Work on the judo details during Lockdown

The world wide spread of COVID-19 has affected our whole judo community. All competitions are put on hold and most of the athletes and their coaches are in various degrees of lockdown. This situation has changed the way the athletes train. We have asked our friends at Athlete Analyzer about their thoughts about the situation and they have been using this time to improve service for judoka. Read how you can benefit directly.

JIC: The judo community is in a lockdown due to COVID-19. How has this situation affected you and your users of AA?

AA: We have noticed that our users' behaviour has changed a bit. This is not a big surprise of course, since the judo community has been affected all over the world. Athlete Analyzer is built to support Training Management over distance and we can see that more users than before take advantage of the possibility to share training plans remotely. We have also noticed that our users are active at different times. Under normal circumstances we see most activity during and after the weekends, when our users are uploading and analyzing their latest contest videos. Now it seems like many are using the spare time to analyze older contest videos, to be fully prepared when the competing and judo training resumes again.

JIC: How are you affected so far as a business?

AA: Our users are very loyal. They continue to use our product and we have noticed that some teams have increased their use, involving more of their athletes. We can also see an increase of new users since this situation started. We think it’s because judoka and their coaches are looking for new ways to improve when they can’t train as much as normally. Trying to find new ways to stay ahead of the competition.

JIC: Loyal means, it’s also good, but do you think this situation will change the mindset of the judo community?

AA: Yes, maybe this situation will bring some new thinking on how to train and prepare in the future. Judo has been a little late compared to other sports to embrace digital tools but we think we will see a change here in the future.

JIC: How do you think digital tools can help?

Most competitive judoka train very hard. But, it’s not only about training hard. It’s about to train smart, to train on what you need the most. Digital tools like ours help the judoka to find their own strengths and weaknesses so they know what to improve. It’s common in other sports and we believe it will be more common in Judo too.

JIC: Do you think your users improve their judo by using Athlete Analyzer?

It’s hard to scientifically prove but we can see a clear trend where our users improve their results quite fast. We can see that many of the club judoka that use AAJ quite quickly end up in their national teams as cadets, juniors or seniors.

JIC: What’s new since last time? You told me about Coachy, can you explain what it is?

Yes, for sure. We have just released some major updates of Athlete Analyzer and more is to come before the summer. We have introduced our virtual coach “Coachy” in Athlete Analyzer. Coachy will guide new users through the system making sure they get a smooth onboarding experience.

We have also released different training blocks that are free to use for our users. These training blocks can be combined to complete training plans including tapering for important competitions. We will continue to develop enhancements of our features based on requests from our users.

JIC: So Coachy will help the users in the future. Do you any message you would like to pass on to our judo fans?

We hope that this tough period will end soon and that the athletes will emerge stronger than ever. This is a period where many athletes have the time to stop and reflect for a while, get their goals in place and also recover completely from injuries. It’s important to stay positive and use this situation for the best. Try to look at the situation as an opportunity to do things that otherwise are hard to prioritize. Do the most of the lock down – work on the details and look forward to putting them in practice when everything starts up again.

JIC: Benefit now and try out Athlete Analyzer to improve you judo.

This is the time to team up. You can benefit by going here.