How to make the most of VBT in your program
VBT can be a game-changer in a number of ways. First, it gives a snapshot of an athlete’s overall readiness for a given session — measurable data at the start of training that helps a coach gauge readiness against the planned stressors. It also drives intent, since every rep gets a reading, which removes a lot of the guesswork in power-focused or peaking phases.
Used over time, the data builds load–velocity (or load–power) profiles that take the guess out of load prescription and let coaches drive the intent of a session with meaningful, individualised loads.
That’s the arc of this episode: readiness, intent, then profiling. The readiness piece is the fastest win — a couple of warm-up sets at a fixed load tell you more about how an athlete pulled up from the last session than any wellness questionnaire. The intent piece compounds it, because athletes who see a number after every rep push harder without being told to. And the profiling piece is the long game: weeks of ordinary training data quietly becoming an individualised load–velocity profile you can prescribe from.
Written versions of all three threads: readiness and autoregulation with VBT, the intent guide, and the load–velocity profiling guide.