Ever considered being trained by your gym shorts? It seems far-fetched, but California-based Asensei Inc. sees the opportunity for a new fitness training category to emerge alongside connected fitness: connected coaching. Central to the concept of connected coaching is smart apparel that tracks not just biometrics but biomechanics, including an athlete’s technique, posture, movement and timing.

“Our view is that tracking isn’t teaching, and counting and cheering isn’t coaching,” said Steven Webster (pictured), chief executive officer of Asensei. “A coach will … look at you and decide, what’s the one next thing that I’m going to teach you that’s going to make you better? That’s the art of coaching right there. It’s looking for that next improvement, that next marginal gain.”

Webster spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, as part of theCUBE’s Western Digital “Data Makes Possible” CUBE Conversation series. They discussed about the future of technology in the fitness industry and how Asensei’s revolutionary connected coaching app is making personal training accessible to athletes of any level.

Personalized Olympic-level coaching

Asensei has created a reference design for a motion capture sensor, and it integrated a network of those sensors into athletic apparel. “[This] allows us to recover your skeleton about as easily as pulling on a shirt or shorts,” Webster said.

But although the smart apparel is the means, it’s not an algorithm that’s coaching, but asensei’s team of top coaches, including Olympic athletes, that have created training programs that can be customized to each user’s unique requirements. “We’re taking the knowledge and the expertise of world-class coaches in the sport that athletes want to follow, and we’re taking that coaching and essentially putting it into a learning management system,” Webster explained.

Asensei uses enlarged dataset techniques in the same way marketing or advertising companies segment an audience and target content, reviewing the data for what’s working and what’s not working. “One of the really interesting things with a digital coach is the more people we teach, the better we can get at teaching,” Webster said.

In trials, one in three users highly recommended the Asensei app, rating it 10 out of 10. “Now, we’re just focused on making sure we have enough content in place from our coaches,” Webster said, adding, “General availability is anytime soon.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s special “Data Makes Possible” CUBE Conversation series. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Western Digital Corp. Neither Western Digital nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE