Millions of plodding, athletically challenged, wannabe jocks scour YouTube clips for coaching tips, enroll in sports lessons from local pros and buy bizarre and, frankly, embarrassing instructional aids.
The latest trend in sporty self-improvement: sensors that analyze your physical form and give instant feedback. These consumer devices - packed with teensy accelerometers, gyroscopes and Bluetooth transmitters - promise to track the speed of your golf swing, the shape of your tennis stroke and the backspin on your jump shot.
I’m a sad-to-middling weekend athlete, and yet I like to imagine that I can be better. I wondered: Could technology actually help? I tested a few products to see.
One must acknowledge a fundamental weakness with these sports sensors: Simply knowing, say, how fast you swing your 7-iron does not at all translate into hitting a golf ball straight and true.
Improving in an athletic endeavor requires a collection of tiny, subtle adjustments.
Tweaks to your stance, rhythm, balance, alignment, fluidity. Only a trained eye will be able to watch the whole motion and identify its weak link.
Still, while they didn’t immediately launch me onto the front of a Wheaties box, some of these sensor products are useful. Herewith, my rankings on the country club ladder, ordered from worst to first:
Babolat Play Pure Drive tennis racket, $399
There’s something pleasingly sci-fi about a tennis racket with a mini-USB port hidden in its handle.
Pop open the Babolat’s butt cap and it’s hard not to feel you’re peering into the future of sports. The promise is obvious: Play a set or two, plug the racket into your laptop, and download an instant, detailed analysis of your performance. I couldn’t wait to take this thing out for a spin.
Sadly, the reality was far less fun. Despite repeated efforts, I couldn’t get it to work. Scads of online reviews confirmed my suspicions: The Babolat is buggy. Though my computer recognized the racket, it failed to locate any data from my on-court sessions. I called up Babolat, which acknowledged the bug, promised me it’s working on a long-term fix and gave me instructions for a short-term workaround. I followed those instructions closely, yet the racket still failed.
Even if the Babolat had performed smoothly, I see a core problem with its model. What if you prefer a racket with a larger or smaller head? What if you’d like to be able to swap in, midset, a backup racket with a different string tension? Or what if, heaven forbid, you break a string? Because the sensor is buried within the handle, and the handle is nontransferable, you’re forced to play with this particular $400 racket if you wish to record your data. Seems like a fatal flaw. And one that could be easily obviated - as demonstrated by our next competitor.
Zepp golf and tennis sensor, $149.95
The Zepp can be used - in tandem with various mounting accessories - to analyze a tennis shot, a baseball swing or a golf stroke. I first tried it with tennis. It slips into a rubbery housing that stretches over the butt of any racket, even a cheap one. The sensor doesn’t get in the way of your grip. I soon forgot it was there.
The Zepp offered some actual results. I easily paired it with my phone using Bluetooth. The Zepp tennis app immediately downloaded a snapshot of the set I’d played.
There were interesting nuggets in the data. The Zepp tallied 254 shots over the hour I was on the court, of which 58 percent were forehands and 35 percent were backhands. It showed that I struck my groundstrokes with consistent power over the course of the set, while my serve lost oomph toward the end as I got tired and my shoulder grew grumpy.
But I wasn’t convinced the details were totally accurate. The Zepp said 47 percent of my forehands were sliced, which couldn’t be right - I know I hit all but a few of these strokes either flat or with topspin. It also claimed I hit only 16 serves over the course of the set, which is simply impossible. I hit nearly that many in a single long game that featured multiple deuces.
Zepp acknowledged the flaw and said it’s working on better serve recognition.
At a golf driving range, I slipped the Zepp into a mount that lets you affix it to your golf glove. Then I hit a slew of balls, alternating between a driver and a 7-iron. The sensor tells you your club speed (mine ranged from 77 mph to 103 mph as I cycled through differing levels of frustration and physical anger) and compares the tempo of your backswing to your follow through (mine mostly hovered around 2.5:1, meaning it took me 2.5 times longer to draw the club back than to swing it forward).
It also creates a beautiful animation of your swing, which you can rotate to view from different angles. This was the most intriguing feedback for me, as it let me compare the plane of my swing to the ideal plane that Zepp suggests. According to the sensor, I swing too horizontally (like a merry-go-round) and should get more vertical (like a Ferris wheel). By watching the animated playback of my swing immediately after each drive, I nudged myself toward a more upright swing plane.
The problem: These more vertical swings produced terrible results - wicked slices that veered off my club into the side netting of the driving range. Perhaps a seasoned golfer with good form and self-knowledge could use the Zepp to experiment with nuanced adjustments. But for a duffer like me (personal best round: 106), the Zepp’s feedback was like sparks thrown on damp kindling.
I didn’t know how to use its suggestions, and I wanted the help of a golf pro to spot basic flaws in my form. Perhaps in concert with some human instruction, the Zepp could be a handy device. The coach could point out my best swing, recording its data on the Zepp, and then I could check future swings against that ideal when I practiced alone. By itself, the Zepp wasn’t enough to improve my game.
3Bays GSA Pro, $181.30
This slick little sensor didn’t interfere with my grip. It’s mounted to a fixed spot on the base of the golf club. To me, that seemed likely to offer more consistent results than the Zepp approach, in which you wear the sensor on your hand and then tell the device the approximate angle of your grip.
I loved the ability to follow through on a drive, step over to my phone and immediately watch my swing re-created in vivid animation - with stats on my club-head speed, impact force, tempo and so forth. The GSA Pro seemed trustworthy: When I purposely sped up or slowed down my swing, or changed its arc, the device recognized the difference.
My favorite feature: The sensor informed me I was almost always hitting the ball with the club face too open (instead of square on) and that my swing path was too outside the ball.
This is genuinely useful and actionable knowledge. But again, putting it into play would be much easier if I had a pro by my side to coach me through the necessary adjustments, instead of guessing how best to achieve them.
94Fifty Smart Sensor basketball, $249.95
I had high hopes for the 94Fifty, which embeds sensor technology and a Bluetooth transmitter inside a standard basketball.
The ball - yes, it’s a $249.95 basketball - can measure how fast you dribble, how hard you dribble, how quickly you release a shot after receiving a pass, the arc of that shot and the backspin on the ball each time you shoot it.
You wouldn’t use the 94Fifty during a game (the ball won’t know which player did what, and it can’t automatically switch between analyzing ball handling and shooting), but the accompanying app is perfectly designed to lead you through individual drills. I tried it out with friends before our weekly Wednesday evening game.
The sensor seems highly accurate. It tallied my dribbles, told me the precise revolutions per minute on my jump shot and recognized whether that shot more closely resembled a rainbow or a clothesline. As a diagnostic exercise, this seemed hugely useful: It was evident that everybody in my game was dribbling the ball with inadequate force, shooting at too flat an angle and not launching the ball with enough backspin - all of which rang true. Further proof: The better shooters in my game had the highest arcs and the most spin.
ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 04/14/2014