a steak and chase it down with a milkshake. If the coach wanted you to be more agile on the basketball court, you’d perform defensive slides up and down the court and other short-circuit drills. The stopwatch timed you, kept track of you, and was your competition during the 100 fly.
But now we’ve entered a new era—and sports are more exciting than ever. Instead of the handheld stopwatch, we have the Fitbit, the iWatch, and various other devices that can track a person’s heart rate, distance, and other valuable sports data analytics. Trainers and coaches can provide real-time, virtual feedback, and athletes can compete internationally without ever leaving home. Sports training apps have pulled down barriers to entry and opened athletics to a global audience regardless of socio-economic status or birthplace. Anyone can access personalized workouts, record their progress, and join a social community thanks to sports training apps. Developers also see many benefits from the valuable sports data analytics that are already improving recruitment processes, the fan experience, and an athlete’s training. Despite how some people see technology as a detriment to physical fitness, the opposite has proved true: Integrating technology makes workouts more effective. With so much ground still to break, is creating your own fitness app just one bright idea away?
Community for Individualized Sports
Whether you run, cycle, or swim, sports training apps have transformed individual exercise into thriving online communities. Peloton and other similar apps let athletes participate in group classes with live instructors, adding accountability to a user’s fitness goals. Apps like Strava create healthy competition and camaraderie, allowing users to share new routes and encourage each other on achieving personal bests.
From a data perspective, Strava and similar crowd-sourced apps are particularly exciting. The individual user’s analytics are now part of the greater sports data analytics world. Event organizers can better design racecourses or create virtual relays, augmenting the traditional athletics competition with data-driven preferences to increase participation and involve local athletes in the planning. Virtual races boomed in popularity during the pandemic, but there exists so much potential to make competitions more engaging through sports apps.
The Love of the Game—Next Level
With sports recruiting apps, the gap between an athlete’s performance showcase and social media has closed. The recruitment process has evolved beyond a cell phone’s video footage being sent via email to a university’s athletic department. Now, recruiters can log in to platforms such as CoachUp and Hudl to watch performance reels and match up players against one another without stepping foot onto a high school football field across the country.
These apps produce sports data analytics that can predict, measure, and improve an athlete’s output all from a mobile device. Not only has the recruitment process changed, but its physical structure too—the office is everywhere and anywhere, 24/7.
These apps connect athletes with coaches, allowing them to get personalized, one-on-one support and training. Athletes and their parents can contact coaches virtually to track training, receive feedback, and conduct other valuable sports data analytics. From an equity standpoint, sports training apps that remove location as a requirement to elite recruiting are truly game-changers.
No longer does someone have to attend the right school or live in the city with the best youth programs. While the idea of creating your own fitness app started as a continuation of the at-home workout video craze of the ‘80s and ‘90s, analytics presents an exciting future. Imagine the capability of a coach to search for point guards or midfielders or left tackles that meet certain criteria to fit their team. Algorithms could better predict a particular athlete’s performance in hypothetical roster scenarios, simulating a season to help coaches and athletes make better-informed decisions.
Resolving Privacy Concerns
Of course, one of the first concerns anyone will raise about a global recruiting sports training app is privacy. While sports data analytics have enormous potential for transforming college and professional sports, successful apps will undoubtedly be the ones that can safeguard their users’ data. No matter how brilliant your idea is for a sports app, you need to make sure you’re choosing the right partners for development who will prioritize industry-leading security practices and build an infrastructure that protects its databases. When designed well, sports apps can both provide valuable data for analytics and keep the privacy of minors as a foremost priority.
What’s Next? The Future of Sports Training Apps
When Roger Bannister set out to break the four minute mile record, he approached it as a scientific problem. Great research went into his training, pacing, and methodology, allowing him to shatter a barrier that had once seemed unbreakable. Certainly, sports data analytics will continue to drive the pursuit of new records. The question remains as to whether the sports world will accept the assistance of new technology.
In 2019, when Nike’s analytics helped Eliud Kipchoge break two hours in the marathon—another running feat that had never been done before—his world record didn’t count due to the pacesetters and other technological advantages not typically present in a road race. A future consideration for sports training apps may well be the approval of a sport’s governing body. Will a sport’s official federation or a high-profile league allow athletes to use an app or real-time data analytics mid-competition?
As tech-native generations get older and assume positions of leadership, it’s possible the standards for fair competition will move in the direction of technology. Already we’ve seen fundamental shifts in strategy for baseball, football, and basketball based on sports data analytics—everything from the rise of on-base percentage as a valuable metric to the increased prevalence of three-point shooting. Solving problems with analytics will continue to improve how games are played.
The Integration of E-Sports
We recognize that athlete no longer just means someone who plays physical sports. Hand-eye coordination and reaction time value just as much in the competitive world of e-sports. The boom of e-sport popularity in the past decade has raised an important consideration that anyone creating their own fitness app should perhaps broaden the definition to include digital fitness. Mental and emotional components matter in both physical sports and e-sports, and we’re likely to see future movements that further merge the two.
Future sports training apps may allow athletes to simulate their performance or try new drills in a virtual environment before practicing the exercises in the real world. Apps like Armcare already monitor an athlete’s performance to suggest personalized training, but a fully virtual training experience could allow athletes to practice with their teammates even when injured or visualize a maneuver they don’t yet have the fitness for in real life. A positive mindset may prove just as valuable as data analytics in the future of sports.
Fantasy Sports
Even outside of sports, for app developers, virtual reality is the new horizon. Fans will have more opportunities than ever before to participate in sports. Sports data analytics are already immensely valuable to fantasy sports and sports betting. The more users can obtain data themselves without needing to wait on experts to publish stats, the more involved they will feel in the statistics of the game. Future apps that enhance an individual fan’s analysis and simulation of player scenarios will likely draw strong followings. Virtual training, recruiting, and games will further develop fans’ loyalties and commitments.
Name, Image, and Likeness
It’s already a big deal in the sports world to feature on the cover of Madden, but future NIL deals may also include avatars or videos of an athlete. Developers creating their own fitness apps could think ahead to integrations with social media and VR platforms as well as how users might monetize their particular plays or achievements. Anticipating the growth of the entire sports industry will serve developers and companies in their creations. Even if TikTok’s popularity fades in the future, it’s hard to imagine viral sports videos ever falling out of style. Apps that can reward users for uploading valuable content may quickly gain traction.
How to Get Started
Sports data analytics is an industry in and of itself with the advent of 5G and the Metaverse. The future of sports has been forever changed, from scouting to signing deals, and the internet is a partner every step of the way.
Mobile and web app consulting services provided at Soluntech are paramount for entrepreneurs looking to diversify their portfolios. Sports training apps are a booming and lucrative industry. Soluntech schedules pre-consultations to gauge whether or not they are the right fit for your vision—we specialize in low-code development and app auditing. As much as we love dreaming about the future of sports, we like taking action even more.
Soluntech publishes its case studies online for potential clients to have access to examples of completed projects. Consider a health care worker who is an ice hockey fan, and doesn’t care much for sports data analytics; this individual’s insight into first aid care and support could be vital to an app catering to the millions of people who use sports training apps. The sports data analytics industry has opened up endless doors for app opportunities. Health, shopping, food and beverage, finance, and more industries will be affected by the creation of new apps.
When working with a custom web developer like Soluntech, ethical and privacy dilemmas can be considered and resolved. That is the great benefit of building an app from the ground up with a professional team—each angle is assessed and analyzed; each question is raised and answered. Now that the industry of sports data analytics is globalized, Soluntech’s bilingual team can develop apps that cater to multiple language speakers across the world. Schedule your free pre-consultation today.