Review of the JAWKU Speed for Speed Training

The JAWKU Speed takes the unreliability and guesswork out of tracking the results of your speed training.

As an athlete, your ability to maximize your speed, boost your acceleration, produce lightning-fast changes in direction, and react faster than your opponent is what gives you an edge in competition.

Massive amounts of effort goes into training each of these critical aspects of your athletic performance. But how do you accurately measure your progress in each of these three areas?

Is Your Speed Training Actually Making You Faster?

So you want to improve your speed as an athlete? Maybe you’ve read through our article on the top speed training tools, added all of the gear you need to your equipment bag and have been training religiously ever since.

How do you know if you’re actually making improvements to your speed and agility?

You may be at a level where you’re in tune with your body to the point that you can feel a shift in biomechanics, power output, and speed. But you can’t know with certainty until you’ve put all your hard training to the test. Or if you want to compare which speed training tools are giving you better results over time.

Numbers don’t lie. The only way to know for sure if you’re getting faster is to test and track the distances you’re trying to improve regularly.

Traditional Sprint Timing Methods

Self-timing with a classic stopwatch may be an excellent option for timing longer distances. But what about explosive sprint and agility efforts where every second marks improvement? Just measuring your reaction time itself needs millisecond-level accuracy to notice your progression.

Having a coach or training partner man the stopwatch for you during your benchmarks leaves plenty of room for error. In reality, you measure their reaction time just as much as you measure yours. And if you have a different person running the timer for you in the future, you never know with certainty if you can compare the results.

If you’re serious about measuring the progress of your speed training, you might even reluctantly consider laying down the cash for a competition-grade race timing system. Not only are these systems thousands of dollars, but they’re surprisingly unidimensional. You’ll get incredibly accurate times for the straight-line distance you’re measuring, but that’s about it.

If you’re working to improve your speed and your agility, other data points are just as critical to measure. You’ll want to see your reaction time right out of the gate and have the ability to test your movement in all directions. Forward, backward, up, down and side to side.

What you need is a tool that combines a competition-grade timing system with a device that measures all the valuable data about your body’s motion.

JAWKU Speed Timing and Tracking Wearable

The JAWKU Speed takes the accuracy of competition timing gates and combines it with accelerometers and gyroscopes for a simple solution that only needs your smartphone and a sensor you wear on your wrist.

Unlike most fitness wearables on the market focused on generally tracking your health and training throughout the day, the JAWKU Speed is purpose-built for one thing: Accurately measuring the hard-earned results of your speed training.

What You Can Measure With JAWKU Speed

Most expensive speed gate systems only provide you with data for accurate sprint times. The JAWKU Speed incorporates additional tracking sensors and allows you to visualize your performance over time within their app.

There are three areas JAWKU Speed helps you measure:

1. Sprint Times and Linear Speed
2. Reaction Time Testing
3. Agility Testing

Let’s break down each of these functional areas into how they work and how you can incorporate them into measuring your speed training efforts.

Measuring Sprint Times

Using the JAWKU Speed for measuring your sprint times is a simple process. You select your distance, place the phone in its stand at the finish line, press the button on the wearable at the starting line, and the device times your sprint effort with astounding accuracy.

Regularly tracking your sprint times is the foundation for seeing the results of your speed training. As a benchmark, you’re able to see if your training protocols are translating into tangible results in improving your speed. 

Measured regularly, you’re able to see trends in less tangible areas of your output visually. You can determine if your recovery strategies or off-field activities are influencing your performance from day to day.

Measuring at different distance intervals allows you to see where your acceleration ends and where your endurance begins. Depending on your sport, you’ll want to keep track of not only your ability to accelerate over short distances but how long you can maintain top speed before you taper out.

Measuring and Testing Reaction Time

The JAWKU Speed measures your reaction time by giving you to option to have an audible start tone to initiate each exercise. The sensors on the wearable track the time between the moment the sound goes off to when you begin moving.

There’s a reason why you measure reaction time in milliseconds for athletics. In competition, the difference in milliseconds is all it takes to have a massive advantage over your competition.

When you’re analyzing the results of your times for both speed and agility, identifying what’s lacking and needs further improvement is crucial to your training. Just having the time for each distance doesn’t help you much if you don’t know what contributes to the performance differences.

If your times are improving but your reaction time is consistent, you know that you’ve been making progress in your running output. But if you notice that your reaction time is decreasing, you can shift the trajectory of what you’re training to make the right improvements.

Measuring and Testing Agility

The JAWKU Speed allows you to test your agility through various standardized agility drills. It also gives you the flexibility to customize your own.

For athletes, agility is just as necessary as speed. While expensive laser timing systems may do an excellent job of accurately measuring linear speed over a set distance, it overlooks the 360-degree quickness required for agility.

Coaches commonly use tests like the 3-Cone Drill to measure the agility performance of their athletes over time. The JAWKU Speed allows you to take that same concept but add in Olympic-level timing accuracy and the ability to do it yourself.

Just like training reaction time, having data to indicate where you need to allocate your efforts during training creates the maximum level of improvement to your athleticism. If your overall speed has been rising but your agility is stagnating, you can adjust your training schedule to include additional agility work.

What the JAWKU Speed Includes

• Orange or Black Wristband
• Speed Sensor
• USB Charger
• Mobile Stand for Phone or Tablet
• Free Mobile App for iOS and Android

If you’re interested in adding JAWKU Speed to your speed and agility training toolkit, when you use one of our links from this post, we get a small commission from Amazon (at no additional cost to you!) So if you appreciate the work we do and the information we provide in articles like this, it helps us keep the lights on. Thanks for your support!

How to Run and Sprint Faster

Targeting your speed, agility, and reaction time in training can transform nearly every aspect of your athleticism. Making improvements all comes down to your training and the equipment at your disposal to help you along the way.

If you’re just starting out in your speed training journey, you can use the JAWKU Speed as a powerful ally in giving you tangible feedback for your progression.

We’ve put together a list of the top speed training tools you can add to your equipment bag if you’re in search of the best devices to help you take your speed and agility training to the next level.

Also, check out our article on HECOstix if you’re looking for one of the simplest solutions for training reaction time, coordination, and focus.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Mobility Athlete newsletter if you’d like to get more tips and tools delivered directly to your inbox to keep you on track with your mobility and workout recovery goals.