the power of speed: the what, why and how of velocity-based training
While not essential, tracking bar velocity serves as one of the most useful tools for tracking rep intensity and optimising session intensity. This short blog is going to run through why and how we use Velocity-Based Training (VBT) for our athletes.
WHAT IS VBT AND WHAT IS IT USED FOR?
Velocity based training is exactly as described, basing your training on how fast you’re moving in a given exercise. VBT technologies give you instant feedback on how fast the bar moved. It goes without saying that you must modify the load used to focus on different qualities. For example, if you’re trying to do a fast lift like a Barbell Squat Jump, you might use around 40% of your 1RM (1 rep maximum) as opposed to working on strength where you might use 80% +.
This made coaches ask exactly how fast the bar needs to move to improve specific qualities. So now we know, with decent confidence, how fast you should be moving in different exercises to get improvements in different qualities. Not only this, but some other awesome benefits came along with this.
Tracking your speed of movement in training allows us to (I will expand on these):
Prescribe weights to focus on specific areas (speed, speed-strength, strength-speed, strength, max strength). Put simply, either you’re focusing on FORCE or RATE OF FORCE development.
Track improvements in strength without testing at maximum intensity
Autoregulate training intensity to mitigate fatigue accumulation
Improve athlete intent in training
After we’ve covered these basic why’s, I’ll go through how we make the most of VBT technologies at Ethos Performance.
Want to know how to get the most out of your athletes with VBT and what else a VBT technology will give you? Read on…
part 1: why use velocity-based training
ACHIEVE YOUR TRAINING GOALS
Imagine you’re a coach without VBT technology. You decide that an athlete you’re coaching needs to improve their power production. In order to train power, we operate at a speed called ‘Strength-Speed’ (essentially sub-maximal loads moved quickly). It’s an arbitrary term that defines weights around 50-70% 1RM (dependent on the exercise) where Power (Work/Time) is maximised. Now you can use percentage-based training with effectiveness, but an important issue that arises is how the athlete presents on a given day.
While we can know that 70% will move faster than 90%, we don’t know with precise certainty what percentage will give us maximal power production because we can’t accurately predict the athletes level of readiness. For example, if we prescribe 70% and the athlete is too fatigued to move it quickly, the exercise won’t train power, it will be training strength. On the other end, if the athlete presents feeling amazing, then you might miss opportunities to apply progressive overload (gradual increases in training load allow for continual improvement).
With usage of VBT, we’re able to know exactly how fast every rep of an exercise is. The second the athlete starts doing sets, we know whether we’re effectively ticking our training goals or if we’re walking into walls and getting nowhere.
TRACK IMPROVEMENTS
Testing is an extremely important part of the training process. It allows us to track improvements, stagnations or decreases in performance and informs our programming decisions where otherwise we would just be going off our best guess. In typical settings, strength testing is done via rep-maximum tests (RM) where the athlete lifts a maximal weight for a given number of reps (typically 1, 3 or 5 reps, i.e. 1RM, 3RM or 5RM, respectively) and jump testing is done via things like broad jump, vertical jump, triple-hop, lateral bound etc.
Your ability to produce force underpins many physical qualities like power and speed and forms a huge part of being resilient to injury. As such, coaches will commonly test big compound movements like squat, bench or deadlift to ensure that their program is working. Without testing, there’s no other way to know if the program is having the desired effect.
So we know we should test, but there’s a glaring reason why NOT to strength test. Because when you go as heavy as possible in 3-5 exercises, you can accumulate a fair bit of fatigue. This is understandable and expected, but as strength & conditioning coaches, we must remember that strength & conditioning training is not the number 1 priority. Athletes will not win games, competitions or fights because we improved their squat strength, they’ll win because they had the requisite technical and tactical skills to defeat their opponents and the physicality to back it up. So if we reduce the quality of training because we tested too hard, we lose opportunities for skill improvement.
The big benefit with VBT is that we can track how fast a submaximal weight moves. For example, instead of doing a 1RM test, we can ask them to move the heaviest weight possible at 0.5m/s (metres per second - the way VBT tracks speed) which is around 80% of an athletes max bench press. If we find that they move 5kg more than before at the same speed after a 12-week block of training we know they’re stronger without going anywhere near maximum intensity, which is a huge benefit when trying to manage fatigue and training load.
MANAGE TRAINING INTENSITY: ‘KNOWING WHEN TO START YOUR ROADTRIP’
When training athletic populations, the context around every session is primary. A good analogy is like driving from your home to work. Depending on the time of day you choose to drive, it will either be an extremely easy drive or a very long and arduous drive, and there are a million other factors too! Was there an accident? Are you poorly slept and thus at a risk of causing an accident? Are you really annoyed and feel like driving just a teeny tiny 20km/h over the speed limit? Have you got a lot on your mind and are forgetting to focus on the road?
This is a really good analogy for what it’s like to be an athlete. Your coach has the session (route) planned, but how well you’re able to do that session and how much you get from it will largely depend on your condition on the day. Just like above, are you tired, poorly slept, emotionally absent, sore? Or are you fresh, stable, keen to train and focused? Commonly, it’s extremely hard to tell how an athlete is feeling, and it’s rare to have the time to address these factors on the spot with the amount of time available even if you do know. And much like taking a roadtrip, once you’re in traffic you can’t get out of it, and you’ll never get that time back. This is exactly like training, once you’ve fatigued the athlete, you can’t un-fatigue the athlete, they just need to recover.
So VBT acts like a map that tells you how the traffic is and how long it’ll take to get to your destination. If you look at the map and see that there’s no traffic and the ETA is quick, you jump onto the road ASAP. Just like driving, if you see your athlete moving a given weight 10% faster than usual, you know that they’re in a good state to train and can thus perform better and get more from the session.
IMPROVE INTENT IN TRAINING
Last but not least, is the benefit of intra-session competition. The great benefit of VBT is that after every single rep you can see what speed you hit, and it’s glaringly obvious if you’ve hit the velocity target and at what weight you did it. Athletes clue in to this and, for lack of a better phrase, send it. So do I! The element of personal competition created by trying to get faster and faster adds the competitive element to training we love that is sometimes lacking in gym training.
The adjoining benefit of this, is the return on investment that athletes get from maximal intent in training. If every rep an athlete does is done at maximum effort, things like neural drive, fibre recruitment, rate coding and rate of force development will all increase, making your training more effective.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
Tracking velocity during your lifting sessions is far from essential, but it holds some fantastic benefits if you choose to invest in a velocity-based training technology. It’s likely that you won’t wish to invest in one, so if you’d like to know some alternatives to prescribing training using VBT, try the following blog out for size, its methods are those we use with our online athletes regularly!
Can we touch on:
Using peak power prescription (wattage) instead of M/S always (as something we also like doing at ETHOS)
Different types of devices we can use. EG: Gymaware, FLEX, PUSH.
What to do if you don’t have VBT device?
Part 2: how to use velocity-based training technologies
All methods of VBT will tick the goals above (managing training intensity, increasing intent and tracking genuine improvements). What I will do below is outline how we can use VBT to guide our training and list some drawbacks of each particular method.
VELOCITY-FIRST WEIGHT PRESCRIPTION
Typically, practitioners will use tables like the one below to guide their training. What we do is here start with the goal in mind, which will be the improvement of one of the below qualities. For example, we might decide that our athlete is strong, but needs to improve their power output via some dedicated power training. This training typically lives in the strength-speed realm (0.7-1.0m/s range). So, we pick a benchmark for the athletes to hit and prescribe our sets and reps around it. For example, Box Squat, 3 sets of 5 repetitions at 0.7m/s. Don’t tell them what weight to use, just tell the athlete to keep upping the weight until they’re hitting 0.7m/s and try to increase the weight they use at this velocity. Very simple, very effective and achieves the desired goal.
DRAWBACKS
The issues I take with this method of prescription are that a specific velocity prescription doesn’t tell us about genuine power output and that each range is quite broad. Firstly, if we plan to improve power, the velocity of the bar doesn’t actually tell us the power of the rep, it just tells us the velocity. This is valuable, as we can assume that we’re ticking the box if we’re within a velocity range. The issue is that the loads you can use between a given range vary differently which affects power output greatly, which leads me to wonder, which velocity within ‘strength-speed’ will genuinely improve the arbitrarily defined quality of ‘strength-speed’ maximally?
This applies for all other velocity ranges, and my personal fix for this is to prescribe a velocity range a little tighter than outlined in tables like the one below. For example, if I want to improve speed-strength, I will prescribe a range like 1.2-1.3m/s or give a minimum velocity that must be hit e.g. minimum 1.0m/s. This will ensure you can more effectively track the impact of training within the range that you pick.
WEIGHT-FIRST VELOCITY TRACKING
This has become a recent personal favourite because of the personal competition it yields, especially within loaded jumps. It works particularly well with athletes you’ve coached for a little bit longer and can thus prescribe with some more certainty, and it goes like this. First, pick a weight that you know an athlete will hit within a general velocity band that you’re trying to target. A rule of thumb for me is to use a weight which the athlete will definitely move fast enough for the velocity range. Instead of prescribing the velocity target, tell the athlete to hit as high a speed as possible using the weight you’ve prescribed and track it. Because the weight stays the same and there’s less meddling with weight selection like when trying to hit a specific velocity, it’s far simpler for athletes to experience and understand the improvements that they’re experiencing which as a uniquely impactful motivator and once again ensures maximum effort.
DRAWBACKS
The drawback with this is similar to the first in that, to an extent, you have to take somewhat of a guess at the weight they use according to a desired outcome velocity. This can be remedied by prescribing a specific velocity in Week 1 of a program and making subsequent weeks prescribed based off weight instead of velocity so that Week 1 can be used as a benchmark to improve from.
DROP-OFF VELOCITY TARGETS
This method is particularly useful with any interventions aimed at improving endurance qualities like High Volume Power Training, where the main focus is retaining high outputs over a longer period of time. A fantastic benefit of VBT technologies here is your ability to objectively define fatigue levels in a given set and set parameters on how much slower you’re happy for the reps to become. For example, you can have the athlete find a weight that moves at 1.0m/s during a Barbell Countermovement Jump and set a maximum 15% drop-off. Once you try, you realise that despite the typically recommended 3-6 reps for power training, athletes typically have many more reps in the tank that will move fairly quickly.
Additionally, not only for the training of repeat power, this is another tool for autoregulation as opposed to searching for fatigue. For example, set an athlete to find a weight that moves at 0.7m/s and give them a maximum two reps that can move below 0.7m/s. This will ensure that athletes aren’t accumulating as much fatigue in each set and act as another tool for weight selection.
part 3: POWER TARGETS AND PROFILING
By now it’s clear that velocity is a meaningful tool for maximising training prescription. Another piece of data that VBT devices give you is Power (i.e. work/time), which is particularly useful for both profiling and prescription. This is a topic covered particularly well by ‘https://www.vbtcoach.com/’ and I’ll to outline our applications of power based training here.
WHY POWER?
To cover it quickly, for a given load in an exercise you will move it at a given speed, the intersection between ‘Load’ and ‘Velocity’ is power, and within an exercise there will be a perfect intersection between the weight on the bar and the speed you lift it that gives us maximum power. A good analogy is that I can throw a bouncy ball faster than a cricket ball, but if I throw them both at the same speed, there will be one that hurts more to get hit by despite the identical speed. Likewise I could try to overarm throw a 20kg ball of the same size at you but there’s no way I could achieve the desired speed because of the weight of the ball.
So that’s power training, finding the weight in an exercise that expresses the most power, and training at that weight.
HOW DO I PROGRAM POWER-BASED TRAINING?
Power-based training is very similar to VBT, with the vast difference being that you aren’t looking for a specific power output, you are looking for one of three major power landmarks.
Maximal power output: Pick an exercise and build up by 10-20kg increments, track the power of each each weight and you will find that one particular weight will yield the most power
Supra-maximal weight: After you’ve figured out what weight yields peak power, you can choose to train above this weight, which will yield lower power
Sub-maximal weight: After you’ve figured out what weight yields peak power, you can choose to train below this weight, which will yield lower power
The key training principle is simple, aim for an exercise, set x rep and volume load prescription that will give you the adaptation you’re after. Why use above or below peak power? The same reason we apply variety and progressive overload, accomodation. Accomodation occurs when a given training load (e.g. 3 x 5 @ 100kg) no longer yields any adaptation, and something needs to be changed. For example if you do 3x5 @ 100kg for 4 weeks and you can’t go any heavier, you need to change something. You could reduce weight and hit it more for more reps or vice versa. The goal here is to give the body a novel stimulus which will continue to drive change in the body. This why one might choose to go above or below maximal power, because it stands to reason that you may need to alter the stimulus applied so that you can either improve the athletes speed or force output potential so that they can produce more power.
Final notes
Velocity-based training is very simple but also very complex. The trick to getting better at applying it in your contexts is simply to use it more. Get familiar with your device, different velocity/power readings on different exercises, variations and goals. This will hone your understanding of its application more than simply reading about it. And don’t forget, technologies aren’t necessary to improve athlete performance. Many athletes and coaches improve all the time without it and will continue to do so. Don’t put the cart before the horse, learn fundamental training principles then apply more complex training tools and technologies.