The Benefits of Velocity Based Training

With the release of our online VBT course, Durham and I dig into the strengths, weaknesses, and best practices for using VBT with clients and athletes.

This is one of my earliest recorded conversations on velocity-based training, and it’s deliberately balanced — as much about where VBT falls short as where it shines. The strengths are the ones that still hold up: objective effort measurement, honest day-to-day readiness data, and the motivational kick athletes get from seeing a number attached to every rep. The weaknesses we cover are the ones most VBT advocates were quiet about in 2019 — the cost of measurement hardware at the time, the temptation to drown a program in data nobody acts on, and the coaching skill it takes to know when to override what the numbers say.

Listening back, it’s also a time capsule: this was recorded before Metric existed, when the barrier to entry we complain about in the episode was exactly the problem we later set out to solve.

For the current state of the argument, the velocity-based training guide is the place to start.