An Estonian start-up company Sportlyzer (sport+analyzer) is developing software that analyses training info for amateur athletes and accordingly plans target driven training sessions.

Sportlyzer software should help amateur athletes overcome a common problem – unsteady motivation.

“The person himself may not understand what his training pauses are caused by. This way distaste for any kind of sports activities may develop,” reports one of the founders of the company Tõnis Saag.

Problems that cause holes

“Our software analyses a person’s training sessions and helps him discover possible problems which cause “holes” in sports activities.” In principle it will work as follows: the user inputs data into the program – starting from age, weight, job nature, average training activeness, and the practiced sport ending with the average training length, intensity and pulse rate indicators.

Saag: “Athletes training on different levels are prepared to input different amounts of info. Malle using a step counter wishes to write down only the steps stepped daily while Andrus wishes to keep an eye on the dynamics of his kilometre run. Thus input info depends on the user profile.”

Data-training circle

Thereafter the software will analyse the data and make recommendations for future training sessions. New training session and new data insertion – everything revolves in a circle. At first, users must input all the data themselves. Later on, it is planned to link Sportlyzer with the most common sports monitoring devices like step counters, pulse watches etc.

Sportlyzer wants to enter a mercilessly competitive market. Many of the bigger names like Polar, Suunto and Nike offer thorough programmes with their devices. Tight competition also occurs on the web where environments like TrainingPeaks, DailyMile, DailyBurn etc can be used for training planning. Similar programmes are also moving to smartphones – for example there are RunKeeper for iPhone and SportsTracker for Nokia.

User friendliness as competitive edge

“The circle that must be competed with and outperformed is vigorous – suitable for a practical sports application,” Saag smirks. He considers user friendliness Sportlyzer’s edge compared to the forenamed applications.

“While existing applications gather data and make statistical excerpts, the people cannot interpret them for themselves, thus making the data a useless amount of bits for them. Sportlyzer transforms these otherwise useless bits into useful and practical recommendations,” Saag notes.

When Sportlyzer will be launched, remains a secret. The idea has been improved for almost a year and a team has been assembled.

Internet entrepreneur Jüri Kaljundi involved

In research and development work cooperation is carried out with the researchers from the University of Tallinn and the University of Tartu, the business development is left to the Internet entrepreneur Jüri Kaljundi and the Estonian Development Fund, who has included Sportlyzer in their incubator.

Saag perceives the whole world as a potential market for Sportlyzer and money is planned to be made on advertisement and services. “From the moment the user wishes to get more out of the environment than just training diary management and comparison to friends’ training sessions or if he wishes to use intelligent planning software, he has to pay for it. How much is yet to be determined. Definitely times less than membership fees at fitness clubs or consultations from private trainers,” Saag says.