Researchers develop velocity-based training guidelines for football, tailored for specific positions

LAWRENCE — When one thinks of football players in a weight room, they most likely picture athletes lifting large amounts of weight to build strength and power, not necessarily trying to lift fast. But researchers at the University of Kansas have published an article detailing how position-specific, velocity-based training can be used in college football to help athletes improve performance and avoid injury.

Football players traditionally have lifted weights both in season and during the offseason to build and maintain the strength needed for an explosive, physically demanding sport. KU researchers studied the newer approach of velocity-based training, which measures the speed of a barbell during a lift to gauge an athlete’s performance from one session to the next. In working directly with the KU football program, researchers at the Jayhawk Athletic Performance Laboratory have developed guidelines for different ways to measure velocity in strength training and published the plan to help strength coaches and athletes improve their weight training.

Quincy Johnson, assistant professor of health, sport & exercise science and assistant director of the Jayhawk Athletic Performance Laboratory, said velocity-based training has become both more accessible and popular in recent years. The method uses a camera attached to a weight rack that can measure the speed of an athlete performing lifts with barbells such as squats or bench press. Strength coaches can take the maximum amount of weight an athlete can lift in an exercise, then measure the speed the bar moves at various percentages of that weight. For the study, authors measured speed from 60% to 100% of an athlete’s one rep maximum.

The research team developed several sets of measurements for the study:

• Strength speed, which can help develop top line speed, is developed when a bar is moving at 0.7 to 0.9 meters per second. 
• Accelerative strength, the strength which helps athletes go from a stop to top speed quickly, is best developed at 0.45 to 0.75 meters per second. 
• Absolute strength is best developed at 0.25 to 0.5 meters per second.

The research article also contains guidelines on how coaches can use the approaches to help develop athletes’ needs by position. The researchers worked with “bigs,” or offensive and defensive linemen; “mids,” or players like linebackers, tight ends, quarterbacks and running backs; and “skills,” including wide receivers, cornerbacks and safeties.

“In the sports world, the goal is to prepare athletes and win. In our world, the goal is to do research and report findings to support those coaches to better train athletes,” Johnson said. “We’ve been able to measure maximal muscular strength in the weight room for a long time, but when you watch the game, you see that the smaller guys move faster, the mids need more power and strength, and you don’t get those from the same lifts. This approach helps prescribe the right exercise and the right amount of weight for each athlete at the right velocity.”

The article was published in NSCA Coach, the journal of the National Strength and Conditioning Association. It was written by Conor McNally, former assistant sports performance coach and director of sports science at KU; Johnson; Yang Yang, doctoral student in the Jayhawk Athletic Performance Laboratory; and Andrew Fry, professor emeritus of health, sport & exercise science at KU.

The article also details how strength and conditioning coaches can use velocity-based training to develop individualized plans for each athlete in a program that is also adjustable from one workout to the next. The approach can help build strength during the offseason, maintain fitness during the season or even help an athlete achieve individual goals by focusing on the lift, weight and speed that can best achieve those aims. Velocity-based training technology provides real-time data on the speed of a repetition and the category it falls into. 

The approach also has potential to aid in injury prevention by avoiding overtraining and maintaining data for an athlete from one training session to the next, according to the researchers.

Johnson said the hope is to help more programs, strength coaches and athletes use velocity-based training to improve strength training in college football and to help support the adoption of VBT in more athletic programs. Next research steps include further studying velocity from one rep to another, across various sets of repetitions and further exploring VBT’s role in injury prevention.

“It’s a dynamic tool,” Johnson said of velocity-based training. “There are multiple benefits to this type of individual athlete-specific training. It can help build power, speed and give detailed ranges of how much an athlete can and should lift on any given day.”