Stormers rugby become first professional club to integrate performance monitoring with AMS by Catapult
South African rugby team the Stormers are the first professional club to integrate Catapult wearable technology with AMS by Catapult. Using Catapult Connect, the built-in API between OpenField and AMS, the Stormers seamlessly compare objective and subjective performance data to centralise player wellbeing feedback.
AMS by Catapult Head of Performance, Anita Sirotic, explains the benefits of connecting the two products.
“The benefits of bringing together the wearables piece and the AMS piece into one platform is that any department or any staff member has better visibility over what their athletes are doing from a holistic point of view,” Sirotic said.
“What I mean by that is that they’re not working in silos with their own bits of information, but they’re able to bring that all together and to get a really good snapshot of what the athlete is doing. They really get to be accountable for their own performance and take ownership of it. Which I think empowers the players at the end of the day.”
Stephan Du Toit, Head Strength and Conditioning Trainer, has been using Catapult for a couple years to better manage the load of his athletes, and recently implemented AMS by Catapult to centralise the communication and data collection across the organisation.
“The wearable technology by Catapult has made my job a lot easier but a lot more exciting,” Du Toit said. “I love data, I love knowing what they do, I love seeing post-session where we have been and what we have done and if we’re on the right track.”
“Marrying the wearable technology with AMS by Catapult means that we can have one dataset that you can make real in-depth decisions on. The value that sits with the players is now more profound because they’re now finding more interest in their own training and performance, and they’re starting to understand that when we do certain things they get these benefits from what they’ve done. And that can ultimately lead to improved performance and winning more games and winning more cups, and enjoying the game so much more.”
The integration also automates a lot of the manual work of player assessments, which Senior Physio Wayne Hector uses to increase efficiency.
“With the AMS system it allows players to manage a self-screening process in the morning, which means that I don’t have to physically be in touch with each player before their day starts,” Hector said. “The system flags players based on their musculoskeletal results in the morning and that just allows us to be a lot more efficient at the start of the day before the players hit the park.”
Stormers lock Chris Van Zyl appreciates the flexibility of using objective and subjective data to inform decisions day-to-day.
“A combination of putting in our daily wellness as well as our RPEs after every training session, our S&C coach gets an understanding of where we are and how we’re feeling,” Van Zyl said.
“And often based on that if there’s an issue of undertraining or overtraining, he will adjust our sessions accordingly, as well as if we’re not feeling up to it and we’ve got a bit of soreness or stiffness, he may adjust the session accordingly to ensure he gets the best out of us every day.”
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