> ## 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. # #057 - Velocity Based Training & Performance Application - URL: https://adamringler.com/podcast/057/ - Published: 2020-12-07T14:35:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T02:06:15.000Z - Description: I'm discussing the application of velocity based training techniques (VBT) and the application of training along the force-velocity curve. - Author: Adam Ringler - Tags: Decoding Excellence, #podcast, Strength Training In this episode of the **Decoding Excellence Show**, I'm discussing my application of velocity based training techniques (VBT) and the application of training along the force-velocity curve. I discuss the different velocity thresholds, exercise modalities, how I utilize VBT during different periods of our annual training program, and much more. 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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 - Velocity based training is applied along the force-velocity curve, with different velocity thresholds matched to different training qualities. - Exercise modality matters: the episode covers which movements pair with VBT and how it is utilized during different periods of the annual training program. ## 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 conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. Hey everybody, I'm going to pause the show real quick and announce something brand new to the Decoding Excellence Show. We've created an online community that has exclusive content that you will not be able to get just by navigating to the site alone. \[00:00:37\] If you subscribe today, you will have access to our private podcasts, online video lecture series, brand new digital content that we are creating to help support you as a strength conditioning coach, a new practitioner in the high performance field. You do not want to miss this material. It's going to help you in every facet of your career. Get over to AdamRingler.com and join the insiders today. \[00:01:03\] We have a great episode for you today where I talk about velocity-based training, the way I use it, the benefits I get from it, and how I use it within our annual training program. We talk about fatigue, we talk about speed thresholds, we talk about what modalities, what lifts, what exercises I use it on. You do not want to miss this show. If you're a VBT rookie, check it out. \[00:01:25\] Tune in. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Decoding Excellence show. As always, I'm your host, AdamRingler. And today we are talking everything, velocity-based training. That's the entire show. It's a mini episode where, again, I'm going to talk a little bit about my application \[00:01:41\] Of what I do in regards to how we use our pushbands. We've used tendos, we've used open barbells. We have not, at least in my experience, have used anything like leaf form or any other technologies. But I will be discussing just some of the methods and the ways that I sort of go about our usage, my usage of velocity-based modalities within a weight room. \[00:02:11\] So let's first get into this. A couple things aside. Number one, I am not Dr. Brian Mann. I will not say that I'm an expert at any means with the usage of velocity-based training modalities in our weight room. Again, I know Louis Simmons has used tendos. \[00:02:31\] Again, this isn't Westside barbell. A number of practitioners in the field have really made their living, right? Have really championed the usage of measuring bar velocities when it comes to collegiate strength and conditioning. I'll say that again, just because of the proximity of himself to pushband and the push company. \[00:02:54\] Again, I'm not Andy Baker. I'm not going to give you that specific advice, right? So let's get those disclaimers out of the way first. So what is bar measurement, right? So there's a lot of different ways that we can monitor and measure progress within a weight room, right? \[00:03:12\] The easiest for most people to wrap their heads around is if the weight is going up, then you would presume that athletes are getting stronger, right? That's very easy to quantify things like load, intensities, density of the training session when it's, you know, you keep track of the actual duration of the training session and the volume that you have and you can calculate the volume versus the intensity by the session duration and actually get a density quality of your training sessions. \[00:03:42\] But another thing that you can do if you have accelerometer, so you have linear transducers and ways of measuring the actual velocity and speed of the bar acceleration peak forces is measuring bar speed. And that is where training for speed or training for power or a conjugate sort of type program comes in where you might have a max effort day and you might have a dynamic effort day. So we historically have used some type of bar tracking technology within these walls, \[00:04:16\] Within this weight room. I've historically, you know, in the past have used, and this is very rudimentary, so I feel ashamed of even saying it, like, you know, literally measuring the time duration of a set and progressively, you know, still flat loading that across the training sessions so that or across the training weeks so that we're measuring the actual set duration. So that if the set duration is speeding up, right, getting faster, then one could rudimentarily \[00:04:51\] Presume that athletes are getting, you know, faster, right? So they're doing their sets at a more intense speed. So what we can do now, if you have the technologies, right, and you can either equip a bar, monitoring a bar, you know, velocity based measurement tool, like pusher, some of these other sort of applications, is you can actually measure the speed of the bar rather than the time or the set duration that it takes an athlete from start to completion. \[00:05:20\] So we do this in both our off season, we do it in our preseason, we do it certainly in our in season, the velocity zones in which that we try to maximize changes depending on the intent, depending on the goal of what we're trying to accomplish. So if it was a sort of a strength type movement, and we want to make sure that our athletes are adequately loading the bar, this is all given under the huge umbrella of an assumption that athletes are giving maximal intent behind the movements, despite the weight, despite \[00:05:55\] The intensity or the percentile load on the bar. But if we are chasing, you know, some type of submax strength, yeah, we should be looking for a range that is 0.5 meters per second to 0.75 meters per second. If we're looking for absolute maximal strength, there's a likelihood is that given maximal intent, that the speed of the bars will probably be moving, you know, slower, lesser than 0.5 meters per second, right? And there's a threshold that's been pretty well versed, well documented across \[00:06:32\] Some of these experts I listed earlier in the show about different thresholds for, you know, when you could sort of calculate out, you know, this is a one rep max, or if I cannot achieve this velocity speed, I'm going to fail at this lift for bench press and for squat and for deadlifts and some, some of the other core lifts. So why is this important to monitor, right? We can do this. We can monitor speed, even with the assumption that if it's moving slow and you're loading the bar pretty heavy, right, this is what we're aiming for when we're having \[00:07:08\] Sort of a max effort type of movement, a max effort type of training session. We don't want the bar moving violently fast on a max effort lift because we want to train that strength, we want to train that sort of strain aspect of our movements. So, you know, if I see an athlete and they're moving a load and they're moving it between 0.75 and 1.2 meters squared, then I start to know that load is not maximally challenging that quality of strength that we're trying to develop. We need to load and have greater intensities on the bar. Conversely, right, \[00:07:42\] If we are now doing and shifting to more of a dynamic effort type of lift, we where we want to move and work on bar acceleration and bar speed, then obviously if they're dropping below, you know, that sort of speed strength range of 1.3 to 1.0, we know that we're no longer sort of training that quality. So, again, you can use any type of VBT technology and tool for both maximum absolute strength training and trying to generate and elicit a positive adaptation for those speed and power qualities that you want to train. Now, we do this in a number of \[00:08:22\] Different ways, right? We will equip our bars during, you know, dead lifts. We'll do it for bench press, we'll do it for our Olympic lifting movements. We'll, again, we'll look at peak power and peak force in some of those movements. We'll look at average power in some of our more squatting and maximal effort sort of strength movements. So, things like our squats and our dead lifts, we'll look at that. But again, this is a way of quantifying how not only how much we're moving because our athletes input the loads, it also allows us to program a percentile of their max, \[00:09:01\] But it also gives us really good information to make sure that our athletes are moving loads faster. Some of the ways that I've done it in the past is I've kept the intensity of their 1RM flat across training weeks. So, let's just say week one through week four has kept the same load on the bar. But with the understanding that we want them moving that load faster and faster from week one towards week four, we've done things where we've tried to increase competition within the weight room. And we do that by creating sort of constraints around the way they could \[00:09:39\] Progress or regress. So, especially in our in-season training programs, we do that quite frequently where we'll program somewhere between 50 to 65 percent of their 1RM training max or their actual absolute max and that becomes the training max for that day. We will then create the constraints or the game that if they hit their repetition target, they're sat, let's say we have three reps of upper body, where we're doing a speed bench on this particular day. If they hit all three reps above their training threshold of that zone that we're trying to hit, let's just say 1.0 meters per second \[00:10:20\] Then we are then they're allowed to move up, they're allowed to increase the load on their bar by five pounds and then they get to try the next set and we'll have multiple sets of speed bench or speed squats or speed deadlifts in our training session. And this allows for some competition, not only do they get more load on the bar, but they're also trying to make sure that they deliver maximal intent on every repetition across every set because we have a leaderboard in the weight room. It generates on our television. It will automatically populate who's on top based on \[00:10:57\] Whatever metric we want to measure. So we will measure depending on the movement of the day, we may measure peak power or we might look at relative peak power. So we're now we're taking into the athletes size and structure and weight into the equation across that relevant body weights that we have loaded into the system. And that allows us to now say, hey, for every kilogram of bodyweight that you have, you're producing this amount of power. When we have that relativity across our athletes, especially in a group like basketball or volleyball where there's a lot of different \[00:11:35\] Differences in size and structure of our athletes, depending on the position requirements of the sport. So we will look at maybe peak power. We'll champion that on our dynamic effort days. We'll look at relative maximal load on our more max effort days. So what's the maximal load you use across your training training sets? And then that will go up on the leaderboard. So it allows us to have a lot of different ways that our athletes can compete. They can compete for strength on our max effort days. They can compete for peak or or average power on our dynamic effort days. It allows us \[00:12:16\] To better say again, more accurately see if our athletes are fatiguing across set one to set three to set five to set eight. However, sets we have and we've gone as far as doing dynamic effort works in the range of 12 sets per movements on some days. And then obviously as our volume increases on core, then we'll drop the dynamic effort sets and our training volume down a little bit. But it gives us some ideas of our athletes. If they're fatiguing out across our sets, that's something that we need to obviously work on. If they are having difficulty even achieving \[00:12:56\] That rep range or that velocity target per that set and rep range, then perhaps we need to modify the training program or modify the percentile of that one Rm that we're using on that training day. And that allows us to like within the competitions that we have, yeah, it's great if you hit your rep target above your speed threshold, you can move up way. But if you're not getting within that sort of threshold that we're aiming for, depending on what sort of bio outputs we want to focus on and adapt, then you need to strip some weight off the bar as well. So it works both ways. \[00:13:33\] You can progress and regress based on the training threshold. So you're just changing the paradigm of what athletes are focusing on. They're no longer focusing on maximum load in the weight room. That's what we need. I'll try to get bigger, get stronger. No, they're focusing on great intent and be explosive and accelerate and move that bar as fast as possible. And they're just using weight to either influence the speed positively or negatively. So that's some things that we utilize with our velocity based training modalities within our weight room. Now, in addition to that, \[00:14:09\] We talked about using it for max effort days. We talked about using it for dynamic effort days. We talked about sort of the zones that we want to the velocity zones. So things like that are below 0.5 meters per second. That's obviously pretty heavy. Given maximum intent and desire to move that bar quickly, if that's the speed, you're looking at a rep range, probably a 1RM estimate between 90 to 100% of your 1RM. If you're starting to go and train at sort of the some max strength zone anywhere from 0.5 to 0.75, you're getting into that 70 to 80% \[00:14:48\] 1RM zone. For us, like I said earlier in our dynamic effort days, whether we're training for speed strength or strength speed, we're usually hovering. We focus a lot more in our in season around that strength speed aspect to fill buckets that aren't being filled on the basketball quarter, the volleyball quarter, the playing field. We end up doing a lot more of that 50 to 60% tile of 1RM, which has a tendency of being more of that strength speed output. That ends up being 0.75 to 1.0\. For us, if our athletes get over 1.0 meters per second, then we ask our \[00:15:29\] Athletes that we gamify the system that, hey, put a little bit more load on the bar, which then in turns allows for them to have greater peak power outputs or average power outputs across their sets, which then rewards them on the leaderboard when it actually comes down, comes time to actually rewarding our athletes based on the outputs that they do in the weight room. To be honest, we don't do a tremendous amount of max speed work, ranging from 10% to 20 to 25% of 1RM. We do a lot more ballistic work with like med balls and plios and jumps and med ball slams and throws, but that's a \[00:16:10\] Range that we really don't get into with the barbell movements. Occasionally our trap bar jumps or hex bar jumps or athletes will get up and above 1.3, 1.5 and start loading and achieving some of those velocity outputs, but that's really just an indicator that we need to put more load on the bar. That allows us, again, I guess I didn't really say that we utilize a lot of trap bar jumps and squat jumps as well to try to get some of those ranges and try to train sort of that speed strength and strength speed zones, but this gives us a lot of good information and actionable \[00:16:50\] Information that our athletes can utilize, right? The feedback that they get from the tablet saying, hey, you're moving that bar and it's only moving at 0.92 meters per second, that's not fast enough, so you need to try a little bit harder than the next set, or you're moving it at 1.2 meters per second, and now you need to put a little bit more weight on the bar and again see if you can achieve that target output. It just increases the training competitive atmosphere within the weight room, which ultimately will help them on the goals of, you know, not only getting stronger, \[00:17:23\] But also getting more explosive and developing that explosive strength and the power that they're looking for. So a small little episode about some of the velocity-based training modalities that we use, right? We use this, we build it into our annual training plan, so we can look at things like time under tension when it comes to actual hypertrophy and trying to build muscular size and muscular endurance, so we can look at that TUT, we can work on strength training just by simply making sure that the loads that are on the bar or the implement are, you know, somewhere around that sort of 0.75 \[00:18:04\] To sub 0.5 meters per second zone. We can work on power and speed by making sure that we surf the curve and actually working through a lot of these velocity ranges, and it's just great because it supports what you're trying to do, whether it's strength or speed or power or endurance or time under tension, the modalities and the implements help support your coaching judgment of, hey, do we put a little bit more weight on the bar and go for a 1RM? Do we back off if the velocity is too low and we're sort of that critical threshold for muscular failure? Or do we flatload it across weeks and \[00:18:42\] Actually have data to suggest that you're moving the implement faster? So there's a lot of different ways that you can use it, whether it's prevention of overtraining by, you know, again looking at fatigue, not only across sets, you know, within the workout, intro workout, you know, fall offs or velocity zones and thresholds of fatigue, but you can also look across weeks and seeing if there's a relationship with, you know, less load or less velocities across all the sets. Again, you want to make sure that when game day comes around, and I think particularly about basketball, yeah, you're trying \[00:19:17\] To peak for every basketball game, right? There's the congestion of training schedule. Every game is important across the season, but you also want to arrive at, you know, conference tournaments and NCAAs, you know, being it not only physically strong, but explosive and fast as well. So you can start to work across your annual training program and plan and make sure that you're peaking when you want to avoiding the valleys of fatigue by making sure you manage the recovery and rejuvenation piece as well. And then just being, you know, articulate with, and sort of intelligent, perhaps, \[00:19:54\] With the way that you periodize and program through your cycles across your training weeks. So I just wanted to give you an idea of some of the ways that I've utilized velocity-based training, independent of the actual technologies that you might use and check it out. It might be a great resource for you to add into your training. And there's a lot of affordable options out there. You do not need to go to gym aware or elite form immediately. No disrespect to those companies. They're amazing companies, but if they're cost prohibitive for you, you can look at other \[00:20:28\] Sort of training ways, right? Whether it is, I think bar ninja, open barbell, maybe bar sensei, I think is perhaps one of the, one of the newer technologies. There's a bunch out there. Check it out. I'm sure there's a simply faster article that talks all about velocity-based training. So usually a really good resource to check out. And they, they keep, they keep it pretty updated. But, you know, whether it's push or elsewhere, there's a lot of different technologies that you can use. And it just becomes another tool in your tool belt. It won't replace the barbell. It won't replace \[00:21:01\] Your coaching eye. It won't replace your experience as a coach on the floor, but it can help you better align what you believe you see your coach's eye to what is actually objective lead being measured through the accelerometer or through the bar sensors. So check it out. I appreciate you as always. And thank you for tuning in to the Decoding Excellence Show. \[00:21:30\] Hey, everybody. That's going to be it for this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show. I hope you took something away from the thought process surrounding velocity-based training modalities. Whether it is surfing the curve and different velocity thresholds and speeds, the way we program or periodize throughout the given year based on the qualities and outputs that we want to train, whether it's max strength or if it's strength speed or speed strength or max speed, right? Hopefully it just gives you something to let your brain marinate on and \[00:22:00\] Think about how can you start to apply some velocity-based training modalities and techniques within your own way? I've been there. I've been there before where I didn't have the money and the finances and the budget to be able to go out and buy the best technologies. And there's some very easy ways and rudimentary ways that you can do the same thing. So hopefully you took something away from this podcast. As always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the Decoding Excellence Show. The newest way you can support is by heading over to AdamRingler.com and joining \[00:22:32\] The high-performance insiders. This is an exclusive community that allows you access to the private articles, the private podcast feed, and digital lecture series that's being hosted behind this community wall. Check it out by heading over to AdamRingler.com and subscribing today. The second way you could support the show is simply by signing up for the newsletter. This is something I take a lot of pride in. I try to go out on the internet, dig up research articles that are fascinating. 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