> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://adamringler.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # #041 Monday Minutes: Answering Audience Submitted Question on Force Plates - URL: https://adamringler.com/podcast/041/ - Published: 2019-08-05T15:34:09.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-21T12:11:40.000Z - Description: In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, we're returning to our Monday Minute theme and answering an audience-submitted question. - Author: Adam Ringler - Tags: Decoding Excellence, #podcast, Testing and Assessment In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, we're returning to our **Monday Minute** theme and answering an audience submitted question regarding force plates. I reached out to my good friend, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Newman University, **Stryder Blackburn**, to help me set the tone for the episode. I appreciate you!You can find Coach Blackburn on Twitter at [**@Stryder9090**](https://twitter.com/stryder9090?ref=adamringler.com) As a reminder, our Monday Minutes shows are a quick 10-15 minute episode where I discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week. I believe with conviction, you'll take away something interesting from this show and I hope it delivers you a little bit of value in your day. As always, thank you for supporting **The Decoding Excellence Show**! In addition to those social mediums, you can head over to [**AdamRingler.com/Newsletter**](http://www.adamringler.com/newsletter?ref=adamringler.com) and sign-up for my weekly newsletter. This is a newsletter for the curious. It's chalked full of interesting articles I've read through the week, things I'm exploring and finding fascinating through my week, and a collections of thought experiences and resources I've cultivated. It's essentially a Birchbox for performance-related articles and musings. If you are looking to help grow and support the Decoding Excellence show, navigate over to [**Buy Me a Coffee**](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/AdamRingler?ref=adamringler.com). Buy Me A Coffee is a an easy & fun way to support the show. For the price of a Grande Latte ☕ you can support the show and help us maintain the quality of the content. One hundred percent of the contributions go directly to supporting the hosting fees associated with operating this podcast. If any of the material resonates with you, I'd love for you engage with me at [**@AdamRingler**](https://www.twitter.com/adamringler?ref=adamringler.com) Thanks again for listening to the Decoding Excellence Show! I appreciate all the support growing this Sport Science, Strength & Conditioning, and High-Performance Coaching resource. If you have taken anything away from the show, please login to iTunes and navigate to [**Decoding Excellence**](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?mt=2&ref=adamringler.com) page and leave us a review. --- --- --- ## Key Takeaways - [Force plates](https://adamringler.com/understanding-force-plate-testing-in-basketball/) serve two purposes: auditing the training process, to see whether outputs like peak power and rate of power development are actually improving, and assessing neuromuscular readiness, to see whether those outputs have dropped enough to warrant an intervention. - The specific outputs Adam watches include rate of power development in the 0 to 50 and 50 to 100 millisecond windows, peak force, left-right asymmetries, stiffness, eccentric-to-propulsive ratios, and load-explode drive. - Context decides which metrics matter. A force trace can be sliced hundreds of ways, and what matters for a jumping sport like basketball or volleyball will differ from hockey or the throws, so the population, the sport, and the organization set the priorities. - Protocol choices should fit the athletes: the staff moved from no-arm-swing countermovement jumps to jumps with arm swing because that is how their basketball and volleyball athletes actually jump, accepting noisier data for a more familiar movement and testing three to six jumps to build a fatigue picture. ## Listen and Subscribe Find this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?ref=adamringler.com) and [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/093GVrPwd9l832q3EWhVKc?ref=adamringler.com), or use the player above. --- ## Go Further in This Episode Enjoyed this conversation? Here is how to get more from it: - **Read the transcript below** to revisit key ideas at your own pace. - **Share this episode** with a coach or colleague who would benefit. - **Subscribe to the Decoding Excellence Show** on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?ref=adamringler.com), [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/093GVrPwd9l832q3EWhVKc?ref=adamringler.com), or your favorite app. - **Join the newsletter** at [adamringler.com/newsletter](https://adamringler.com/newsletter/) for weekly insights on human performance. --- ## Episode Transcript *This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.* \[00:00:00\] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence show. Hey everybody this is your host Adam Ringler and welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show Monday minutes. It is a brief 5 to 10 minute episode where we are catching up on everything that is happening in our industry. Things were reading, things were checking out, things that we are experimenting with, exploring and it is meant to just be a quick little summary, \[00:00:55\] Little tidbits, little breadcrumbs of things that are happening around our strength conditioning and high performance industry. Like always if you enjoy the show, there's a couple ways that you can support it. The very first thing I would recommend is please head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Pop in your email, I promise I won't spam you and occasionally about once a month I'll send you an email. It will be things that I'm reading almost like a \[00:01:23\] Monthly recap of these Monday Minute episodes. I think you'll get a lot out of it. I explained to my friends that it is essentially the birch box of newsletters. You don't know what you're gonna get but you know whatever you receive is gonna be chock full of great information. So head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Hey everybody, welcome to the Monday Minute. I'm your host Adam Ringler and today we're gonna do something a little bit different. Every week after I make a \[00:01:53\] Publication, I usually get flooded with Twitter or Instagram DMs asking some very specific questions about whatever we're talking about. Most of the times they are relevant to support science or performance sciences and I thought rather than just discussing maybe the latest trends in our industry, we take a moment to address one question that I get from the audience every single week. So what I did was I went out and asked some of my favorite people in the world to ask some \[00:02:30\] Of these user-submitted, audience-submitted questions and I'll take the remainder of the Monday Minute's time and try to provide some answers and provide some clarity and just flesh out some of the details for every question that I receive. So without further ado, here is my good friend Coach Strider Blackburn. Head Coach, Strength Conditioning, Newman University. Hey everybody, this is Strider Blackburn, Head Strength Conditioning Coach from Newman University. I'm joining the \[00:03:05\] Decoding Excellence Show today to read some audience-submitted questions. All right, Adam, first question we got here. What metrics do you look at when evaluating performance on force plates? Strider, man, thanks for reading this audience question. I could probably go on and on talking about what we do from a force plate standpoint. I look at the utilization of force plates in a dualistic manner, right? The first way that we can use it is to audit our training process. So we \[00:03:35\] Can look at our athletes actually generating greater absolute outputs, peak power, for instance, or rate of power development or load-exploiter drive, if you're familiar with, the smart of science's force plates and their software system. The second way that I utilize force plates are to assess the neuromuscular readiness or the readiness to train for our student athletes. So are things like rate of power development decreasing significantly or enough to warrant some \[00:04:06\] Necessary intervention? Some of the other parameters that the force plates spit out, whether it is RPD 0 to 50 milliseconds, RPD 50 to 100 milliseconds, look at things like stiffness or the eccentric to propulsive ratios. But nonetheless, what's most important, I think, with utilization of force plates is that there are nearly hundreds of different ways of slicing and dicing this force trace. So what might be important for me might be very different for you. What I might \[00:04:42\] Look at for, you know, a jumping dominant sport like basketball might be something that you don't care about for ice hockey or, you know, track and field or your discus throwers or things like that. So context is very much key for whatever population that you're looking at. In addition to that, there's some things that we do as well, right? I first came here and I started out with using encounter movement jump with no arm swing because I thought that would be a \[00:05:12\] Much more valid way of determining the lower body kinematics of the jump, right? It would be more sensitive to changes because there wouldn't be an influence of arm swing mechanics. Then I realized that context is key. Our basketball athletes, our volleyball athletes, want to utilize their arm swing in it. Yes, it makes the data a little bit more noisy, but it's also a movement pattern that is very familiar for them. So what we ended up doing was okay, we're going to \[00:05:43\] Continue to go through our warm-up protocol and we'll continue to go through our our submax jumps and essentially our force play testing protocol, but we're now going to allow a counter movement jump with arm swing. So that's another key parameter that we've we've changed over the course of of our time is utilizing arm swing on most of our jumps. We also do a number of different jumps. We do upwards from three to six different counter movement jumps and we get a \[00:06:14\] Little bit of a fatigue index as well. We can pull out their best jump. We could average the six jumps. We could take the worst jump. We could drop the top two and the bottom two. There's a hundred different ways of looking at it and we've experimented with our data sets looking at a wide variety of different ways of doing it. So ultimately, it really depends on what is important for you and what is important for the context and the situation that you work within. So it's \[00:06:41\] Going to be not only population specific, but it could be sport specific. It could be organizational specific. So ultimately, you really need to make those decisions based on, you know, the landscape in which you work in and the people that you work with. So what parameters are going to be important will be determined by what your organization values. So it's really hard to answer that and it's also, I don't want to lead you down a rabbit hole of what is \[00:07:07\] Important for University of Colorado and what is important for us and what's important for me. But ultimately, those are just a few of the things that I specifically look for. Look at RPD, look at peak force. We look at asymmetries across both of those. We look at low and exploding drive and a number of other different force place specific outputs. \[00:07:33\] Hey, everybody. Thanks for tuning in to this Monday Minute Show. I hope you took something away from it. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right? The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at Adam Wrangler dot com forward slash newsletter. And like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great articles, research papers, sort of daily notes, things I'm finding fascinating and experimenting \[00:08:04\] With and being a human guinea pig with to try to change my own behaviors, my own habits. But ultimately, to really try to improve my life and get something a little bit more meaningful out of it. So head over to Adam Wrangler dot com forward slash newsletter, pop in your email. And I promise you, you'll get a welcome email and you'll start receiving those monthly updates. And you won't regret it. I'm not going to spend send you a bunch of spam messages or \[00:08:30\] Anything like that. I really think that you'll get a lot out of it. And and check it out. I get questions every single time we publish either an article or the latest update to the Decoding Excellence Show. And the question I often receive is, how do I support this show? But we have a new way that the audience and the crowd and everybody else here can support the Decoding Excellence show. Head over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Wrangler. It's actually not buying me \[00:09:02\] A coffee. I know the name sounds sort of confusing or misleading if you will. But what it is is it's a platform, sort of a crowdsourcing way of of donating to the show. And the idea is that you would donate a coffee, right? $5, $4 or whatever to the Decoding Excellence show. And what we do with this is we turn the proceeds directly over to supporting the hosting of the Decoding Excellence show on whether it's our Spotify or our simple cast or iTunes and elsewhere. And it \[00:09:35\] Supports the hosting fees for our website and the Decoding Excellence Decoding Excellence show. So if you want to support the show, you can buy me a coffee. You can buy seven coffees, you buy yourself a coffee. Otherwise, please head over. Check it out. It is buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Wrangler. I'll include it in the show notes. And as always, thank you for supporting the Decoding Excellence show.