Therabody Prime Plus and Garmin Instinct 3
Massage gun maker Therabody, once known as Theragun, has announced a partnership with Garmin to help power its AI-enhanced recovery plans.
This feature is called Coach by Therabody, and the concept is it will pull in data from platforms like Garmin Connect in order to guide and refine recovery suggestions.
It makes a lot of sense. How can the Therabody app know what recovery techniques might work best if it does not when and how you exercised, or for how long?
What’s not quite so clear is what Garmin gets out of the partnership. Apps, of course, pull in data from platforms like Strava or Garmin Connect all the time, but it sounds as though Garmin has more of an active involvement with Coach by Therabody.
“We are excited to collaborate with Therabody to help athletes of all levels perform – and recover – at their best,” says Susan Lyman, a Garmin marketing Vice President.
“By providing athletes with these tools, they can make more informed training decisions and, in turn, work to take their performance to the next level.”
Coach by Therabody is currently in beta, with plans to roll the feature out more widely in February, as per an Instagram post from the company.
Garmin already calculates a couple of key recovery metrics in its watches. Across the range there’s Body Battery, which offsets exercise against stress and sleep (and more) to estimate how drained your body may be. Its higher-end watches also provide a Training Readiness stat, also used to inform any suggested workouts. Both are highly useful.
Garmin’s Connect platform will not be the only option for those who use Coach by Therabody, as Strava and both Apple’s and Google’s platforms’ data can be sync’d.
“Therabody is not doing AI for AI’s sake,” claims John Solomon, Therabody Chief Marketing Officer.
“We looked at how AI could solve a problem for our consumers. And over time, feeding it with the rich data from Garmin will allow us to really understand how recovery impacts performance at a scale that’s not been achievable until now.”
Some of Therabody’s most recent recovery gadgets include the Theragun Prime Plus massage gun, the heated eye-massaging SmartGoggles and the leg-compressing JetBoots Prime.
Long-terms followers of Garmin might feel a little itch at the back of their brains wondering if this could be an experimental precursor to a Garmin acquisition of Therabody.
In the past notable Garmin acquisitions include Firstbeat Analytics (in 2020), which designed the clever algorithms behind features like Body Battery, and Tacx (in 2019), which makes some of the very best bike turbo trainers.
This article was originally published by a www.forbes.com . Read the Original article here. .