Faster, smarter, tinier: How gizmos smaller than your palm are powering Asian Games stars | Sports News
6 min readSep 14, 2026 10:14 AM IST
A little button-like gizmo that can be tucked inside a swim cap to track a swimmer’s heart rate. A device that looks like a flattened computer mouse that fits snugly between a hockey player’s shoulder blades to tell them if they are putting more load on one leg while running in straight lines.
A tiny monitor that can be fixed to the back of a swimmer’s head that breaks down their stroke rate and the speed of their push off. A little pen-like device that is used by decathletes to measure their lactate levels after each of their 10 events.
As high-performance athletes strive to get faster, higher and stronger, the devices that are aiding them with intricate data points in training and competitions are getting tinier. Smaller than the palm of your hand in fact.
Take, for example, the GPS tracker from Catapult Sport that is used by PV Sindhu, the Indian women’s hockey team and even pace bowlers. Despite its compact size — players tuck it into the back of a vest in training and competitions — it comes equipped with an accelerometer, a GPS that’s connected with satellites, and a gyroscope.
Wayne Lombard, who is the head of athletic performance for the Indian women’s hockey team, uses this GPS device to track the players external load (physical exertion data like distance run). Then, he uses that data to help the coaches figure out how hard they should be training so that actual matches feel less gruelling than a hard training session.
“In hockey, we use it for training as well as in matches. It helps us understand the distance players cover, the speed they’re covering it in, and the repeated sprint efforts by a player. But it also gives us running symmetry data: how much load a player is putting on each leg in every single run that they do,” explains Lombard.
This running symmetry data, Lombard explains, can also help warn that a player is vulnerable to soft tissue injury or is fatigued on one side of the body.
“With Sindhu too, we mapped out, using this device, what her match intensity looks like, and then we started implementing that in training,” says Lombard, who is currently working with about 30 Indian athletes, including the Indian hockey team, Murali Sreeshankar, Tejaswin Shankar and Jeswin Aldrin.
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With fast bowlers in cricket, the GPS, with the gyroscope, can break down the load on the lower back of a pacer when bowling.
Cutting through water
Swimmers too have their own tiny gizmos like the Polar Verity Sense and the TritonWear device that help them glide through water effectively.
“The Polar Verity Sense device is one of the most used heart rate sensors for swimming. It’s waterproof and we use it to track the energy zone that swimmers are training in,” says Asian Games medal-winning swimmer-turned-coach Sandeep Sejwal, who trains athletes like Sajan Prakash at the Inspire Institute of Sport at Vijayanagar.
“Initially, we started using the device with our swimmers to try and catch swimmers who were not working hard. But now it’s mostly being used to keep swimmers in control and not go over the effort that they are required to do in order to develop their heart rate.”
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600 hours of training data
Polar is a circular device, slightly bigger than a blazer button which can store up to six hundred hours of training data and shows heart rate, pace, and distance in the water.
Sejwal adds that high-performance swimmers also use the TritonWear device that is tucked behind the swimmer’s skull. The Swimming Federation of India has given its top swimmers this device.
“That thing tells you your stroke rate, the speed, time between two strokes, speed of the push off, time you are taking every lap. It is very fancy,” said Sejwal.
He adds that while these devices have been around for a few years, they would be very expensive and many swimmers could not afford it, or, when the pocket allowed it, it was difficult to source.
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Rowers too have their stroke rate monitors. As Samuel Pullinger, the head of sports science at IIS, explains, “Rowers have these tiny devices that you can clip on both oars, and it provides everything related to speed of the boat and the amount of strokes. It tells you if the stroke rate is too high or too low. Let’s say in a training session, rowers have been asked to work on intensity level four, for which the stroke rate is meant to be 28. But with the data we collect, we notice that the rowers are doing 32 or 34. We can tell the rower to ease up.”
For decathlete Tejaswin Shankar, Lombard has an Eaglenos lactate monitor (which acts a bit like a blood glucose meter) which he purchased in South Africa. The idea is to check Tejaswin’s lactate levels after as many of his events as possible in the 10-event decathlon.
“We just do a finger prick to get some blood from him to figure out things like how fatigued he could possibly be based on how quickly the lactate comes down. We take it after as many of his events that are logistically possible in a decathlon. Lactate generally has a half-life of around 30 minutes. But if it’s not coming down quick enough, it means that we need to do something different in his recovery strategy to make sure he’s recovered for the next event,” says Lombard.
