Coaching made personal, effortless and accessible…

So why is a Molecular program manager talking about coaching you ask? Well, Molecular is part of an amazing team that conceived and delivered the Adidas miCoach personal training system. I was fortunate enough to be part of this team and the experience has been and will be a highlight in my working life.

To me, it is the meeting of my passions - sports, technology and marketing. More over, it is the fact that this product is not technology for the sake of technology, but rather technology as an enabler in allowing a user to achieve their goals.

The system itself consists of a phone, heart rate monitor, foot pod (to measure your stride length and rate) and a web application (www.micoach.com). In conjunction, the system offers you an unprecedented training experience without tying you to a gym, location, or a real life coach with whom you need to make an appointment. miCoach allows you to set your own schedule, run where ever you want, when ever you want and provides you with coaching, motivation and purpose. The science of the system is based on Heart Rate zone training informed by the experts at Athletes’ Performance.

You are accompanied at each step in the process just like (or perhaps even more so) than a coach or personal trainer would. You can take your training program where ever you go. And you can track your progress in a very tangible and visual manner.

I have personally been using the complete system for 5 months now and can honestly say that I cannot imagine going for another run without miCoach with me. The system works. The recommended workouts each day are less than I would normally have done if I was doing it myself. The reason is that many of us over train and there by plateau at a certain level without actually seeing improvement. The coaching plan that is created for me matches my level and focus’s on achieving my goal and it does this in a manner that is transparent to me. Just to be clear - I am doing LESS and getting MORE!! When does that ever happen?!

Nothing I say can be more powerful than the facts -

So let’s consider for a moment the brand angle. As a user, I spend about 20 minutes a day on the adidas miCoach application. I review the workout that I completed and I look forward to the next workout tomorrow. That’s 20 minutes with the adidas brand. When I run, I carry my adidas Samsung device with my adidas footpod and adidas heart rate monitor. Depending on the length of the workout, that’s another 30-40 minutes of adidas brand time. That’s an hour a day of me, as a consumer, interacting with adidas.

To say that I am excited about the product and the possibilities is an understatement. miProject, miPassion, miCOACH.