How to Improve Athletic Performance with XSENSOR’s Intelligent Insoles

Individual athletic performance is vital to how teams perform. It’s essential for university funding and attracting the best talent. It’s critical for creating an all-star team that will take you to the playoffs, the championship game, and the Olympics.

Most importantly, ensuring your athletes are always safe and doing their best is critical. This is why athletic coaches, directors, physical therapists, and even massage therapists center athletes in everything they do. They need data to do that, which is where Intelligent Insoles from XSENSOR come in.

To understand the extreme value of performance insoles, we must first examine what athletic performance data is and what forms it can take. Then, we’ll talk about performance data measurement systems and how they work before illuminating the path to better athletic performance today.

What Is Athletic Performance Data?

Performance data is what it sounds like—science-backed information about what’s going on when an athlete performs their skill set. Each person moves uniquely, whether it’s a golf swing or a three-pointer. The way their feet leave the ground and touch back down, plant in one place, pivot or jump, or hit full speed—these are all fingerprints of the individual.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to pinpoint these movements with the naked eye. Even video slowed down can’t help you in many cases, where an athlete moves too fast or critical activities happen on too small a scale.

Without the right tools to measure performance, athletic gurus often find themselves constantly reworking experiments to try and answer crucial questions. They need help determining the proper footwear or assigning the right physical therapy exercises. Performance enhancement languishes, and budgets get blown. It’s not good.

Before we discuss how to fix that, let’s consider the two main types of data you can capture with performance insoles.

Types of Performance Data Measurement

If you want to see better performance in your athletes, then pressure mapping and gait analysis are your two best friends. These two sensor-based capabilities can dramatically increase performance by gathering both data types.

Pressure Mapping

Pressure mapping uses sensors to determine areas of high and low pressure inside the shoe. This informs you where the athlete places most of their weight, such as on the heel or the toes. If unevenly or incorrectly distributed, it can waste energy, throw them off balance, or increase the chance of injury.

You can correct their stance and movements using that data, then test again using sensor-generated data. This also helps you choose the correct shoes and supportive accessories for each athlete.

Gait Analysis

Similarly to pressure mapping, gait analysis uses sensors triggered by movement. These create a picture of what happens as an athlete lifts feet and places them back down, moving from step to step. From a basketballer’s leap to a tennis player’s pivot, each motion generates a unique data fingerprint to increase a player’s game considerably.

You’re probably curious about how data gathering works, so let’s discuss it.

How Performance Measurement Systems Work

The most accurate and reliable performance measurement systems rely on advanced technology, but their operation is simple. Here’s how they work, step by step:

• Place motion insoles inside the athlete’s shoes. Ensure a good fit and that they don’t bother the athlete, which could indicate that you’ve got the wrong size.
• Head down to the track, field, or court with a device running software linked to the insoles.
• Ask the athlete to perform their regular tasks. Note: a good motion insole should be wireless, communicating its sensor data by Wi-Fi to nearby devices so it doesn’t limit the athlete’s range of motion.
• Observe data as it comes in, showing exactly what the athlete is doing in real time.
• Analyze the data and images to see where areas of high and low pressure occur so that you can adjust these as necessary with footwear and drills.
• Rerun tests whenever you need to assess patient progress and continue to improve their performance.

Make sure that when you use such systems, they are reliable. Getting the wrong data can be as bad as having no data.

Using Data to Take Performance to the Next Level

The correct data allows you to improve athletic performance. You can see exactly what’s happening inside an athlete’s shoe or how they place each foot while running. You can correct for minute imbalances in their stance or slight imperfections in their footwear. Data gives you the power to refine athletic performance like never before.

The wrong data, on the other hand, works against you at every step. If you don’t have the information you need, it’s hard to make a correct diagnosis (if not impossible). This leads to ineffective treatments for injuries and drills that don’t make as big a difference as they should. It also makes it more difficult for you to educate athletes about their own needs. Adding unreliable equipment with product design deficiencies is the nail in the coffin.

Instead, you need performance-tracking systems that produce consistent laboratory and field results, delivering instantaneous information.

Ready to get started? XSENSOR can help.

XSENSOR Systems to Help You Improve Performance Today

At XSENSOR, your success is our goal. Every sensor-based system we design is geared toward one outcome: gathering the most detailed possible data of any given movement, from the shortest step to the longest leap. Athletes whose coaches and program directors work with XSENSOR’s Intelligent Insoles see better performance without fail.

Want to learn more about how our Intelligent Insoles can help you? Our team is ready to help, so contact us today.