From the Water to the Land

Zone Ready Press Release 3.17.09

From the Water to the Land

Orange County, CA – The Zone Ready staff took a field trip to the OC last week to meet up with Steven Munatones and staff from The Yard.  Steven has been active in the international swimming and water polo communities since the 1980’s.  The meeting with Zone Ready was prompted by the possibility to find ways to take some of that technology and practical applications used in elite aquatics competitions and make it available to all amateur sport athletes.

Steven Munatones elaborates: “There are so many ways in which high school coaches in all sports would benefit from this technology – we have several top foreign Olympic teams vying for the technology.  What gets tricky is creating a pathway to allow practices that are common, even essential, in elite sports and make them part of the culture for popular sports like football, baseball, soccer, and so forth.”

Zone Ready was intrigued by the opportunity to find a simplified approach to making coaches more open to the possibilities of trying something new.  In so many sports, coaches have difficulty accepting new ways to doing things better.  “The saying goes – ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result,” quips Zone Ready Coach Doug Gizzi.  “We want to encourage coaches to understand how training affects their athletes’ bodies. And if that training is having a detrimental effect, we want hard data that can prove it.”

Enter the convenient lactate threshold testing device that Steven Munatones is utilizing together with the world’s leader in this field, Dr. Genadijus Sokolovas, who has tested over 2,000 world-class swimmers, triathletes and water polo players.  The proprietary lactate threshold testing protocols are used to optimize the training, nutrition, and recovery for US swimming legends from Michael Phelps and Dana Torres.  The key is in the ease of use and accelerated processing of the blood analysis.  Within a minute, the coach can get a quick sample from the athlete’s ear lobe, send it through, and receive a real time reading on the current blood lactate level.  Thereby, prompting the coach to increase or decrease training intensity or volume; even recommending the athlete to get something to eat if necessary.  The results lead the athletes to maximize their raw abilities and not waste a single rep in training – which invariably leads to a lot of gold medals!

Michael Phelps shown after his lactate clearance test by Genadijus Sokolovas 

right after one of his gold medal-winning swims in Beijing

Zone Ready was impressed with the ease of the lactate testing device and how using one could, in time, be a welcomed part of the “normal” training culture amongst popular sports.  Other devices that could have a stable place on the training stage from Steven’s arsenal are his semi-portable vibration device and a precise velocity measurement system. 

Regarding the patented vibration device, Genadijus, Steven and their team have developed a safe and effective way to harness the benefits of vibration training for the amateur athlete.  Unlike some vibration technologies, this device is thoroughly researched, used in hospitals, approved by the FDA for pain reduction and does not risk any harmful side effects to one’s internal organs or vision.  Finally, this is vibration training done right and done safe.

The last piece that the Zone Ready staff put through the paces is an apparatus and software program used to measure velocity at specific moments in one’s athletic performance.  According to Coach Doug Gizzi the advantage is obvious, “A lot of methods to measure speed or acceleration just give one number – how quickly you got from A to B.  This program can tell all those things throughout a video and a proprietary computer program to provide a continuous “velocity curve”.  Now, we can look at the swimmer’s stroke, the runner’s gait, the jumper’s takeoff, etc., and see where they are performing well and where they need work.  This allows us to create specific programs to optimize strength and power where the specific athlete needs it the most.”   

Example of instantaneous capture of velocity, force and power in a swimmer underwater

It seems that company’s like Zone Ready and the technologies from The Yard are never satisfied until they get the best to those they train.  And in the world of sports performance optimization, that is a never-ending journey.  Zone Ready reminds all athletes and coaches to never be satisfied and to constantly thrive to better your best!

To Learn More Goto: www.SwiMetrics.com