NEW YORK — Wearable fitness technology company Athos launched an update to its brand and athlete training system Thursday and will now narrow its focus on supporting competitive, performance-driven athletes.
Athos has compression gear with sensors that measures muscle activity using EMG (electromyography) and heart rate. The data is streamed to the user’s mobile device, providing real-time insights during a workout. Teams such as the Los Angeles Clippers, Philadelphia Phillies, Philadelphia Eagles, FC Dallas, Santa Cruz Warriors and Ohio State along with private facilities that cater to elite athletes use Athos products in order to make decisions based on a better understanding of training loads.
“The brand shift for us really is we looked back over the course of nine to 12 months,” Athos CEO Don Faul said of the time products have spent on market. “When we talked to athletes who were using the product, the few things that stood out…competitive athletes, really performance-driven athletes were finding a ton of value in the products — athletes at the professional, collegiate, and competitive high school athletes who were working with generally sophisticated coaches.
“When we talk to coaches and athletes at the elite level, one of the biggest challenges they face is avoiding injuries and keeping athletes healthy.”
Faul said based on that feedback, a new Athos web app tool will launch as a product for coaches to help understand overall training load, what impact it has on the body and how it affects readiness to perform with an online training center.
“Eventually our investments in machine learning and AI will start to step into that gap and provide that type of virtual training experience to the individual athletes,” Faul said.
Redwood City-based Athos is a venture capital-backed company with Golden State Warriors co-owners Joe Lacob and Chamath Palihapitiya on the Board of Directors and ex-Warriors player Jermaine O’Neal as an investor. The company closed a $35.5 million Series C investment round in November 2015, noting then that it would “scale to support increasing consumer demand.”
Faul said last month that the company’s long-term aspiration and vision remains getting its garments and products to every athlete because it believes “technology that really is only used by elite athletes eventually is going to find its way to every individual consumer.”
For now, Athos will focus on those elite athletes because it learned that the people that found the most success in using its products were competition-oriented pro-level and collegiate athletes along with serious high school athletes and knowledgeable individual athletes who generally worked with strength and conditioning coaches. While these elite athletes validate the technology, over time, that technology could work well for the consumer.
“If we’re going to win, we’ve got to really focus,” Faul said.
“We’ve got some of the best athletes in the world who are already using the product who have access to really sophisticated coaches and trainers. Let’s really focus on building a great experience for them. And as we do so, they’re going to help us figure out, ‘How do we take that logic that is today in a coach’s head and translate it into software to eventually machine learning will replace?’”
