Blog

By Jason Dougherty, Athletes’ Performance

A warm-up is about more than just touching your toes or taking a short walk, it’s about preparing your body to move and perform more efficiently during a workout or a game. Using dynamic movements instead of the traditional stretch-and-hold method, also known as static stretching, increases your heart rate and core temperature, activates key muscles you’ll need during activity, and reduces your risk of injury.

Static stretching places muscles in a lengthened state for a long period of time, causing muscles to relax. Research has shown that relaxed muscles pre-workout aren’t ideal for achieving the best results. Unlike static stretching, dynamic stretching involves contracting muscles, not relaxing them, and moving actively between movements. This type of stretching offers more benefits by activating your muscles, improving your range of motion long-term, and preparing your body to perform its best.

In addition to preparing muscles, a dynamic warm-up also helps with muscle balance. For many people, including pro athletes, one muscle group typically overcompensates for another muscle group that isn’t doing its job correctly. The overcompensating muscle group becomes overworked, ultimately leading to injury. A dynamic warm-up helps correct these imbalances, decreasing your injury risk, improving posture and movement efficiency, and enhancing your performance.

The Pillar Preparation and Movement Preparation sections of every miCoach workout are structured to maximize all the benefits listed above. Try the Match/Training Prep plan or one of the miCoach single workouts, such as “Football Practice Prep Short” or “Football Practice Prep Long,” to prepare your body to perform.

At adidas, our focus is to make athletes better through a deep and traditional understanding of what athletes need to perform at their best. Athletes, teams, and coaches are constantly looking for an edge over their competitors and in the elite world of sports every bit counts.

As the paths of sports and technology continue to converge and create performance advantages, adidas and miCoach in collaboration with Athletes’ Performance are leading through innovation. We strive to be at the forefront of technological sporting advances and deliver cutting-edge solutions to help our athletes find that edge. Based on years of research, innovation, and development, we’ve developed miCoach elite, a state-of-the-art, real-time performance monitoring solution for sports teams.

From the outset, the focus of miCoach elite has been to understand and improve on existing performance monitoring solutions and deliver a market-leading product. We travelled the globe, visiting teams on the cutting-edge of utilizing data to improve their performance. From the top football, rugby, basketball, and Australian Rules football teams, we explored how technology was being used to increase performance on the field. This research led to a deep understanding of the performance driven needs of elite teams. We knew that miCoach elite had to be able to:

• Transform large amounts of data into usable information.
• Provide accurate and repeatable real-time insights for training.
• Present an intuitive, user-friendly interface that’s easy to use and manage.
• Track total training impact.
• Be highly portable.
• Be non-invasive for the athlete.
• Be cutting-edge with the latest sensor technologies.   

With these key criteria in mind, miCoach elite developed five components, including:

miCoach elite PLAYER_CELL

The miCoach elite PLAYER_CELL is a small, sophisticated sensing device that captures the key metrics of an athlete’s performance in training and on the field. Metrics collected include speed, distance, heart rate, acceleration, power, and position. Each system will include 30 miCoach elite PLAYER_CELLs.

Techfit elite

Techfit elite is an advanced medium compression base layer that tracks heart rate through integrated sensor technology. The base layer shirt is designed to comfortably integrate the miCoach elite PLAYER_CELL between the shoulder blades without interfering with training or game play.  

miCoach elite base

Each team will be equipped with a miCoach elite base, a portable receiver that collects data from all 30 miCoach elite PLAYER_CELLs and relays it back to an iPad in real time. The base is a rugged, water-resistant, transportable device. 

miCoach elite dash

The miCoach elite dash is a native iOS application built for live monitoring and provides real-time data to trainers and coaches. The application allows trainers and coaches to view the performance of athletes across multiple metrics including speed, distance, acceleration, heart rate, and power.

miCoach elite Web application

Post-analysis of training and games can be performed online through the Web application. Each team has their own customized and secure Web space. Data is analyzed to gain insight into an athlete’s workout intensity, fitness level, and conditioning needs based on the metrics produced during training and games. 

These components are integrated seamlessly to provide one of the most advanced physiological monitoring and management systems available and are already improving the performance of top teams, including A.C. Milan.

As a key development partner, A.C. Milan was the first team to receive the system and integrate it into their sophisticated training regimen. Major League Soccer in the U.S. introduced miCoach elite as a league-wide initiative, enabling all 19 teams in the league to benefit from performance analysis technology. The German National soccer team began implementing the system into their program in preparation for the 2014 World Cup. As an innovation partner, Athletes’ Performance provided their training expertise to give the teams listed above the opportunity to take their training and game performance to the next level.

In the coming months, miCoach elite will continue to be rolled out and utilized by top teams around the globe to get the most out of their athletes and ensure they maintain peak performance. adidas and miCoach will continue to innovate and improve the technology and always push the boundaries of what is possible to bring the biggest possible advantage to our athletes and teams.

Today’s movement will usually appear in the Movement Preparation portion of your Strength and Flexibility workouts. Movement Preparation prepares your body for movement using dynamic movements to activate muscles. This movement will increase your heart rate and core temperature and increase blood flow to your muscles. Perform five to 10 repetitions to help improve your performance and decrease your risk of injury.

Coaching Instructions:

[1] Stand with your legs straight and your hands on the ground in front of you.

[2] Keeping your legs straight and stomach tight, walk your hands forward.

[3] Still keeping your legs straight, walk your feet back up to your hands.

[4] Continue for the remainder of the set.

Coaching Tips: Use short "ankle steps" to walk back up to your hands. That is, take baby steps using only your ankles. Don't use your knees, hips, or quads.

Feel It: Stretching your hamstrings, lower back, glutes, and calves.

Today’s movement will usually appear in the Movement Preparation portion of your Strength and Flexibility workouts. Movement Preparation prepares your body for movement using dynamic movements to activate muscles. This movement will increase your heart rate and core temperature and increase blood flow to your muscles. Perform five to 10 repetitions to help improve your performance and decrease your risk of injury.

Coaching Instructions:

[1] Stand tall with your arms at your sides.

[2] Step back with one foot into a lunge and contract your back glute.

[3] Reach the hand of the back leg overhead and bend your torso toward your other hand.

[4] Return to the starting position.

[5] Repeat the movement with your other leg.

[6] Continue alternating to complete the set.

Coaching Tips: Keep your chest up and do not let your back knee touch the ground.

Feel It: Stretching the hip flexor of your back leg, the glute and groin of your front leg, and the side of your torso.

The UEFA Champions League, one of the most elite and respected tournaments in soccer, kicked off in June. After months of tough matches, hard work, and nail-biting moments that kept fans on the edge of their seats, the finalists are ready to go head-to-head for the championship. Here’s a quick recap of some of the key matches leading up to the championship game.

Quarterfinals

In their second matchup of the quarterfinals, Galatasaray, down 4-0 in aggregate goals, battled back to score three goals in the second half of the second game, but ended up just short of moving on to the semifinals. In the PSG versus Barcelona matchup, there were two tied games. Barcelona advanced on aggregate away goals (Messi scored his 8^th Champions League goal of the season), and advanced for their sixth appearance in the semifinals.

Semifinals

The semifinal matchups consisted of two German teams and two Spanish teams each paired against the other country in the semifinals: Bayern München (GER) versus Barcelona (SPA) and Borussia Dortmund (GER) versus Real Madrid (SPA). In the first game, Bayern München won 4-0 with Thomas Müller scoring twice and recording the fastest sprint of the match at 27.2 kilometers per hour. In the second game, Müller scored the final goal and the team won 3-0 to solidify their spot in the finals. Dortmund squeezed by Real Madrid to win in aggregate goals.

Final

Tune in on May 25, 2013, to see Dortmund take on Bayern München for the championship in Wembley, England.

Train like a UEFA Champions League player with one of miCoach’s soccer training plans.

By Jason Dougherty, Athletes’ Performance

No equipment? No problem. Harness the power of your own body weight. It gives you the freedom to exercise on the go and offers a variety of other benefits, regardless of whether you’re a beginner or a pro. Here are a few of the key benefits of training without equipment:

1. Awareness. Training using your body weight as resistance can heighten your awareness of how your body moves, its range of motion, and your movement patterns. Use these workouts to improve your posture and movements and focus on mobility and stability.
   
2. Convenience. Whether you’re traveling, pressed for time, or don’t have access to a gym, training with your body weight allows you to fit in an effective workout anywhere.
   
3. Efficiency. Eliminating the need to change equipment or move between machines makes it easier to go from one exercise to the next in less time. This swift exercise style provides a new challenge to muscular and cardiovascular strength and endurance.  
   
4. Flexibility. The variety of exercises that use body weight are endless and can be combined to create short or long workouts. These exercises can also be modified to fit anyone’s fitness level from beginner to pro.
   
5. Fun! Mixing up your workouts keeps training fun. Use your creativity to build your own workouts. Not only can breaking up your routine help you fight back against exercise slumps, it can also keep you motivated.
   
6. Scenery. Training without equipment allows you to go the park or out in your yard for a change of scenery and some fresh air.

Start training using your body weight with miCoach non-equipment workouts, which you'll find under Men's and Women's Training areas. 

By Jason Dougherty, Athletes’ Performance

A game of rules and etiquette, tennis is all about tradition. This tradition works well for the game, but there’s room for some modern changes in training. The most successful players use interval training to tackle the toughest tournaments, especially the notorious clay courts at the French Open. Clay courts, like those at the French Open, slow you down, making it even more important to change speeds and recover quickly. Interval training can improve your game whether you’re playing clay, grass, or hard courts. Here’s why.

Matches aren’t just about rushing the net for a volley or racing to return a lob, they also involve waiting for the other player’s serve and slower ball returns without much running. Interval training is essential as part of any tennis training plan because it recreates the natural stop-and-go style of play. Interval training mimics this by using a pair of specific speeds, one slower and one faster. Working between the two intervals allows your body to work hard and fast for a period of time and then rest.

As your body begins to adapt to this training, the rest intervals decrease. Over time, this makes your body stronger and more capable of working harder for longer periods of time with less rest. This translates into quicker movements on the court, shorter recovery time, and the ability to move between plays more efficiently.

Consistently training, both on and off the court, to develop greater efficiency can give you the competitive advantage. You’ll be more capable of fighting the effects of fatigue to remain explosive and ready make a play at any stage of the game, set, or match.

Develop your competitive advantage, condition your body to compete at the highest level, and build your capacity to win with the miCoach tennis cardio plan.