APPS TO IMPROVE YOUR ATHLETIC FORM:

Well-heeled athletes often employ a retinue of coaches and biomechanics consultants to regularly critique and fine-tune their form.

Most of us don’t have such resources and, in the past, generally relied on advice from training partners or spouses. More recently, many of us have turned to simple smartphone apps that provide recorded videos or animations showing us what the app’s developers consider to be good form for our sport, whether that sport happens to be tennis, golf, baseball, weight training, basketball, soccer, swimming, running or virtually any other activity.

But now a new generation of apps are going a step farther and providing a personalized assessment of form, together with suggestions for how to better it. These apps, with names like RunForm, BarSense, and Hudl Technique, generally require you to film yourself while you serve, squat, swing, throw, lift, run or otherwise work out.

You then upload that video to the app, and it allows you to view yourself in super slow motion, frame by frame, with accompanying commentary; overlay your swing or serve above that of a professional athlete performing the same move; or have the app use complicated geometry and algorithms to draw lines and circles across your body, assessing how you move, compared to an ideal version of that movement.

Interesting.