Is Adidas' miCoach Speed Cell making me fitter?
My avatar's stats are up, at least
As I've alluded to in various previous articles, I've been using Adidas' Speed Cell system for the past couple of weeks, so it's time to show how it actually works in the field.
A brief recap is the Speed Cell is a sensor that measures your activity as you run around.
Adidas has initially focused it on football, launching a boot with a slot in the sole for the sensor - the adiZero F50 as used by Lionel Messi and Gareth Bale.
In future, it will also be supported in running shoes, basketball and tennis equipment, but as I'm not playing football (at least on grass), I just attach the sensor to my laces using the provided plastic holder, backed up with tape around my boot.
Of course, I am in no way an elite athlete, but even as someone who regularly motors around the five-a-side football pitch, as well as playing hockey, it's fascinating to get some insight into my performance.
You can see what I got up to over the weekend in a glorious 4-1 defeat of Crewe.
I've successfully used the Speed Cell twice to-date; both times playing hockey.
Operation is very simple. You attach the Speed Cell to your shoe (or into your F50) and then it will record all your movement.
It can store up to seven hours before it starts to record over old information, so when you've finished your game, you slot the provided dongle into your iPhone and hit the sync button. This copies the raw data from your Speed Cell where you view it using one of Adidas' iOS companion apps.
From real to virtualI use miCoach Football, which as well as enabling you to edit the period of activity, displays different attributes, such as distance travelled and top speed.
It also breaks everything down into the four basic colour zones that Adidas uses across all its training sensors - red for high intensity, blue for low (as you can see from the screenshot above).
In terms of the game part of the football app, your activity is used to improve the attributes of the players in your team. You can see below how my most recent game has boosted my avatar.
The red highlighted data on the left is my real world performance and the blue on the right is how my avatar has changed.
More useful perhaps, you can sync the data to Adidas' miCoach online portal, where you can do more complex analysis on it, properly record what you were doing and where, as well as sharing it to Facebook etc, and building out proper training schedules, if you're that way inclined.
