Smart insole Nurvv has added two new coaching features, in a major update to the platform.
The company has added a Running Economy and Form Coach, which aims to make runners go faster and longer.
The first new feature, Running Economy, acts like a miles per gallon reading on a car. It tracks your performance during a run, and works out your ideal pace for longevity. The NURVV coach will then help you stay in that pace zone, if you take your smartphone out for a run.
However, the most interesting addition is certainly the Form Coach.
Using its unique position in your shoes, the Form Coach tracks four key metrics about your running style: cadence, foot strike, step length and execution.
Rather than basing these from running idealisms, Nurvv looks at your runs and takes a snapshot of your form when you're running at your best. The aim is to help you run with your best form all the time, rather than get you striding like Mo Farah – which is an interesting and innovative take on run tracking.
Nurvv then estimates the potential improvement as a percentage and time improvement. If you're targeting a quicker 5K time, for example, it will estimate the amount of minutes you can knock off your PB.
But that’s not where the Form Coach ends.
If you choose an improvement – e.g. cadence – you then start a training block with tailored sessions to improving that aspect. Each session will also be broken down, so if your target cadence is 165, you will build up to that slowly within the session.
Each training block is stretched over a cumulative total of 25km of running, so you have multiple sessions to put your new form techniques into practice.
While some changes in running form can lead to potential injury risks, Nurvv says that because it uses your own personal baselines for improvements, the risks are minimal.
We’ve seen many wearables take the idea of running coaching over the years – notably Lumo Run and Moov. Nurvv’s approach looks different, and in a good way. We’re interested to see how it works in practice.
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James is the co-founder of Wareable, and he has been a technology journalist for 15 years.
He started his career at Future Publishing, James became the features editor of T3 Magazine and T3.com and was a regular contributor to TechRadar – before leaving Future Publishing to found Wareable in 2014.
James has been at the helm of Wareable since 2014 and has become one of the leading experts in wearable technologies globally. He has reviewed, tested, and covered pretty much every wearable on the market, and is passionate about the evolving industry, and wearables helping people achieve healthier and happier lives.