David Beckham uses KTH invention
Nowadays both football players and their trainers have workloads and pulse rates under control – thanks to Activio, the Swedish health control project from KTH. This got started in 2003 and was developed jointly with the Swedish national football team. Today this technology is used daily by football team Real Madrid, the recent Spanish league masters, in their training.
In the middle of Real Madrid´s large training gym is a huge data screen. This projects the pulse rate of every player who is training there, during all their exercises, thanks to the Activio system. This has been a boon to David Beckham, and many other team members who have had injuries, as they are hard at work rehabilitating themselves – and the pulse rate is a crucial element in that process, so as to make the training as efficient as possible, and yet not too strenuous.
One of the main parts of the Activio system is a ”pulse recording band” round the chest of every team member; this band then transmits his pulse frequency wirelessly to a computer up to 200 metres away. Each team member´s pulse rate is displayed in real-time on the large screen in the form of an intensity scale, much like the speedometer on a car.
– Activio´s pulse rating system does help us a lot, says Dr Luis Serratosa, who is Chief Physiologist at Real Madrid. Both the players and the trainers like it. This is a kind of challenge to the players – each one of them being able to check his own effort continuously, I mean!
om Magnergård, KTH Alumni member and one of the fathers of Activio, appreciates Real Madrid having chosen the system for their systematical quality training programmes.
– A mark of quality – it opens up for valuable exchanges of future medical knowledge, too, with some of the top world football players working daily together with a whole lot of physiologists, he adds.
Olle Blomqvist