Originally Posted by
carleton
1: Do in the gym what you cannot do elsewhere. Otherwise, why bother?
2: Velocity meters in the gym when doing maximal efforts will simply be fatigue meters. Basically, "I usually move the bar at X m/s but today I'm down to only Y m/s. This means I'm fatigued or about to get sick." In the same way that power meters are used by sprinters on the track.
3: I feel like velocity based training is probably just a neat use of accelerometers and apps in an "Internet of Things" (IOT) sort of way. It won't actually improve training much as weight training is a very, very mature activity (hundreds of years old) and everything under the sun has been tried already and we have culturally kept the best parts. The only thing is that we have to pick the best program for the individual athlete, that's the challenge. What works for 25 year old Johnny who's been lifting as an athlete since HS may not work for 45 year old Jimmy who is new to lifting and athletics in general.
The reason I feel VBT can be useful is for optimizing / choosing a weight that will maximize power output in the gym. Whether it be squat or sled press. Also it can keep you honest in terms of did you actually give maximal effort on that rep, since you get immediate
feedback on peak velocity. This graph (Force Velocity Curve) shows that there is an optimal weight/velocity for power production. Whether training in this zone actually has any transference to the bike....I don't know. It seems that for an individual exercise you could try lifting different weights up to 1 RM and get your specific force velocity curve for that exercise. Once that is known you can extrapolate which weight/velocity for that weight would be optimal to produce the most power. The graph shows a large range for peak power, but this becomes more narrow when you know the exercise you are doing and have some data to go on. I know many of these devices will actually calculate peak power and average power. Whether this is worthwhile (for someone experienced in the gym), I don't know, but it seems like it would be a good way to train.
