Performance

With the launch of the Pacer Pro, Polar is aiming to give dedicated runners all the tech needed to plan, track and analyze their training sessions in a lightweight, wrist-worn package that benefits from powerful processing and long battery life.

Monitoring your performance can help you improve in pretty much any sport, and that includes table tennis. The German-designed Janova paddle was created with this fact in mind, as it tracks your strokes while you play.

While there's no substitute for in-person soccer coaching, a coach can't be watching what every player is doing, all the time. That's where the Jogo system is made to come in, as it continuously tracks players' performance from within their shoes.

The usual suspects, like steroids, are closely monitored in sports but what about other drugs such as psychedelics, not commonly thought to be performance-enhancing? Can LSD improve athletic performance, and if so what does this mean for elite sport?

When training for any sort of physical task, it's important to keep challenging yourself as your skills improve. That's the thinking behind a new adaptive basketball hoop, that gets higher and smaller as users make more shots.

You may remember the smart jacket that Google and Levi's launched under the Project Jacquard umbrella – an initiative to add extra smarts to clothing. Now there's a new Jacquard product on sale in the form of smart insoles developed with Adidas.

While there are already performance-tracking watches that count swimmers' laps and strokes, they typically don't provide feedback on the quality of those strokes. A new device known as the SmartPaddle, however, is designed to do just that.

Being a college lecturer – or at least, being a good one – involves more than just speaking at a podium. You also have to engage the students, and a new dual-camera system is designed to assess just how well instructors are doing so.

​Competitive swimmers certainly like to track their performance, often using devices such as swim watches – the problem is, the athletes have to stop to look at those things. A Vancouver-based startup is out to address that problem, with its head-up display (HUD) Form Swim Goggles.

​Ordinarily, when employers wish to assess the performance of employees, they have them fill out questionnaires or take part in interviews. A new (and perhaps somewhat Orwellian) system is claimed to be more objective and thus more accurate, however, by utilizing smartphones and fitness trackers.

A study has found increased volumes of a certain species of gut bacteria in marathon runners following the completion of an event. This species was found to metabolize exercise-induced lactate into propionate, a compound that may increase exercise capacity.

Many mountain bikers already use smartphone apps to track basic ride metrics such as route/distance travelled, elevation gain, and speed. A group of four Danish cyclists wanted to take things significantly further, however, so they created TrailSense.