Australia's Olympic swimmers use Apple Watch fitness tracking in training

Australia's Olympic swimming team use Apple Watch's fitness tracking to boost their training.

The nation's team - known as the Dolphins - captured 21 medals at Tokyo 2020, and gold medallist Zac Stubblety-Cook is happy to use technology to enhance his performance in the pool.

In a profile piece by Apple, he said: "Being able to accurately measure my heart rate in between sets has been a really valuable data point for me and my coach to understand how well I'm responding to training."

Meanwhile, Swimming Australia's performance solutions manager Jess Corones explained how her team can use the data in the best way.

She added: "Data is the key ingredient when it comes to designing performance outcomes for athletes.

"We have seen increased engagement from athletes wearing Apple Watch, which gives us more data points to inform analysis and make coaching decisions."

As well as using Apple Watches and iPads - including the Locker analysis app available for "nationally accredited swimming coaches and analysts" - they have also worked with Amazon in the past with machine learning.

The partnership in 2019 involved Swimming Australia taking the information it has on both its own athletes and competitors and putting it into a 'data lake', which was used to develop performance and training strategies.

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