So, the Olympics are just around the corner. Several new products are debuting there that will be available to the public shortly after. Check out this great article in Fast Company that talks about the new arrivals. I’ve showcased a couple of my favorites. The first is Nike’s PRECOOL vest, which atheletes wear for one hour prior to game time. Research from their lab determined that performance falls off drastically when core body temps hit 103 degrees. This vest helps slow the rising of that core temperature, improving their play. It’s a relatively simple design that’s filled with water and then frozen. Wish you would of thought of it, don’t you??
Next up are Nike’s new Flywire shoes, which creates the shoe casing with a layering of high-tech filaments of roughly 7 feet to create a thin fabric. That’s right- this shoe is 20% lighter than the lightest shoe ever created, weighing in at 92 grams. It’s kind of a like a suspension bridge designed to hold the foot, all made possible by technology. All those “cables” lock the foot in place and give it a snug fit feeling a bit like a second skin. The best part is that production costs are dramatically cheaper, making this shoe lighter, cheaper, and simpler! Gotta love technological advances, huh?
And finally we have Speedo’s LZR suit, which I might say is a bit controversial. Let’s just say they found a loophole. The sport’s rules ban any suits that create buoyancy, including anything with bubbles, fins or spoilers. So instead of lifting Speedo squeezed, making the swimmer sleeker and smaller – and able to glide through the water faster. They did this by creating a sheath that compresses the body with 70 times more force, molding them to the ideal hydrodynamic shape by compressing areas of the body that cause drag. The fact I find most interesting is that as of May when it was released, 37 of 41 records were set with people wearing it.
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