A note from Jacob
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Transcript:
The plan is to do a bit of a theory, but with a practical focus. So we'll talk about some of the theory behind VBT, but also some of the theory as it relates to how you'll actually use it with your athletes and the things you'll then talk about with your athletes on the gym floor and then things you might look at as you're maybe running the next program and you're looking back through their velocity data on metric teams, you might go, Okay, this athlete is doing this. What does that mean? What should I be chasing next? Kind of thing. So we'll talk about some of that stuff as we go and work our way through this. And then once we've done that, we'll go out on the gym floor, we'll have a chat about what you guys are seeing on the team's dashboard, which you can log on to on your computers and have a look at as we talk through it.
If you have any questions, do you have any feature requests? Let's get those out of today as well. That'd be really cool. And also look through the metric pro app that all your athletes have on the gym floor. We've got a bunch of new features that literally got released last week, and I'll talk you through what they've got, and we'll talk about what's coming as well, which will be really helpful for you guys to drive engagement and make this stuff more interesting because it can be pretty dry. It can be pretty theoretical, but the whole goal behind metric is to make VBT more fun and easier to use. Instead of making it more complex and more nerdy, when you give it to a 15 year old footballer and he or she goes, Oh, yeah, cool. I get it. And then they start lifting better, which is the ultimate goal. So a bit about me. I m a sports scientist, strength and conditioning coach. I graduated from Deacon back in 2013, which is starting to show my age. I was a head of education at Core Advantage from 2015 to 2019, running the internship, coaching at the same time as well.
Very similar set up to you guys in terms of private facility. Athletes come, they remember, we test them, we performance train, all that stuff. In 2020, we started thinking about this whole VBT idea. And initially, we wanted to build a better string device, but decided that the string and needing hardware was a fundamental limit. It's like it needs to be an app. It needs to be free to download, free to try. And then you want to be able to play with it from there and do online coaching, do remote training, or have as many devices as you want in the gym. And so metric was very much born out of frustration with the existing tech, and we want to make a better app, better software, but also go hardwareless. And so I also work online under vbt coach. Com. I've got Instagram, Twitter, and a blog. If you guys want to dig deeper into some of the stuff we'll talk about there. I've written some pretty extensive blogs and YouTube stuff on that. So that's me. Metric VBT, like I said, born out of frustration. It started as a hobby project. So my brother's a developer.
He has a background in robotics and computer science and computer vision. And we were just lifting. I was training him. He wanted a bench. Bigger said, Let's do this velocity based training thing. We're going to do some targets and blah, blah, blah. Why do we need this string? What's with the string? That's all there is. And he said, No, we can do better. And so he started playing around with the idea of using vision on a camera. It took three years to get to a beta, which we released privately initially in November of 2021. Then in April 2022, released the first free app, hit 100,000 sets in December of the same year, and then just this year in May 2023. So literally a month or two ago, we released Pro, which is an individual subscription product, and then Teams, which you guys have been on since before the release. We're only just starting a wider release right now as we go. So outline, as I said, fundamentals, some application, lots of questions. So hit me up as we go, and then we're going to get on the gym floor and have a bit of play and a bit of a practical and look at any issues you guys might have come across in your own training or questions your athletes might have had, and we can go from there.
So this term of velocity based training, I actually don't really love it because everyone is training with velocity all the time. If you choose to do an isometric, that is still a choice is about velocity. So velocity is this constant that's always happening in our training. It's just whether you're tracking it or not. So tracking velocity is the real difference here. Everyone's training with velocity, and people who do RPE training always talk about, Well, that was really fast, so therefore the RPE is low. Or, That was easy, that flew up. Or, You really ground out those last few reps. These are all velocity terms just without the objective data. So people are already subjectively doing velocity power fatigue type measures with their eyeballs in training and getting quite good at it. But velocity tracking or velocity based training, as it's more commonly known, is the idea of giving that objective data and going, Okay, well, it looks slow, but how slow? And how slow is it compared to what you were last week? Are you always just a slow lifter? And so that's your baseline. And so it doesn't really matter. Or are you normally really poppy and really fast, but today you're moving slow compared to those numbers.
So should we adjust? Should we make changes? And we'll talk about how to use that data in a second. So in training, velocity is a decision, like I said. So just like we pick exercises and we pick different things, we're picking velocities. Sometimes velocities.
Determined by the choices we make in terms of load, exercise, selection. Come on in. So velocity is the decision. Just like we pick exercises, just like we pick rep ranges, just like we pick rest times, we pick velocities. Sometimes velocity is determined by our first choices, or sometimes velocity can then determine those other choices. Velocity tells us a lot about what's going on in training. So we can use that data to then make decisions in real time or program future decisions as well. So it's a really informative metric when you measure it well. In saying that, though, it's not like when we say velocity based training or velocity training, it's not just about lifting fast. We don't want to just strip weight off the bar and then go, I'll move as fast as possible, chasing one meter per second or 0.8 metres per second. That's one option. That is a way to do, say, for example, explosive power training, dynamic effort work. But I actually think velocity is more helpful when you're doing your heavy strength work because it's really subtle. A change of 0.5 to 0.45 meters per second on, say, a 3RM, that's a huge difference.
That's a 10 % difference in velocity. We can use that on us to determine what we do next. Well, if we're in season, we're doing a single work set, you're way down, let's strip back our accessibility work, or things are moving really great, let's add some weight on. Today's a good day to push harder. So you can use that on both dynamic explosive training, or you can be doing it for power, cleans, jumps, things like that, but also on your heavy work, doing through our arms, doing triples and eight up here. All that stuff is really valuable, but it's contextual. So my 0.5 meters per second is very different from your 0.5 meters per second. So it's tricky to compare between athletes, but I'll show you how you can compare within a single athlete over time. That's where it gets really, really valuable. But historically has been hard to do. And so metric's job is to fix that, make that easier. So there's this idea of, are we using velocity to determine training, or does the training we choose then determine velocity? So we add velocity constraints to our training. These are some examples. So if velocity is slow, we're going to reduce the weight because fatigue might be present.
Sets are going to stop at 20 % velocity loss. We're not going to allow too much fatigue to accumulate within a set. We're keeping all our working sets above 0.75 metres per second as an intent chasing dynamic effort, explosive goal. Really good in season if you're doing a game day priming lift, for example. Don't chase weight, let's just keep you in this 0.8 to 0.7 range. And then the flip side of that is the heavy stuff. The working sets don't start until we get below 0.5 meters per second. So what we're doing here is we're setting a velocity constraint, and everything that comes out of that will be determined from the velocity. And so it's velocity first, load, reps, volume, they all come as a result of what happened with the constraint we set. So get the velocity high, we get power outcomes. Make the velocity low, get the fatigue number high, we get more of a hypertrophy or strength stimulus. So that's a really cool way, and I'll show you some more specific examples shortly. That's a really cool way to use velocity that also auto regulates. Because velocity is responsive to fatigue and readiness, your 0.75 meters per second and load will vary every single week.
So one week, your estimated one rep max might be 200, and so 0.75 is equal to 100. The next week, your estimated one hour due to fatigue is lower, so the load at 0.75 meters per second will also be lower. It follows your fatigue level. So most weeks it will go up and to the right as you get stronger and more powerful. But there'll be weeks where it goes down, particularly for in season athletes, footballers, basketball, soccer, things like that, where you go, Oh, you would just beat this week. Play big minutes, you got a double header for a basketball on the weekend, something like that. This is not the week to go hard. We need to just maintain, get you through, get in the recovery, and then move on. So that's one option for velocity measuring. But the other way is you flip it. And you go, Let's look at our training variables first, and then we'll track velocity outcomes as a performance measure. So let's program five by fives, or three by tens, or cluster sets, or whatever it might be here. And then we use velocity outcomes to reward intent, reward and motivate our athletes, but also see if progress is going in the right direction, not just in how much weight they can lift, but how well they can lift, the quality of their training, which is a really valuable outcome we get from velocity
So some examples of this training variable, first velocity outcome. Second training is just chasing PRs. So just like you chase a new 1RM, or a new 3RM or a new best weight lifted or most reps lifted, you can chase velocity PRs, power PRs, these numbers, which we just added last week to the app, which is a record alert. So when you do a set, you now get a little loading your records and you get a feedback in the app immediately post set that tells you, New Velocity Record at that weight, New all time best power for trap bar deadlift, New most reps at certain weights. You can get those feedback pieces in the training just to make your training better, improve the quality of your training. You can program linearly, but instead of tracking progress on the weight, track it on what we call a curve score or a performance index, which I'll talk about in a second, which is the idea of let's measure your performance across every single set in the gym, not just your top sets. Another one is a jump score of 40 kilos. What's the best power you can make?
So fixed load, but can you lift it faster and create and generate more Watts? That's a really good one for competition in the gym. So this month we're doing trap bar jumps. Who can set the most power? Who can get the most Watts? And then athletes start chasing you 1,000 Watts or 12 Watts per kilogramme of body weight. And so that leader board engagement is really clever as well, which you get with the Teams platform, which we'll talk about it later as well. So it brings up this idea that I mentioned at the start, which is velocity based training versus velocity monitoring or velocity and motion tracking. So velocity based training typically, historically, has rically been this rigid, fixed system of training. You will do speed strength work at 0.75 meters per second, and that is the law. You will do percentage based training, but you will do a daily estimated one. Really rigid, really time consuming and not very effective, to be honest, versus the idea of your coaches, you all know how to program, you've already got great systems. Let's just layer in velocity to add some more richness, add some complexity, add a little bit of fun to it, and train and start tracking progress in multiple dimensions.
Make the entire session higher quality, so we're driving better outcomes because everything is better, because there's just this stickiness of a little bit more feedback, a little bit more engagement, and a little bit more objectivity on things we care about. Because we care about more than just how much weight you lift. We care about the things in the middle that are happening within reps as well. Any questions so far? A lot of nods as we go. Pretty happy with all that? Yeah. Excellent. So let's move on now and talk about some useful applications of velocity. Around the room, though, what have you guys been doing so far in your velocity application? What have you guys been doing with the athletes?
So most of the athletes that we've kept it to athletes over the age of 18. I guess from a bigger program perspective, we've really emphasized in the last two, three weeks of the block, we're chasing it 10.
Sorry. Five. Five blocks. So that's the main application there. And then just getting them into the habit just because it's more of an introductory thing, just tracking in all those big lifts. So really it's more of an introduction and education.
Along with it. A bit of feedback, bit of intent in these peak weeks, if you will, get after it a little harder. Nice, that sounds good. That is exactly number one. Number one is increased training quality. Increased intent, have them more motivated to lift hard instead of just, Oh, these sets don't count. We have a big thing in our gym where it's like, The sets don't count until you get up to the top. It's like, No, they count. I want you to move them with some Christmas. I want you to focus on your intent. I want you to lock in and get engaged. And that's that training quality piece. If you can train like you mean it through all your sets, they'll all add up and you'll get a compound learning effect where every set is better, the top sets will be better as well. You'll add more weight to the bar. But also that'll accumulate. Over the weeks, every week, we're getting two or three more sets that matter and have good power output, good explosives. These are some... Well, I think of them? Well, consider them a hierarchy or a layering of your different methods of velocity based training or velocity tracking.
There are dozens of ways to use velocity, and I absolutely recommend you don't try and do them all at once because it's just really overwhelming and it can be complex. We're going to go through a bunch of different specific uses for velocity today. But that's not to say write them all down and they all have to start next Monday. Quite the opposite, pick one or two, start then go, oh, let's try that thing that Jacob talked about. Well, that doesn't work for us. The kids don't get it. It's a bit too complex. Our athletes are too young, they're in season, whatever it might be. Not all these things have to be done simultaneously in parallel, but you pick and choose. So just like you pick and choose exercises, rep schemes, tests that you might care about at certain times, you try and go, This just isn't working. This isn't showing us or giving us what we wanted, so we need to shift things and you change. So this is a recipe book or an array of things you can choose from, but you bounce around. Don't feel like you have to do them all tomorrow.
So level one, training quality, stuff you already, Ethan, mentioned that you're already doing in here. Level two is performance tracking. So let's take that stuff we're doing in session, measuring power, measuring velocity on 100 kilo deadlift, whatever it might be, and let's track that over time. Does that velocity number go up as a result of good training showing up? If someone misses a session or misses a bunch of sessions, does that number go down? Can we use that to get them back in the gym and go, Well, you're not showing up. Your numbers are going down. Let's get to work. Number three, programming. That's where you start actually using that and go setting parameters, maybe setting velocity targets, or you're prescribing around these velocity numbers in amongst weights, reps, all that stuff still matters. And then level four is bringing it all together and looking longer term. We're in the season right now, we're going into finals. What should we change? What parameters, what variables can we adjust along with exercise selection, range of motion, all that thing out of the stuff to get them the best result. Now in off season, let's crank up the volume.
What velocity numbers can we have that help our athletes understand we're chasing volume right now? It might be higher velocity loss, or it might be more reps at a certain velocity target, or things like that, or chasing simpler metrics like tunnel. All that stuff can work here. So like I said, there's no perfect VBT strategy. You pick and choose, find what works, be willing to start small, and be willing to be iterative and experimental. So I always recommend, pick the thing here that makes the most sense to you guys and your athletes. What's the thing you can explain in a sentence? And your athletes will go, Yeah, I get that. Cool. And then take that, do that. Now we're doing this. Athletes are recording regularly. We've got a history of data. What can we do that makes it a little stickier or makes them train a little bit harder? Or now we're going into a power phase. How can we iterate and adjust? So it can be overwhelming. There's a lot going on, but feel very comfortable experimenting and throwing things out if you hate them. None of this stuff is set in stone. Cool.
So some applications. Improved training quality. So through objective feedback and motivation, what we're doing with it, taking things we're already saying with a subjective look and feel, that was slow, great rep, really poppy, blah, blah, blah, all these words we're already using to talk about the quality. And we're going, Okay, that was really crisp and poppy. That was about 0.8 %. Let's see if we can get 0.85. Giving it a number, giving them targets, because this stuff really helps with training. So there's some great research that says you give athletes feedback, and the more feedback you give them, I'll give you all their slides at the end too, so I don't feel like you have to write everything down. And this is only a sampling of them. Feedback will consistently improve training quality in session, immediately lead to better performance on that same day, but also chronically lead to better performance. So this one here is a group of athletes that did six weeks of jump training. They got no feedback, half feedback, and 100 % feedback. And that was the results after six weeks of just jump training improvement. So 15 % versus a 5 % or 6 % improvement is pretty significant differences.
These two studies here did a really clever thing. They had the exact same programs. So there was a teams of rugby players. They had group A doing one program, group B doing exactly the same program. The only difference was the feedback group got velocity feedback on one exercise in their program. Their squat jumps at the start of the workout. They then did the program for eight weeks, and they then compared their field based performance afterwards. And the group that just got feedback, that was the only difference. Same exercises, same reps and skips. They just saw what numbers they were getting on that 40 kilo squat jump versus not. And the difference was night and day. So this group actually lost power. It was in season as well. So that might be a variable. But you can see these lighter bars are significantly higher on every test. So we're looking at one, one and a half, two, even five % improvements versus negligible change over the eight weeks of training. Ethan?
Is that live, like mid set or.
Like post set? I'll have to get the research papers for you, but I think these guys were after and they were in. So it can be post or in. Some people like the inste nt, some people don't because it can be distracting because it is often a bit of a lag when the feedback comes through. So I like just after the set, particularly with power, if you've got multiple sets, you're doing, say, three threes, do first one, all right, 1100 Watts or 1.2 meters per second. All right, get that again. Get that again. What did you get last week? Oh, 1.2. Let's get 1.3. So you can do it after sets. In set, particularly power work, is just do the reps, get the work done, really high quality, then we'll worry about how that looked afterwards. Still, some pretty compelling differences in results there. So metric offices this. The easiest number is this compared to last time. It's size 11 font or something on the screen. It's tiny. But that number, you're aiming for pluses every single time, particularly on velocity, particularly on power. This is a bad example. This athlete had a... Oh, it's my numbers.
ad a slowest... And I'll show you, these are all from the same workout. This was a bad day. This is early in the morning. I was tired. The session before had been good, and this day was not a good day. So a tenth of a second slower for best rep today compared to last time, that's a big drop. So I did not go above 90 kilos. And I was like, That is me done. I'm cooked here. I'm going to do that one more time, then call it a day on the squats. I was tired and the numbers reflected that. So what you're chasing is the opposite. So athletes should be getting positives here. So plus 0.01, that's enough. That's up. That's good. Progress and moving up on this. The second place you can take that. So that's on a single set. Then on a whole session, you can start looking at multiple sets across this profile shape here. Have you guys had to play with profiles yet? Yeah. Brand new. So it's only been out for a week. But this functionality gives you your load velocity profile automatically calculated during a session. So athletes do, once they've done two sets, they start getting a profile and you get the little grey last time versus today line.
And so this session, every single weight under low velocity for normal. So this is a fatigued day. This was not a good workout. What you should see is the opposite. Purple should be on top of grey. You should be having slightly higher velocities at every load compared to last time. And so it's a nice visual way of going, what's your profile look like? Is your purple above the grey? There's a power option as well. So if you click the toggle there, you can switch to a power profile, which is a curved shape instead. Same thing, though. Green line versus grey line. The green line should be above your last time line. So nice visual way of the whole session together. Quick glance. You look pretty slow today. You got to look at their profile? Oh, yeah, we're all down today. So you can make decisions from that afterwards or on the moment. The next one, which we literally added this week to the app, is the records feed. So you do a set, this loads in, give it five seconds or so, and up come your velocity records. So this here was a different workout.
This is a good day. Velocity record, 0.82 meters per second. That was the fastest rep I'd ever done on a 70 kilo Split squat. So I don't do split squats very often to let the record show, but that's the best I've ever done. So that's great. So excellent. Let's go up. So I did 75 afterwards. So I added more weight onto that and set a record. You can see the little toggle too. You swipe through, there are multiple records. So you can set load, rep, velocity, and power records. I'm just impressed with 75. That's not bad. Six eights leg. That's good. No, no, no. Sorry. Yes. I'll just let you think it is too. No, it's 6 per leg. Unilateral still doesn't split out. So I'm going to add that feature. And then on a team wide or a squad wide basis, you can start looking at a leader board. Look at everyone's peak velocity, and this is just all exercises all in. I've blur out the names because this is an actual leader board. But we've got 30 days, all exercises, all weights, best peak velocity. So it's a pretty broad leader board. You might not want to show that to athletes because they go, But I do two trap bar jumps.
I only do cleans. I do two. So you might filter it. You might go, Okay, let's look at everyone's trap bar jump at 40 kilos instead of fixed weight, fixed exercise. Who can put the best velocity up? Really great way to set, say, a monthly challenge. All right, everyone, this month we're going to do your first exercise off, everyone's going to do a jump, trap bar jump at 30, then two sets of trap bar jump at 40. We're just chasing peak velocity. The weight stays the same, exactly like that rugby study I was talking about. We're just chasing best velocity. You're trying to set a new velocity PR. You can do the same for max load, max relative load, mean velocity, and we're going to add power to this leaderboard shortly as well. So pretty cool ways to use feedback. So I've covered all of these as we go. Set goals, beat last set, set new records, look at the change of shape of your profile, weekly monthly competition, and use the metrics strategically. So you don't always have to just look at velocity. You don't always have to look at velocity power. So power numbers are really handy.
Just chasing the best power number you can on any weight is cool. Eccentric tempo is really good for hypertrophy, rehab, return to play. Also, novice athletes, lifters who rush, it's okay, I don't care what your mean velocity is, but that eccentric tempo and your pause metric has to be two down, one second pause, whatever on the way up. Get them to really control the weights and get feedback on it. It's like, Okay, what did I say? I said, 2 seconds and 1.7. Not slow enough, slow down. So you can use that as well to give objective feedback. A lot of athletes really like numbers. It's why they're athletes. They know the score, they know their best times, they know all that stats and metrics, and we're just adding more stats. Stats that makes it, and in a way that makes the gym stickier and more fun. Any questions on that one there? Feedback. That sounds like the stuff you've already been doing. There's just more options that can go a little layer deeper and get more things here. And so look at the session on a zoomed out level or not just set by set.
You can start looking at sessions and then look at the population on a leader board. Look at how everyone's traveling. We're going to look at tracking progress. So the classic you're probably seeing is this idea of estimating one RM. You create a load velocity profile. So you do three to four sets, different weights, see what the linear relationship is between velocity and load. Then you pick a number. It's called a minimum velocity threshold. Depending on the exercise, it might be around 0.4, 0.35, maybe 0.3 meters per second, so slow. And that correlates with your 1RM. This works really nice for the power lifts, squat, bench, conventional deadlift, but it breaks as soon as you do things like a trap bar, or a partial range squat, or a narrower grip bench press, or a floor press, or an RDL. Things tend to change change from this consistent, steady model. Once you get away from a moderate height lifter with a moderate strength level on a standard lift, the number gets broken. So what I prefer instead is what we call performance index. Instead of looking for what that is as a weight, we look at the entire area of that velocity profile.
Question just resting around. So we're looking at the entire shape and size of that. So you can move this out by lifting heavier, and it brings the profile out here to the right, or you can bring it up by lifting every weight faster. And so you're now rewarding effort across every single load during that session. So we are going to add a calculation for this automatically into metric. So don't worry about getting... You don't have to get your algebra out, this will be tracked in the app as the athlete does the session and then also reported week on week. So you can see this number going up for each exercise. But it's a cleaner way to just go, Okay, what's your index? 107. What was it last week? 105. Cool. Progress. Or over an eight week or five week block, you go, Okay, what happened with your performance index? We went up by 10 points or 4 % increase. That's huge. Great job. Great block. So it's another way of rewarding good training. The other one I like as well, it's more specific to power exercise, is what's your maximum theoretical point of power output?
I'm not necessarily naming you to train at exactly that number, but if that graph goes up and expands, then that number will get bigger. And so it's another objective way of saying, Okay, cleans, jumps, whatever it might be, what's your power on that? And are we generating more Watts every week as a result of good training? Getting stronger, getting more explosive. So they're the two profiles I like the most. And don't worry about calculating, we're working on that at metrics. That will be added to the app and the Teams dashboard soon. So metric will do this for you. Review and share these profiles. We're just tracking progress. So just like you do an IMTP and look at that week on week, just like you do a 20 minute sprint, it's doing measures that relate specifically to the work being done in the gym. So that gym becomes sticky. It's like, Okay, we're chasing a performance index. That's why we do this exercise. We're doing this exercise. Let's see if we can get that performance index to go up. For us, we found this really helps take athlete's attention away from just how much weight's on the bar.
Sometimes that's important. People got to pay people to get strong. That's still valuable. But athletes can be just like, Oh, I've got to score 100. I've got to score 150. I've got to do double body weight. And then get really attached to how many kilos or how many times multiples of body weight are on the bar. To a point that can become a limit. There's a law of diminishing returns with how strong field based athletes need to be. And so we can blend that in with the world. Let's chase power as well. Let's chase this performance index, which is a more overall measure of your effort and your quality of training. Three, programming. With fatigue monitoring, order regulation, real time adjustments, potentially, and optimizing stress in the gym. So have you guys heard about the term order regulation? Familiar with the concept somewhat? Yeah. So it's really the active term for readiness. So readiness is how ready you are to train. It's a combination of your fatigue, your life stress, your motivation, the music that's on, how well you're fed, how hydrated you are, caffeineated, all those things mixed with fatigue and the such. Order regulation is taking that information, trying to measure it some way and going, Okay, readiness is low by whatever measure.
Let's not push you super hard today because you're not in a state where you're going to be able to handle and recover from that stress. We're adding stress to an already stressed system. It's not going to be effective. And there's good research to back that up. So ultimately, what we're doing is we're trying to, again, create that light green line, not the dark green line. We want our athletes to super compensate. We fatigue them during the session, but they quickly recover and they get better as a result of the stimulus. If you ignore those things. We just have a situation where they just tread water, or worst case, they go backwards and end up getting burnt out, or overtrained, or injured. So we want to create an optimal section. Now, it's not to say you never work hard. You still have to work hard. And there'll be times times where you might spend some time down here in order to get a longer term super compensation. There are high volume blocks, there are high intensity blocks. That's a thing. But if we only ever do crappy training where we just smash ourselves every single workout and never get recovery, we'll spend our time treading water.
That's exercise, that's fine, but it's not training and performance. We want to make people better. So VBT and velocity tracking allows us to do that with more precision. That's really what we're doing here. And that's really about avoiding training to failure. So training to failure is this idea of... Particularly it's measured in velocity loss, with 35 % to 45 % being failure in a lot of these studies, while 15 % to 25 % being work, but not impossible, is the distinction they're looking for here. Repeatedly, studies have shown that doing less work per set, but doing multiple sets that are easier, is the more optimal way to train. So this here is an acute training study where they looked at 48 hours jump performance in a 3x8 versus 3x8 four training protocol. They did half the amount of work, significantly more fatigue in the three by eight group immediately post session. Forty eight hours later, that three by eight group is still suppressed. So we have over a two day period. So say they train on a Thursday, they've got a game on a Saturday, we've made them a worse jumper from that session on Thursday.
Whereas the three by four group has actually gotten better. We've made them three and a half, four % better in two days. So getting this balance right is important. It has a meaningful effect, particularly in the season. And on a longer term basis, these are multi week studies, which is the same thing. Three by four versus three by sets to failure, significant improvement in performance versus they went backwards for four weeks and they end up with two % gains of about eight weeks, which is a pretty horrible result. And then over here, 20 % group significantly beat the 40 % group. Interesting with the 40 % velocity loss group, you see a drop in Type 2 muscle fibers as well in terms of percentage. So we're actually making them more aerobic and potentially stealing away some of their explosive power by working them too hard. And so a lot of this stuff is often measured in velocity loss, which we'll look at out on the gym floor too. And so here's an example that puts it all together. I looked at percentage based training versus velocity based training using velocity numbers to determine the training.
And again, the velocity based group got significantly stronger over, I want to say it was eight weeks. Sorry, I don't remember this study, eight to 12 weeks of studying, of training, and they see a marked improvement in strength. Both groups got stronger, but the velocity group got stronger, as compared to the other group. These are the target numbers I look at. Under 15 %, that's your peaking and your power zone. So if you're in a taper type situation, in season game day lifts, is under 15 % for strength and power lifts. All power training, probably under 15 %. 15 to 25 seems to be the optimal range, repeatedly shown in research to be the optimal strength and hypertrophy range. So it's actually better to do this range, but do multiple sets for your hypertrophy work. And then 25 % plus, probably even 30 % plus, this a grey area between 25 and 30, that's grinding. That's where it's really tough work. Cori. So would you be using, say, the 15 and 25 as a way to dictate to people and clients how you want to be working hard enough if they're under 15? Yeah. I personally am a chronic under 15 % lifter.
I'll do a set and I'll look at it and I'll be like, I thought that was tough and it wasn't tough. You can match it to an RPE type situation you like. That's like four reps and reserve, six, six and a half RPE. This is your seven and a half to 9 ish territory, seven and a half to eight and a half. And then this is your nine and a half plus, broadly speaking. Not perfect across all exercises, but that's a good ballpark. So if you've got an athlete who you want to be giving after proper sets of six, sets of eight, sets of five even, and they're only giving you 12, 15 % velocity loss, either they're not working hard enough on the early reps and so they're coasting, so the whole graph is flat, or they're just not letting it... They've got two more reps they should be giving you. So you either add weight or add reps. Yeah, absolutely. Really good. That's the best use of this is getting people who chronically train here when you want them training here. So I'll do a set and it's like 11 % velocity loss, five more kilos less, and you go up or you add another rep and you go again.
Really simple tools. What was your velocity loss? 11. When we're off season, we're working here. You can push them. You can use this range as a teaching tool to know where people's limits really are as well. It's like, Let's do some sets. Let's get 10 reps. You have to keep adding weight until your 10 rep set is 30 % or more. Do it safely with spotters and all that stuff. And only athletes have got good technique. This is advanced stuff now, but you can push them. Let's get 30 plus % velocity loss and then go, Okay, how's that looking? Great. Well, now we know what your limit is. You can do that weight for so many more reps than we thought you could. And now you've pushed out their mental limit. And so you can now work with in that and you've expanded what these two ranges are going to look like come season time. Yeah, really powerful. Any other questions? Any follow up on questions on that one as well?
I think that's probably the main thing we do use. Especially on week five, we go 20 %. But knowing that 15 to 25 range, especially for strength and hypertrophy, that's probably something you might look at potentially.
Incorporating a bit more. With the hypertrophy piece, this group will win because it's got more volume. But if you volume match in here, so if you do the extra sets, so that's the big caveat with the hypertrophy piece, is doing 15, 25 %, but only doing one set, the 25 % would have been better. But that's where you do two, three sets, you get more working sets in. What we're really doing here in that 20 to 25 % range is we're going, Okay, this is challenging but recoverable so that it doesn't affect the next workout. So if you're training Monday, Wednesday, Friday, if you only have a work above 25 % Monday, you're still going to carry fatigue into Wednesday. We're just going to carry more fatigue into Friday. Those two workouts are compromised. But if we hit that 20 % range, good workout Monday, fully recovered Wednesday, fully recovered Friday. So we allow ourselves to accumulate across a week, across a month, across a year, more good sessions. That one session on Monday in the higher percentage loss might have been a great session, but it leads to two average sessions that follow it.
So three goods beat a great and two averages, if you will. So it's really what we're doing here is we're trying to accumulate good workouts by pacing ourselves for lack of a... Could I find a less sexy term than that? That's really what we're doing here. But we're just trying to get good workouts but recoverable and get bounced back, particularly in season. Athletes are in season, they got to work and then they got to play. So that's how I'd work with velocity loss numbers. Another option is to select, set and use velocity targets. So having training ranges, say, for example, I want you lifting between 0.7 and 0.8 meters per second. That's just an arbitrary number. I just picked that. There's nothing magic about those numbers. But really, what we're saying when we do that is I want you lifting between 90 and 100 kilos. But because velocity is dynamic in response to fatigue, this will shift in response to if you get stronger or move out. If you fatigue, it will go in. That's really what we're doing here. But we're keeping them in that range because when they lift at 120, it gets ugly.
So let's set them a target, let's have them lift with good quality, and then we'll shift that down over time. So at the moment, early phase, the target is 0.7, 0.8. Maybe in a month's time, we might get 0.7, 0.6, and we'll let them grind a little more. So it's another way to control the weight and the quality of the training by setting them a target and a number. And so it also order regulates, it's dynamic. Another option is to set a working velocity. Below that velocity, the working set start. So you have to keep adding weight to the bar until we hit something, five something, 0.5, 0.5, 5, 7, 8, something like that. So we want these sets to be tough. We want them now above 110 kilos in this example graph. So we're looking for keep adding weight until we hit that 0.6. Cool. Now that's our working weight. We're going to do two doubles or two triples or two fives at that weight and whatever you might be. A cool way to use this is to do it progressively. So over, say, five, five week blocks, you might go the target is 0.8, 0.75, 0.7, 0.65, 0.6. And each block, the working sets get harder and closer to 1RM as the athlete gets more confident and more mature.
Or they progress through their off season if it's an off season setting. Another option is to train for maximum power. So you do set around the point of maximum power. At exactly maximum power, it might be a red herring that might be a waste of time chasing specifically that. But I know for a fact doing cleans out here, closer to a one room is not what we want with a clean or with a loaded jump. We want our athletes working in a place that generates lots of Watts. It doesn't have to be exactly the maximum, but somewhere in that ballpark is probably what we're chasing. It's a good way of, Okay, you're cleaning nicely, or you're doing jumps nicely. I don't care how much weight's on the bar. I care how much power you generate. We're looking for 1,000 Watts or 10 Watts per kilo, whatever their number might be, after you've done a couple of weeks of setting up and tracking where they're at. The aim is still to not auto regulate. That's an important point. So the goal isn't to auto regulate everything just because we can and because we have these tools and the data.
We want to keep the program the program. But when we need to, we break these tools out to help ourselves adjust if required. Close enough is good enough. People tend to be like, Oh, you said 0.5, and I'm doing 0.5. That's a work set. That's close. That's in the range. As long as the intent is good and the effort was there, plus or minus point two. So if the target was five, 4 8 to 5 2 is probably fine. Also, though, don't ignore other variables. So all these other things in your training don't get ignored when you start training velocity. It's a big mistake. Everything has to be around velocity. It's a thing. It's part of your program, but it's not the whole thing. So load, the reps, the rest time, your exercise prescription, scheduling, sequence, all those things matter. Training schedule is really big with team sport athletes. So what the rest of their week looks like, when you should do your power work, when you should program this up. If they always come in on Thursday post training, their velocity is always going to be down. So you don't need to keep jumping at that shadow every single time they come in with a low velocity on Thursday, it's like, yeah, they come in at 7 PM and they just train from 5 to 6.30. Of course, they're going to be a little bit depressed today.
That's okay. We expect that. So keep all those things, plus your own coaching skill, focusing on technique, keep that part of the puzzle as well. So that's really important there. And then the final one, which is a one slide piece, is periodisation, putting it all together. And it's just taking everything we've just talked about, all the intent piece is the feedback, the motivation, along with the programming, along with the progress tracking in multiple directions. And you're like, Okay, what's our season look like? What's our next multiple five week cycle is going to look like? And how might we use velocity to chase the goal we want with certain populations or certain individuals within that? And so this isn't my place to tell you what to do because you've already got a programming structure. It's already working great. You just go, Well, where do these things fit in? And hopefully these are some things that might want to fit in with your program. Any questions on all that practical theory stuff? I think we'll probably get a couple out there as well. Yeah. So we'll get headed under the gym floor. We'll take a couple of minute break.
We're headed to the gym floor. I'll show you some of the tricks with setting up metric, making sure you get good framing positions. We'll go through the app and then we'll just riff from there is the plan. Nothing else on that while we're here? We're not getting any questions from the last three slides. You didn't miss much. That's okay. We're recording it. J arred wanted me to record it for him. I'm also going to put it on the VVT Coach website. I hope that's all right with you guys. If you don't want to be in the video, let me know and I can edit that out. But let's head out to the gym floor. I'll give you the video. I'll also get you the slides afterwards as well. Head out to the gym floor, let's have a look at the practical and talk shop.
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