Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Big Data Analytics Can Be the Next Step for High Performance Sports


Why have Big Data solutions been disseminated to improve sports performance?
After its use in laboratories, businesses and research institutes, always in order to improve medical procedures and find the cure of diseases or to fix financial issues, the analysis of large volumes of data through super processors had its benefits also lent to the sports industry.

Examples are diverse and reach such modalities as tennis, volleyball, basketball, soccer, martial arts and baseball. Among the reasons that explain why, in recent years, the use of this technology has become so common in sports.
Real-time performance data collection (such as heart rate during a start-up, pulse height, muscle strength decrease over exercise time, scam level) allows you to understand much more quickly and accurately what the physical limits of each Athlete, as well as which points should be improved; This same monitoring of data during a training allows physical and technical coaches to visualize, within minutes of a play, what groundbreaking mistakes have been made, which positioning failures gave way to an opponent's counterattack, among other tactical diagnostics; The ability to unravel the adversary's playing characteristics is also an indisputable advantage in high-performance competitions. Careful analysis, for example, of the characteristic movements of a tennis player's feet before executing a forehand or of the avoidance vices of a boxer during his fights may reveal weaknesses of rivals imperceptible to the naked eye, ensuring a much more effective preparation.

Big Data Solutions in Sport
Soccer
After the success of the German team in 2014, several clubs also started to incorporate data mining in the preparation of their athletes. One of them is Bayern Munich, which has bet on Big Data solutions to understand perfectly the kinetic energy involved in the movements of its players during training in order to reduce injuries. Such a system can warn the physical trainer that a player has already suffered an injury the last time he had to do a certain exercise, for example, and this allows the adaptation of the training routine according to the limitations or needs of each athlete In Brazil, GrĂªmio is one of the clubs that rely on Analytics to optimize performance.

Volleyball
The Brazilian team of volleyball is one of the pioneers in the use of Big Data in the sports sphere. Inside the gyms of the Volleyball Development Center, a kind of "HQ" of national volleyball, in the city of Saquarema, several cameras were installed at strategic points of the blocks, allowing the visualization of practically every possible angle. In addition, discrete electronic equipment is attached to athletes' bodies, allowing constant monitoring of heart rate, evaluation of contractions and muscle strains in each pass or cut, checking of impulse levels, among other analyzes. The response time of the players in front of the opponent's moves and the collective movement on the court are also recorded.

MMA
Neither MMA has escaped the competitive advantage gained through automated solutions. The most important athletes in the segment, such as Anderson Silva, Rodrigo Minotauro and Jon Jones, have used specialists in Big Data Analytics to develop descriptive, diagnostic and predictive analyzes of their training and the performances of opponents.

Tennis
Tennis found descriptive analysis a different function from the usual: transforming the experience of watching a Grand Slam in a rich process of interaction and visualization of multiple angles of the dispute, in real time. During the tournament, a gigantic amount of data is captured, analyzed and shared with the millions of fans who are watching the game of the grandstand or on TV (through apps that can be accessed from any smartphone). The tool combines data extracted from no less than 39 million sources, generating information collected from the last 5 years of different Grand Slams. The product of all this technology is the availability of the complete history of performance of each player, his or her possible weapons against opponents and what he or she can use to neutralize them.

Yes, sports have a lot to do with analytics, and for other viewers, analytics can sound fun if you think in that way!

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