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I spent an afternoon in early February training like an NFL star — or more accurately, a future NFL star.
Last week, we wrote about some of the wearable technology football players are using to help prepare them for the NFL Scouting Combine and draft.
As part of the reporting, I spent an hour in Los Angeles using the Adidas miCoach wearable tracker with Scott Piri, one of the football trainers at EXOS, an athletic performance company that trains the Combine athletes.
To learn more about my experience with the system, please see the video here:
Piri’s goal was simple to understand, and much more complicated to carry out: He wanted to use the technology (and his expertise) to make me a faster human being in less than an hour.
And it worked. I actually improved my top speed by 1.5 mph, which is significant when you’re sprinting.
It’s not as though this challenge was impossible. Speed has never been my forte, so there was certainly room for improvement. But the fact that I improved significantly, and in only about 45 minutes, made me a believer in the system.
One thing to note: A colleague asked me if I purposely ran slower at the beginning to ensure I’d see improvement. I did not do this, at least not consciously. I wanted any improvement I saw to come from the training/technology. Perhaps I ran harder at the end because I wanted to be faster; my guess is that the training simply did its job.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
