Jacob Tober

The work.

After my sports-science degree I worked as an S&C coach for the better part of a decade at Core Advantage, a private high-performance company in Melbourne, with athletes across more than twenty sports — from eleven-year-olds with Osgood–Schlatter through to Olympians and professional athletes.

It was on that gym floor that I saw first-hand the benefits of velocity-based training. We didn’t reach for it often (it didn’t always fit the workflow of a busy gym), but every time we ran testing or built tracking into a programming block, our athletes’ eyes lit up. A simple shift in focus, plus objective data, visibly raised the intent and energy in the room for athletes, coaches, and interns alike.

In the midst of the 2020 lockdowns, my brother Davey and I co-founded and built the Metric app inside Core Advantage. I’d loved VBT from the moment I first used it, but the tools for measuring bar speed weren’t good enough. They introduced too much friction for a busy gym floor, and the trade-off was often too much time lost to logistics.

The goal with Metric was a way to track barbell velocity through a phone’s camera. It needs no additional hardware: no linear position transducer, no sensor strap, no wearables, just point and shoot with the camera already in your pocket. We patented the computer-vision system behind it and launched the app to beta in late 2021.

Building it pulled me off the gym floor and into software. I started as head of sports science at Metric, focused on making our app accurate but also useful for coaches and athletes. That role has evolved over the years, and I’m now Metric’s head of product, development, and design — listening to user feedback and input to drive features from concept into implementation.

So while I don’t coach day-to-day anymore, those years on the floor are the foundation for how we build Metric: a focus on usability, on lowering friction, and on surfacing the numbers and data from your training that matter at the moment they can actually change a decision and improve your performance.

Building Metric only solved part of the VBT problem; the education piece still needed work. So VBTcoach grew alongside Metric — a place I could go deeper into the sports science and put answers to the questions coaches and lifters kept asking, written to make velocity-based training more practically focused, and accessible to anyone, not just labs and pro teams. With 10 topic pages, 7 calculator tools, and over 40 articles, VBTcoach is focused on serving its niche: making barbell-velocity tracking and weight-room data as useful and practical as possible.

In late 2025 I started pulling my ideas into one place — first a mini-ebook, The Fundamentals of Velocity-Based Training (free here), and now Lifting with Data, the long-form version of everything on this site. The first physical edition ships later in 2026 and is open for pre-order now.

Lifting with Data.

I’m writing the long-form version of all this — the book that pulls velocity, programming with velocity, and the science underneath both into one place a coach can sit with for an evening. First-edition pre-orders are open. Hard-cap on the print run; the buyer list is small on purpose.

Say hello.

Coach question, podcast invite, research collaboration, or just want to argue about the five-zone model — email is the best route. Direct message on Instagram works too if you’re briefer.

• ◇ EMAIL · JACOB@METRIC.COACH
• ◇ INSTAGRAM · @VBTCOACH
• ◇ COACHING · CORE ADVANTAGE