SportCon

Muscle Oxygen Monitoring is a technology that allows trainers and coaches to see inside the athlete’s body in real time while they perform their sport. The sensor is wearable, completely wireless, and so unobtrusive that it is used in competition. It has been used on a vast range of athletes including cyclists, runners, swimmers, free divers, motocross racers, hockey players, rock climbers and even horses.

Muscle oxygen monitoring is based on near infrared spectroscopy. It measures the hemoglobin and myoglobin oxygenation in the capillaries and tissue of the muscle.

The sport science around muscle oxygen monitoring is advancing rapidly.  Trainers have developed methods to assess which physiologic system is limiting the performance of an endurance athlete. They can observe the metabolic state in the muscle by the second, so they can design interval training to target specific physiologic adaptations like improving muscle oxidative capacity or improving cardiac stroke volume while minimizing the time to recover from the training stress. Researchers at the Nike Sport Research Lab have developed methods of predicting fatigue in players even in intermittent activities.