Velocity Based Trackers (VBT) are useful tools to add to an athletes program who is trying to chase strength and power adaptations. VBTs are useful in that they measure the concentric bar speed during our traditional strength exercises such as squats, deadlifts and bench press. Measuring bar speed have a multitude of practical applications that can be missed when looking at it with the naked eye. The following are 3 big areas in which VBT can have a massive influence:

1. Lifting Intent – Having an objective measure for bar speed ensures that athletes have a tangible target to hit when looking to not only build up rate of force developments with traditional strength exercises, but also ensures that they are leaving nothing in the tank if we want to be pushing the most amount of weight possible. For exercises such as barbell squat jumps, the load itself isn’t always an indicator of performance and jump height can be tricky to measure with as much efficiency as what VBT devices can immediately showcase. VBT devices give rep to rep immediate feedback, giving athletes continuous assurance as to whether they are performing a rep well, or if they need to drive further intent in order to reach a target (even better when that target is one of their team mates for competition)
2. Autoregulation – Another great benefit of VBT training is how athletes can utilise it to either push or pull back their future training session. We know bar speed has a strong relationship with fitness and fatigue levels. If we were to pick a weight – say 80% of an athletes 1RM – and perform a single rep, we will be likely to see ‘x’ bar velocity on any given day. Anything below this average for this particular individual, can be assessed as the individual perhaps being underrecovered for this particular training session, giving a clear indication that the training volume may need to be adjusted in order to maintain athlete readiness throughout the week. Vise versa, if the bar speed is faster than the athletes typical average speed, then this may be a great indication that the athlete is ‘firing’ and may incline them to add more weight on the bar (perhaps even go for a PB).
3. Training Intensity – The final benefit is ensuring athletes are training at ideal training intensity for their given session. We know that athletes have a common bar velocity cut off point as they approach failure for individual exercises (i.e. BB bench press ~0.25 m/s, BB Back Squat ~ 0.32 m/s). If we were to program an athlete to go to failure on BB Bench Press, we would like their last rep to be somewhat close to that 0.25m/s cut off and have a velocity tracker can give you immediate feedback as to whether or not they have an extra rep in the tank. We can also use this with RPE or RIR prescriptions. If we want to prescribe an RPE 9 or traditionally 1 RIR, we would expect the last rep of the bench press to finish around 0.3-0.4 m/s. Similarly, we can use velocity based cut off points in order to manage fatigue levels. For example a power exercise like a loaded jump, may have a cut off point of 1 m/s to ensure the athlete is travelling fast enough to challenge the system to develop rate of force development. We can use this cut off to manage fatigue prior to a competition day as well as part of a primer session in order to safely assume that fatigue associated with more ‘grindier’ sets can be minimised with an appropriate velocity cut off point.