CardioWall Helps Football Club Pinpoint Stars of the Future

Notts County Football Club is using Rugged Interactive's CardioWall in the pre-season tests to assess players' reaction time and identify the most promising members of the team.

CardioWall is helping the coaching team at the Notts County Football Club in Nottingham, the UK identify the most promising young players. Rugged Interactive's fitness wall is used to assess players' reaction times as part of the Notts County Academy's pre-season tests. A study undertaken by the club's sports science team has revealed a strong link between players' reaction speed on the CardioWall and their speed on the pitch, which makes the interactive wall an excellent assessment tool to help the coaches pinpoint the most promising players, as well as those who need additional training to improve their fitness.

The reaction tests conducted with the CardioWall will now be used to complement coaches' on-field football skills analysis. “Testing reaction speeds is a key factor for any football team. Using the CardioWall as part of our weekly academy training sessions has really helped my team identify those players with the quickest reaction times on the pitch and those that need additional training plans to improve their reaction speed. And the great thing about it is that we can use it to benchmark the players’ reaction speeds throughout the season,“ said Tony Tompos, the Notts County Youth Team Physiotherapist, who uses the CardioWall in his weekly fitness training and considers it a great tool for upper body fitness as well as for rehabilitating players with lower limb injuries.

The CardioWall is a versatile fitness tool that delivers a high intensity workout, offers a wide range of functional training workouts, and helps improve users' reaction speed, peripheral vision, core strength, endurance and balance. Training sessions challenge users to think, reach, stretch and squat, making the CardioWall a great addition to any sports-specific training program. The reaction wall allows users to set different ability levels and goals, and lets them track their progress over time, see a performance analysis in real time, compare their results with past performance, and download training data for a more detailed analysis. The training wall is very easy to use and suitable for users of any age and ability.

“We are delighted to see the CardioWall influencing the identification of future stars at Notts County FC,“ said Simon Heap, Founder and Creative Director, Rugged Interactive. ”It provides a scientifically proven cardio-workout for these young football professionals and with our FitMakr Pro data capture software, it will enable them to track and analyse their performance data including reaction times on a regular basis. We wish the team luck for a successful 2015/16 season.”

To learn more about how the CardioWall is used at the Notts County FC training facility and see the reaction testing in action, watch the video below.