The athletic department at the University of Kansas currently boasts a pair of nationally ranked basketball teams, but high-end hoops is par for the course in Lawrence.
New this year, KU can also tout top-tier weight-lifting technology, which it’s using to improve the strength and conditioning work of its basketball teams and other Jayhawk squads.
Kansas was among the first handful of college programs to begin working with EliteForm, a Lincoln-based startup that makes tools for prescribing weightlifting regimens and collecting and analyzing data from workouts.
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We’ve chronicled EliteForm a few times over the past year — including in January, when Nebraska Global announced its investment in the startup, and, more recently, in August — but a video released last month (embedded above) provides an altogether different — and glowing — take of the company’s technology.
In the five-minute video, Glenn Cain, an assistant strength and conditioning coach at KU, examines EliteForm from the end user’s point of view, discussing how the Jayhawks have used the technology and what benefits he’s seen from it.
First, Cain says, EliteForm digitizes the entire process of a coach prescribing a workout regimen to an athlete. “It allows us to eliminate paperwork completely,” he says. Additionally, with two cameras mounted on weight racks, it provides quality footage of athletes’ lifts.
Finally and “most importantly,” Cain says, EliteForm’s technology helps quantify how fast the weight bar is moving when an athlete lifts, providing coaches a quantifiable measure of how hard athletes are working. Athletes are ranked by those numbers, Cain says, and “it becomes a huge competitive piece for the athletes.”
Cain also touts EliteForm’s technical support and says the company’s technology is tailored to the needs and demands of athletes today.
“We feel that this technology is revolutionary,” he says. “We feel that it is going to put us at the forefront of training in terms of strength and conditioning. We feel that we are going to be setting the standard for what’s to come in the future from a training perspective.”
Credits: Video from youtube.com.
