Barbell Shrugged - The Science of Athlete Monitoring w/ Dr. Kieth Leiting, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash Barbell Shrugged #602

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

Keith Leiting has been an Assistant Professor of Health, Exercise and Sport Science since 2015. Keith eared his Ph.D. from East Tennessee State University and is also a Certified Athletic Trainer and Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach. Prior to his arrival at Lenoir-Rhyne University, Keith was the head athletic trainer and assistant strength and conditioning coach at Integration Sports, professional sports training academy, in Taiwan. Keith’s research interests include identifying optimal strength and conditioning practices for military personnel and examining force characteristics that underpin athletic performance.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   Individualization for group coaching What metrics every coach and athlete should track Using GPS to measure intensity and workload How to measure overreaching and overtraining Balancing intensity in the gym and on the field   Email Dr. Leiting   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Mentorship Application: https://bit.ly/DDMentorshipApp   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we are hanging out with Dr. Keith Lighting from Lenore Ryan University and soon-to-be Dr. Travis Mash. Actually, Travis Mash and him work very closely on athlete monitoring, and athlete monitoring is actually what Mash's PhD is going to be in. So this is a super cool conversation because these two guys are digging really deep into some very cool ways to monitor your athlete, make sure they're not over-training, over-reaching, and there's a ton in here for anybody that is interested in learning how HRV, if you wear a whoop band, just all these little tiny pieces can play a role in getting the most out of your training. If you're a coach in here or just an athlete, we talk about how to individualize training in a group coaching setting, the metrics you should be tracking, how GPS has become their go-to in measuring intensity and workload, measuring overreaching

and overtraining and how to avoid it, and then balancing intensity in the gym and on the field depending upon your sport. Before we get into the show, we got to thank our sponsors, Bioptimizers. You know that over 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium and it is the number one mineral to fight stress, fatigue, and sleep issues. Check it out. Things are crazy these days. These are that mentorships kicking off. It's been really phenomenal building the entire program out, seeing the crazy results. We're also going into 2,000 plus Walmarts over the next three months, which is quite the undertaking. And we've got some really cool partners and very excited about it. But along with that comes stress.

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coach Travis Smash Dr. Keith Lighting from Lenore Ryan University. Before we get into impulse momentum and athlete monitoring, we have to know, I know Travis Mash has a history in weightlifting. Judging from his performance in your class, do you think he could have a future coaching athletes in weightlifting? Does he have a chance? I think he has a chance. You think so? Yes. I don't know. Is he a good student?

Like if I was his parents right now, is he getting a lot of O's for outstanding, S for satisfactory? S is exceptional, to say the least. Ah, exceptional. That's very solid. Appreciate that, Doc. I'll see you later. That's right.

We also are going to be talking about athlete monitoring, which is the class that Travis is taking with you right now. But before we get into all these fun topics, I'd love to hear just a little background and how you got into this. Well, ironically, I didn't want to go to college when I got out of high school and that led me to the Marine Corps the Marine Corps kind of instilled some discipline in me which definitely helped and then I realized that it was time to go to college I didn't want to retire and speak like I was in high school that brought me to Western Illinois University where I actually thought I wanted to do physical therapy. They didn't have a physical therapy program, so I did athletic training.

And that's where I kind of found my niche, working with athletes and doing rehabilitation programs, getting them back to sport competition. From there, I actually got accepted to East Tennessee State University as the women's soccer GA for athletic training. And that's when I ran into Mike and Meg Stone, did my master's and my PhD under them. And really working under Mike and Meg Stone is when I fell in love with the strength and conditioning and specifically biomechanics. I really enjoy the concepts of kinetics. So hopefully when we talk about the impulse momentum relationship, that's kind of one of

the things that I'm really passionate about. And in that process of learning from Mike and Meg Stone, understanding athlete monitoring and the value that that can have when it comes to potentially reducing injury risk and trying to maximize athletic performance. So that's kind of my condensed background. I'm going to go out and say that I know virtually nothing about impulse momentum. Can you give us kind of the high level of that? Simply, impulse is the amount of force that you're producing over a given period of time. So either we can increase the amount of time that you're producing over a given period of time. So either we can increase the amount of time that we're producing force, or we can produce the maximal

amount of force that we're producing. And that is going to directly lead to a change in momentum. Now momentum is the mass either of an object or your body weight, depending on what we're trying to move, and the velocity that it ends up moving with. So ultimately, in athletics, we typically want to move our body weight, or our body mass. So that's not going to change. Oftentimes, in a competitive season, certainly not within a day, it's not going to change a whole lot. So that means that if we want to move faster, we need to improve impulse, which is again, either force or time. Now, that's the simple version of it. We can get into a lot more detail when it comes to time constraints and sport specific movements. And that's really what ends up limiting how much

time we have to produce force. Is there a distinction there between impulse and just saying rate of force development or power, peak power? So rate of force development is going to be a measure of force over a given period of time, which is typically broken down into 50 milliseconds, 100 milliseconds, 200 or 250 milliseconds. Whereas impulse, it could be three to five seconds of force. It depends on what you're doing. If you're trying to push a car, you can potentially produce a lot more force over a long period of time because of the fact that you're in contact with the ground for a longer period of time.

So when it comes to rate of force development, it is a form of impulse, but it's those shortened pieces of time. And that's really what influences athletic performance. You know, it was in your class that this is sad. I don't know if I should admit this, but like, you know, as a weightlifting coach, they're always saying, stay over the bar, you know, you know, stay through the legs. And it made sense, but I honestly didn't know why. Other than I think, you know, I could understand kind of conceptually why I would have a better bar path.

But then when you talked about impulse and then you made us do that project at the end of the year where, you know, I talked about the clean. Then it dawned on me that because after the first pull, you transition and you decelerate. So like all the good that comes from the first pull happens because the longer I can stay pushing my feet through the floor, the more velocity I can create. Because it's over by the time I transition, you're going to decelerate. So whatever you've created is what you've created.

So the longer you stay over, the more speed you will have created, more velocity. So then I was like, oh, so it took me – so how long did it take me to actually learn that? I started lifting in like 1990, so it only took me 30, 31 years. Not bad. Take that example. If you look at a power clean, or I should say hang clean,

if you're going to do a hang clean, you have a short range of motion and a short time period to produce as much force as possible in order to lift the bar as high as you can. Now, typically your hang clean is going to be much less weight than your full clean. And again, that comes down to the time in which you have to produce force. You're creating a greater impulse because you have more time to produce force. Your maximal strength characteristics haven't changed between a hang clean and a full clean. You just have your feet in contact with the ground for more period or for longer period of time, which leads to a greater impulse, which leads to greater velocity. Right velocity right what about you'd also have to consider then the you know like muscle spindles at that point too right because of the stretch reflex that you wouldn't get from just absolutely

yeah yeah yeah muscle spindle involvement is going to be very influential when you're talking about stretching any of those tissues right in order to get that reflexive response. And that makes the concentric phase that much more forceful. Right. Is that a rationale for using hang cleans for other athletes that don't have a lot of time to produce force? Like if you're a sprinter and your ground contact time is really, really short, do, in your mind, do hang cleans transfer better or just does that concept apply? The concept definitely applies. Whether you can justify that there's better transfer. I don't

know. But I think that is definitely justification for utilizing them in your strength training program. Yeah. How are you guys measuring impulse? Like what are the mechanisms of doing it from like a sprinter to a weightlifter to a football player? Really what you need is a force plate for weightlifters. So in-ground equipment that is underneath the platform or underneath the athlete's feet. And we can measure the impulse. Ideally, if we're looking at sprinters, we would have a treadmill. Or you could potentially set up a track where it has force plates running down the track.

Oh, wow. That would be expensive, wouldn't it? Who's got one of those? Yeah. I have heard about a tennis academy doing that with an entire tennis court. They put force plates in the entire court so they can monitor the ground reaction forces playing tennis. Data overload. My brain just blew up.

That would be so awesome. Yeah. That would be so awesome. Like this class, anyone coaches listening, man, if you could ever take, definitely,

I think every coach should have at least the basics of biomechanics, but if you could take athlete monitoring course, like it's going to change what it does right now it's got me i'm in this just like last semester with biomechanics i'm in this part of my life where i'm so frustrated because i know where i want to have now because you've given me all these tools so now i just got to develop it if i don't develop it i'll lose my mind it's like there's all these data points you just you just got to put them in and he also taught us how to use excel like i've never really known how to use excel and so now i can set up whatever that whatever i want on excel which

leads to way too many possibilities for someone like myself like a lot of restless nights are about to happen i'll just tell you that you're doing like derivatives training with clean and jerk and snatch oh just like man if i showed you this Excel sheet, you wouldn't know what it looks like. Well, what are you tracking on there? Well, I'm going to track, funny to ask. This is a question I asked Dr. Leine and Dr. Cook. So I'm going to track sleep. And for the people who actually do it, I want to track total calories and then macronutrients.

And then I want to track the RPE, then macronutrients. And then I want to track the RPE, their daily RPE, like how they feel, you know. And I want to ask them multiple questions like, how do you feel, you know, how do you feel stress-wise with school? What about with your personal? I want to separate school and personal because I need to know, is it their schoolwork or is it, you know, they're breaking up with their boyfriend? And then I want to track, I need to know is it their schoolwork or is it, you know, they're breaking up with their boyfriend. And then I want to track – for weightlifting, I want to track the strength lifts like squat, you know, their pull, pulls, push presses, you know, as it relates to snatch, cleanser.

I'm probably forgetting a few, but those are like my – oh, vertical leap. And then I'm going to – oh, velocity too. I'm going to look at how velocity takes into, or plays into it. So it's going to be pretty big. Yeah. So I'm so excited. I'm going to do that while I'm gone over the,

I'm about to leave tomorrow for the nationals, but I'm going to finish it while I'm gone and then let, let the, the doctor himself look it over. Oh, excited that you're thinking about that, Travis, because in two weeks that's what

you'll be doing is developing your questionnaire to implement with your athletes to start gathering data oh good well i've already been doing that yeah yeah that's actually really awesome i mean kind of like a segue almost and like how do you take something like impulse momentum and move that into something that's applicable for a coach to say okay we have this information and and how do you take something like impulse momentum and move that into something that's applicable for a coach to say, okay, we have this information and how do we design a training program to either to get more efficient, stronger, faster, more powerful athletes? You're asking Dr. Lighty or me? I know with me, like I'll say impulse. Impulse, for example, here's what it's done for me.

I can now tell my athletes why I'm telling them what I say. When I say stay over the bar, drive with your leg, now I can actually show them mathematically. And believe it or not, several of my athletes are very mathematical. A lot of weightlifters are very mathematical in thinking. That's why they like the precision of weightlifting. So when I can explain to them that by staying over, create, here's impulse, here's what it says, this is why you'll produce more velocity, then they get total buy-in. So that's the big thing about, you know, for me, the biomechanics was getting buy-in and being able to say whether or not this way of thinking, because, you know, you have in weightlifting, you have a catapult used to have that old argument catapult versus like triple

extension, which is a dumb argument. But now you can let, now I know these equations. I can start to say, well, this is what's true. You know, if you're going to argue with me, you have to argue with Isaac Newton. So he's pretty smart. And he's not here anymore. So wins yeah he wins uh well i guess all of this kind of leads into athlete monitoring which is the class that travis has taken right now with you um what's uh what's like the the high level you know position or like what what comes out of that class and and how you're laying it out well the overarching goal is to familiarize our students with the purpose behind athlete monitoring,

the value to it, whether it comes to reducing injury risk or maximizing performance. The second part is trying to figure out how to be efficient with your time so that you're able to monitor the variables that are important, minimize the involvement or the influence or disruptions training, and then use that to maximize performance. Now with that being said, the overarching goal of the class is to ultimately teach the students how to set up an athlete monitoring dashboard in excel to analyze gps data mainly because of the fact that i've got several friends that are currently doing this for six-figure salaries yeah so it is a lucrative niche to go into

uh gps that's gonna get a few people uh perk their ears up a little bit because most people probably just think gps is a way to get to the what you plug into your phone and go to the grocery store that was good i was i was thinking of a better example than the grocery store but since you guys finished it for me um yeah how is how is gps uh how does that even play into kind of the strength conditioning world? Oh, get ready. This is awesome. Well, it's a matter of quantifying the amount of work the athlete is doing, and that's really what it comes down to.

Travis mentioned using RPEs to get an idea of how they're feeling. That was the original implementation for quantifying workload is using session PE from Carl Foster. Now, things have progressed massively since the 90s, and now we have small little, essentially devices or square units that athletes will wear on their back when they do their sport-specific practices. And through global positioning systems, GPS, they're able to track the athlete within about 10-centimeter accuracy across the softball, soccer, whatever pitch we're on,

to look at the actual workload they're doing. So total distance. You can look at the distances in certain speed zones. You can look at accelerations and decelerations. Most companies have specific algorithms to quantify a player load. Those player load algorithms aren't divulged, but it does help us quantify how much work the athlete is doing. So at least it quantifies what the player is doing.

How would you do that in comparing sports? If you're following a baseball player and they're running fences or they're sprinting to first base in 90-foot increments, and then you have a weightlifter that stays relatively in place but is moving crazy heavy weights crazy heavy weights probably not that important i don't think it's not applicable across gotcha i mean even some of the metrics it's not applicable between our midfielders and our soccer players and our defenders because of the distances that they run yeah you can't even compare them within the same how far is somebody that's a midfielder running each game um like on average we have from our men's soccer team here at lr is upwards of 11

miles in a 90 minute game yeah okay 11 miles in a night i'm thinking like 11 miles it's like it's like 11 miles with probably 200 all out 200 200-meter sprints built into it. You're absolutely right. Typically in our training, we try and push our athletes up to about that 160 to 180 mark that they can repeat all-out sprints for about 20 to 30 meters. I've actually always thought that midfielders would be the best CrossFit athletes if they had a decent strength training program to go along with it.

If they can move. Because they have that aerobic side and then to be able to sprint at 100% in repeated efforts. The one and only girl gold medalist in America was an ex-soccer player. So Tara Knott, by the way, I almost forgot her name.

Freaked me out. She was my teammate when I was at the... She was an ex-soccer player. So what I was going to say is like, first, I want to preface this by anyone listening. Let me just tell you why you should be listening right now. If you want to be a coach, there's a, there's a coach I know who's with the Washington Redskins right now, and he's doing only GPS and he's not even tied to the strength and conditioning staff. So if they get fired, he's still got a job. So he's still piecing with his six-figure income.

So if I'm a strength coach or if I'm an exercise science major wanting to be a strength coach, I would listen to this podcast and I would take it to heart. Because unless you like bouncing around from team to team in the strength and conditioning world, this is your one out of that. And you can still get to be near the athletes. You can still have a part in the strength and conditioning world. This is your one out of that. And you can still get to be near the athletes. You can still have a part in the strength and conditioning and still have a steady job.

But my question would be, you know, with – because I know you do this for the soccer team here, right? What are the different components that you track? And do you have – you know, there's a success feature teaching this. Do you have, like, one excelsior teachers do you have like one for all the athletes on a soccer team or what um the way i have it set up is i have a data bank of all the data from the players throughout the entire season right every evening the coach loads new data from that training session that morning or the next

morning i come in upload it to that data bank, and then I analyze the new data or that last training session in comparison to the previous week or in comparison to the previous month's worth of training. So you can tell them where it's trending? Right. And this is where some of the statistics come in, looking at acute to chronic workload ratio, looking at potential effect sizes, percent change from day-to-day variation, some basic statistics to kind of give us an indication as to how their training is going. Can you give us some basic definitions of those things just so people will know what you're talking about?

Acute to chronic workload ratio is essentially looking at the amount of training over the last week in comparison to the previous 21 days and that's one of the weaknesses of the acute to chronic workload ratio is that you need almost a month's worth of data in order to determine whether or not you're pushing your athletes too hard or not hard enough how do you how do you incorporate into that the fact that these are college kids and they're probably doing things off the field that aren't optimizing their performance on the field? Good chance of that.

Yeah. Unfortunately, because they are human beings, there is variability and things that they are doing outside of training. We can't put a GPS on them. You couldn't control it. I would love to put a GPS, you know, on that wire. See this, you went right. You went to the wrong house. You were supposed to go home. You're supposed to go to your, to your dorm, not the bar.

You should have gone left. And because you went right, now you're further away from the Olympics than we had anticipated. I would like to put him on house arrest. That's what I'd like to do. Keith, are these measurements and all the data you're collecting purely to help assist the training and program design, et cetera, for the athletes? Or is this like,

is this stuff you're collecting for research and you're doing published studies, et cetera? This is purely for our sport coaches. Our men and women's soccer are running GPS units and it's purely for their injury management and sports performance. So I don't intend on using any of this for publication, mainly because I haven't come up with a research question for it. Right.

What about coach? What about giving it to the certainly district coach Caldwell? Does he look at this stuff too? Not really. This is pretty much going to our head sport coaches to help them manage certain players that may need a little bit more rest or those that are handling training well and they're able to be pushed a little bit harder. And that way the coach knows that, okay, I can structure practice. This guy can push and this guy is going to back off.

So we adjust the amount of time that the specific players are doing drills so that we can manage their training loads. How are you managing the – you mentioned that it, as far as like in the weight room, having these metrics and the GPS thing doesn't really work for the weightlifting side of things and measuring like the stress levels or the total overall stress on the body and pairing that up, if it's not measurable in the weight room, but it is measurable on the field, how do you balance those two in a practical way? It is measurable in the weight room. You could look at velocity-based training. You could look at quantifying the

total load lifted sets times reps times the weight. But of course, you have to have a prescriptive training program in order to do that. Many strength and conditioning programs are, you're doing a percentage for a day and the coach doesn't necessarily know each athlete's load for that given exercise. Yeah. It does make it more difficult. Now, back to session RPE, that is the one metric that does transverse multiple activities. Weight training, swimming, cross-country, sports practice, whatever it is. We can use session RPE because of the fact that it is one metric that applies itself over multiple different fields or sports. Of course, there are inherent problems with subjective data.

But based on the, you know, in our book, it would appear that the RPE might be the most valid, you know, predictor of all. It's definitely rated it as one of the highest as far as applicability. Applicability, yes. And as long as an athlete has the wherewithal to listen to their body and try and understand what their body is going through, I think that is beneficial.

If you're trying to ask a 15 to 18-year-old how their body's feeling, I mean, that may be difficult because their body's changing so quickly. Your athletes that are 25, 26, well, their bodies aren't changing nearly as quickly or at all when it comes to these day-to-day fluctuations. Not to mention the development of the cortex. It's not even done. You know, like you think about the brain. It's like it's not even finished developing until you're 25 or older. For me, 35, but yeah.

Directly in relation to the amount of ammonia that's gone up your nose. Oh, yeah. You know, my athletes won't start practice until I snort ammonia every day. Matt Weidegger brings me the ammonia, and I'm like, no, no. Every day I say no. You think we're going to do a podcast without some C4 in you? No chance. No chance. I keep it, no, no. Every day I say no. You think we're going to do a podcast without some C4 in you? No chance. No chance.

I keep it right by my desk. I have a question because if I was listening to this podcast right now and I was coaching my athletes that we were coaching when I was, you know, in the CrossFit space, I would kind of be rolling my eyes and being like, do I really need all this? Like, I have a great relationship. I know how to push my athletes when it's time to push them. I know how to pull them back when I can tell they're a little worn out. Why do I need it? It kind of reminds me of like the Moneyball, the movie Moneyball of the old scouts sitting in the room going, well, he's got

these five tools and he's a great player. And then the statisticians sitting in the room going, well, he's got these five tools and he's a great player. And then the statisticians over in the corner going, nope, that's not how you win baseball games. Is there, where do we, in conversations, where do you draw the line of, you know, being a human being and being able to read people with, no, the number says you need to take a day off and we're going to have you take a day off

and that's the thing it does come down to knowing your athletes just like you said sometimes the data says we can back off or we need to back off but the player says i feel fine the coach is able to see that from the player's performance and we continue pushing. Sometimes the data doesn't tell us it's not the end-all be-all. Put it that way. You listen to the athletes. This is why velocity helps me quantify that too. I have so many

athletes. They can have a leg chopped off and they would still say I'm okay. I can train today. You're the perfect example. Oh yeah, I know. I feel like you're the perfect example. Oh yeah. Yeah, I know. I know. But Bash, I feel like you're the perfect example of this because for 20 years you were coaching without all this fun, fun statistics. And now, now transitioning into it, do you find that they, they compliment each other or are they at odds many times?

No, they compliment. Because I wish so much I would have had – I wish I would have had a good – Yeah, because you wouldn't have listened. I'm sure if I brought an Excel sheet into your training, you would have ripped it up and – Bro. No, sorry. When I was young, if Dragomir would have said fill out this, I was so afraid of him, I would have filled it out. I would have been like, whatever you want, sorry. When I was young, if Dragomir would have said, fill out this, I was so afraid of him, I would have filled it out.

I'd have been like, whatever you want, man. Yeah. Just don't hit me. But, like, as a coach, I look back at so many times that deep down, I knew that it wasn't going to happen for that athlete, but that athlete couldn't hear that, you know? Yeah. If you have the data, you could have athlete couldn't hear that you know yeah if you have the

data you could have easily said look you know hunter morgan nathan whoever like it's not in the cards today number one you only slept five hours last night number two you know your 85 percent snatch was you know 12 slower than normal you know then they're like okay you know even that you know if they see the numbers they would start you know yeah i mean the number of times that we had athletes and you could just see their strength numbers the the speed of bars moving slowly but there was no way that you could actually tell them hey take it and it's like the harder you push the more the it's that like mental grind of i have to just get through it um having the numbers though it it's kind of like the that that data that you need to really show athletes like it's it's time to take a day off and yeah or even let them go

and then you know they it does go poorly and then you can say look you know here's i knew you were going to do poorly but you didn't want to hear it and so and you did do poorly then you start to get by it so maybe like you get a person like morgan maybe the first time he doesn't listen to you because you know he's like on cloud nine he feels like he's king of the world and you know he is amazing and so like you got to be okay with it taking a little longer to get buy-in from him but you can say look man and then maybe do it again and again and finally like morgan's like all right you're right so um how far and this is something that we talk uh, I want to say, with the guys over at Whoop when they were bringing in HRV and stuff into the wearables. But how far do you push them towards almost like the overreaching, overtraining side of things, knowing that we have to push the body to its edge, bring it back, and then be able to grow?

That's a good question. How do you play with the edges knowing that you need to get there and at the same time protecting your athletes? That is essentially the art of coaching. Each athlete is going to have a different threshold as far as how far you can push them. Some of that will be demonstrated through your athlete monitoring, the numbers that you're collecting some of that may be through interpersonal relationships you have with your athletes knowing them and having their that confidence and trust where they're able to tell

you hey yeah well but unfortunately oftentimes it's trial and error and you end up pulling a hamstring or you end up with a soft tissue injury, and then you have to read. Yeah. You have that. And you now know that, okay, that was their threshold. It's not the ideal way to do it,

but unfortunately there is no, this is your threshold. This is where you need to stop. Yeah. Are you tracking the amount of intensity that's going into that tracking? Like if somebody is in in a soccer players running for you know 11 miles obviously that's not a one rep max 100 meter sprint towards the ball it's it's low level aerobic conditioning that can go on for 11 miles in these freak athletes like that doesn't really

bother them it's probably the 160 sprints that actually make them tired so how do you categorize long slow aerobic capacity versus the high intensity sprinting that's going on. So in our GPS units, and I think the majority of them are going to come with this, we have preset speed zones. So if an athlete hits a certain threshold above seven meters per second, that is the fastest speed zone. Then we have from like five to seven meters per second, three to five, and then one to three three and then below three or below one.

So we have it broken down into different zones. And that's actually what I spend a lot of my time looking at is these speed zones and the acceleration and deceleration data, because that is the most stressful time. Yeah. Deceleration is actually probably worse on their actual body, right? Yeah. Because of the acidic components i would imagine yeah well you know can you tell like um like a percentage of vo2 max i know like in physiology class i'm bitching about it because it's like so hard on me right now but i have been learning a lot but you know like um once you're above a certain

percentage of vo2 max you know there's like there's a lot, but you know, like, um, once you're above a certain percentage of VO two max, you know, there's like, there's a lot of changes in physiology that take place. Is there any way to determine if you're other than, you know, actually measuring? Um, we would actually have to measure them on a treadmill to figure out what speed they are at. Oh yeah. And then we would know that speeds above that threshold are above vo2 max

driving adaptations how often would you have to retest that because you know like if they're getting better shape yep you'd have to retest that probably on a three to six month basis that's not too bad all right i see what you're saying when you're talking 30 to 60 athletes between men and women's teams it becomes almost in impractical but that's why you might not test i mean this sounds terrible but like you might not test everybody but you test your thoroughbreds like i know in the nfl they don't gps track everybody on the team they gps their you know their uh multi-million dollar athletes because they're expensive. It becomes a cost-to-benefit ratio. Soccer team only has 14 units, but we have a squad of, I believe, 30 guys.

So you test the best 14 starters and their backups. Those are the ones that we want to track and keep an eye on. Right. I mean, that makes total sense. Have you had data on athletes from, say, freshman through senior year and seen kind of the graph of their capacity and workload increase over the four years? Not with our men and women's soccer teams.

Women just got their units a year and a half ago. Men have had theirs three years. But the way our coach recruits, we typically get a lot of older students that are going to graduate school. So they're only here with us for two years. They get their graduate degree and then they move on. Why does he do that? I wonder what's the advantage? They have more maturity. They typically have better ball control, ball skills, better physical development, because you're dealing with athletes that are now 22 to 26 instead of 18 to 22.

I think that's good for, I don't think that would be as advantageous for weightlifting, but I have to think about it. That's a good, interesting concept. I'm learning all these new concepts about recruiting. You know, I'm just kind of, but I hip. It's going well, but anyway. You mentioned when we initially started talking about athlete monitoring, some important variables. What are, is there just like kind of a high-level list of things that coaches should be aware of?

I think it really comes down to what technology do you have access to. That's really what's going to dictate what type of monitoring you can implement. If you don't have technology, you're going to stick with session RPE because it's a pencil and paper test. If you've got some technology or you want to make that investment, you kind of have to weigh that benefit or I guess cost to benefit ratio of how many units can I buy? What is it going to give me? How much time does it take to collect that data versus again,

what does it give me? So it becomes a judgment call between your sports science staff or you as a coach trying to figure out what is the most important piece of equipment that we need to help us improve. Yeah. If the GP, I was just gonna tell you and there's is like you'd be surprised how much really cool data you can get without any fancy thing and you can do you know uh dr lighting needs to make an awesome youtube he won't he's he's

so like he won't do all this crazy social media but if um he will after today well i'm gonna do it if he doesn't so either way but like you can make correlations so you can come up track all this data and then you can see what what is actually relating to you know what's important to you so like for me in snatch and clean jerk i can start to see of all those things i mentioned earlier i can see what you know what correlation they have to snatch and clean jerk. So then you can see the difference in correlation causation. Yeah. You know, so it's really cool.

You don't have to need any fancy, expensive stuff. Yeah, well, I mean, most people probably have a watch on their wrist that can give them a ton of information. But how accurate, I guess is probably the right word. How accurate are your standard wearables that a coach could start to gather information off of? I think that there's probably going to be a cost line. The whopping $30 watch that I have that tracks my distances and heart rates probably is nowhere near the Garmin that costs $400. Yeah. That's your GPS movements and heart rate.

So I think there's a cost line that you're going to cost depending upon how much you want to invest. Yeah. The more expensive you get, the more accurate your data and more reliable your data is going to be. Well, is, is HRV something,

I mean, talking about, we, we worked with the guys from whoop last year maybe two years ago but um yeah before my time yeah i would love to have worked with those dudes we could connect you with them please yeah the um but is is hrv i guess i'm more talking uh interested in the actual accuracy of the wearable. Is it data that is reliable enough that a coach could be able to assess their athletes and knowing what their numbers are?

I think it's definitely a piece of information that you can collect. If you have that device, it doesn't hurt to look at it. And then it's a matter of making that decision with that wearable device amongst everything else that you are seeing and everything else that you're collecting yeah so again you're not relying on one piece of information to make a judgment yeah yeah because i i feel like you know many coaches especially listening to this that are in the strength conditioning crossfit world are going to listen and go well g, GPS, no chance. But maybe even total daily steps for some sort of non-exercise movement throughout the day. And then some sort of calorie tracker, just something that's repeatable

is probably a really good way to start building out some sort, along with an RPE is probably a great four metrics that people could start to use to correlate some numbers and assess where their athletes are at. Absolutely. But from those, how do you start to extrapolate an actual formula that tells a story of where your athletes are at? So just numbers in a spreadsheet, how do we start to tell the story of where your athletes are at instead of just numbers in a spreadsheet how do we start to tell the story of um you know creating formulas or or how do we get to a a number whatever it is like one through ten that says giddy up and go or hey go take a day off i don't know if we're

gonna get to that just because we're so variable. I think that's a great idea to try and push for, but it's almost impossible to create some sort of algorithm that incorporates all of your monitoring variables, all of the subjective questionnaires, in order to determine it's a red light or a green light. And that's, I don't think we're going to get to that because it's just too muddy. There's too much information. There are too many things that aren't right. And here's the other problem. We have certain situations where an athlete, according to the data is supposed to have a bad day and then they hit PRS. So it does, it's not always perfect. And that's the reality of it. So to simplify it to a one through 10 scale of a number, I don't think that's ever going to happen. But what cost was that PR would be my question, you know, so like, let's say their heart rate variability is tracking bad, there's not much variability, and their, their sleep sucks,

all these things, and they PR, But what is the cost of that PR? The compounding effect of more and more stress. You know, like the best you can do is like, you know, try to make as wise a decision. And then when it's time to compete, though, shut your mouth. Like I'm not going to talk to any of my athletes about what they're tracking because it doesn't matter. They got to compete. But like if you can just make as wise a decision as possible during training,

it gives you a higher chance, a higher probability of at the meet being peaked when you're supposed to peak. That's all I'm after. Like, you know, yeah, they might – I've had Matt Weininger come in here with zero sleep and hadn't eaten since the PR because he's a freak and he's an outlier. But like what was the cost of that PR? That's my question.

It just compounds the amount of stress that his body is undertaking that day right man like the question i was gonna ask you about whoop you know about sleep because that's part of what i want to try you know um because you know the whoop will tell you like how much of that was um rem and then how much of that was like deep sleep like what, what do you think about that? Instead of just total hours, because I think we've had a guy named Corey Greger on a show probably gets five or six hours of sleep. However, it's for some odd reason, he gets five or six of the most highest quality sleep you'll ever see. So, but like, how important is that, do you think?

I think it's super important. Just the total quantity doesn't tell you much same thing with nutrition you can eat a massive amount of food but if it's garbage food well that's not going to help your performance same thing when it comes to sleep it has to be that quality restorative sleep and that's what matters i agree is able to measure the amount of time you're in that quality restorative sleep and i think that would be definitely beneficial there's a new company i want to tell you about off the show but i've been starting to work with it's called i was trying to get the dudes from um what was that one place uh uh it doesn't matter but like this new place is like worried about brain waves and cns and like i'm

super it's called brain co and like i'm super excited about working with thoseS and like, I'm super, it's called brain co. And like, I'm super excited about working with those dudes. And like, you know, I just want to track as many variables as I can. And then because you've taught me how to like get correlations, start to see, and then I can tell our audience, like, this is what I found to be important. And this is what I found not to be to say people all the time. Like, I mean, if I'm going to go to school at 47,

maybe I'll save some people out there some time by learning what's good and what's not. Right. Travis, have you guys discussed your velocity-based training and kind of conspired on any way to improve with his data? A little bit, but that's a good question because I want to ask him. We went back and forth a little bit last week

about the variables so my goal Dr. Lightning would be like to take number one you gotta have like a set number but then also as they get stronger a set percentage you know and like track it over time to see how

variable it is because here's the reason Brian Mann told me that if at any given day, if your athlete is low, is 10% below the mean, the standard, you know, the mean set by whatever percentage, they're 10% below that, that at that point it would be best to cut the whole thing and do some bodybuilding and go home.

By bodybuilding, I mean like some, you know, low intensity, high rep, get a little pump, metabolic stress to incur hopefully a good hormonal response and then take it to the house. What are your thoughts on that? When you say load, well, I think just for clarification, with two different measurements, we have a constant load on the bar. Right.

That way we can track changes in velocity. Right. And then you have a percentage of their 1RM so that you can track the velocity in relation to the new changing 1RM. Right. So we can track both of those variables and they give us slightly different information. One of the things we have to think about when it comes to that 10% rule, I don't know where the 10% came from. I don't either. That's what I'm asking. It clearly showed up, but that's what we tend to use. I know in rehab, we use 10% as a threshold between the injured and non-injured for releasing to play. Where did 10% come from? I don't know. I was hoping you had the answer. You're supposed to know everything.

But we do use that 10% rule. And while I think that is a good, at least general threshold to use, how you implement training once an athlete is below that threshold becomes another concern because you talked about doing more of a body builder or just basic strength training, which is going to have a more hormonal response as opposed to high intensity, high velocity, which is going to have more of a neural response. Right. So both are adding fatigue, but just different systems in the body that are experiencing that fatigue, the nervous system versus the endocrine system. Right. So with that being the case, it's hard to identify whether or not you should be doing the hormonal training or just taking an entire day off. What are your thoughts? Right.

What would you do? It depends on the threshold. 10%, I think they can still train, but it's going to be a low-volume, low-intensity session as opposed to doing a low-volume or low-intensity, high-volume session. So you're essentially cutting the reps and the volume. Right. Yeah. I asked him about, you know, okay, so here's my response to that.

And like, you know, he talked about what would I do if it was 10% below? I said, I would go light and work on technique. And his response was that was a terrible idea because, because their CNS is so disrupted that you know that they wouldn't be able to that their it was their medulla or cerebellum wouldn't be able to function properly to remember these movements that i'm trying to teach them so like but like so then i was like all right not bad so well that's when bodybuilding he is his suggestion was bodybuilding but um i like the bodybuilding exercises right just i would be

concerned with the volume portion of it if they're already fatigued and he was very he was very um direct and sane you just pick something very low intensity get a pump and go home so like don't like don't work to failure good you know like take like for example the other day this very thing happened and so i had someone you know grab a kettlebell do some goblet squats get a little pump in their quads and go home and so but but i i don't know appropriate have you done any or do you guys calculate at all i mean we keep talking about if somebody is if like their homeostasis is just walking and being active and then now they're going into like a training environment even if it's a low level bodybuilding type session. Um, and it's not,

you know, pushing the limits of what they're capable of. But what happens if say someone goes to like a yin yoga class, are you calculating that stuff in there too? On the recovery side of they just went super mellow. Um, maybe they took a two hour nap or, but that's still still that's still stress partially like i'm curious what he says i was like yoga would be some stress but the nap is definitely hopefully or at least hopefully restorative um but unfortunately we can't

quantify that unless the athlete is reporting that in their daily uh subjective questionnaires we're not getting that snapshot so we're not getting that snapshot. So we're not getting that piece of information. Yeah, I would love, like, you know, it'd be cool to be, I wasn't even thinking about that until you said that, and it was about like when someone goes to massage or chiropractic, to be able to include that in there too. You know, is there a way to do that? Let's say that on my questionnaire, if I put, you know,

restorative work and, you know, restorative work and, you know, chiropractic, whatever, like just laying on a table and having somebody that's asked you just, yeah, put you in complete parasympathetic for 60 minutes. That's right.

Yeah. That's a lot of good. What about that? Honestly, I think it's super beneficial from the physical and also psychological aspect. Compassionate touching has been shown to be extremely important. That's a lot of what massage is. Someone's there touching you, letting you know that they care.

Of course, they're probably getting compensated for that. But that's six minutes. Wouldn't be the first time I paid for it. Anyway. All these guys know a story that's too good for tv that's exactly where my head went all right all right so is is there a way to quantify that on a sheet on you know on like a data sheet like i mean if the massage is something that is taking place on a regular basis i think that we can note it in a logbook. But to quantify the amount of parasympathetic relaxation that takes place, I don't think that's possible.

Unless there's something with these omega waves or the brain wave that you're mentioning. Omega wave, that's the company that I was trying to get. That's right. Yeah, yeah. If there's some way that they can quantify it, maybe, but I'm not familiar with that information. Yeah, I don't know either um do you guys track anything on the nutrition side of things um not that i'm aware of uh we do have certain athletes that are nutritional high risks because of certain behavior. We have them talk to our sports dietician and our soul soul mass Institute, and we'll get the athletes counseling in that respect,

but we don't have anything that tracks their carbohydrates and proteins and fats on a daily basis or even total calories. That's what I definitely want to do. I want to, right. And I think that's something that with smaller teams and honestly with cell phone technology, we have the ability to do that. It's just a matter of making sure the athlete is accountable in doing that every time they eat or drink something. Yeah. That's where you really got to know your athletes. Like, you know, there's certain athletes I'm 100% confident would do it at least 90% correctly. And there's some I absolutely know it would be wasting my time. And, like, it would just cause me another frustration. So you just got to know your athletes and, you know,

know when to say yes and when to say no. How hard is it to get buy-in from the athletes? I mean, when I think about a college athlete, yes, they know that they're good at their sport. But they're also, you know, they don't have full brains. They're 19 years old and they've been good at sports their whole life. They can't remember a time in which they showed up to practice and they didn't dominate. So when you come to them with this spreadsheet and say, hey, I'm tracking all these things now, do you just get eye rolls? And they go, okay, can I just go play soccer?

Can I just go dominate like I've always done? Right. Some of them do, and some of them that's their genetic prowess that they actually can handle almost any training load. Like I said, the 11 miles in the midfielder, the athlete, we could throw anything at him. He'd eat it up and ask for more. That was his background. That was his genetic prowess. But there are certain players that we have to manage much more closely. So yes, there are some of them that will give you that eye roll and the athlete monitoring

isn't that beneficial for them because of the fact that they're able to handle that training load. Most athletes aren't that way. There is a certain breaking point, and we need to find a way to manage those. Oftentimes, I use the athlete monitoring for educational practices to begin with, mainly to get that buy-in right yeah educate them to show them that you care that you're trying to make them better outside of the weight room outside of the sport practice in their daily lives health yeah yeah nutrition stress management

whatever the case may be and i think that helps with the buy-in so if if you were to take everything that you have now and and make it even cooler i have to imagine that getting some sort of pre-practice post-practice blood work where you can really get into oh yeah like how do you, if there was another level that you were able to attain. The perfect one. Yeah, like, what is the most optimal spreadsheet look like, and what are you tracking? For which activity? Are we still talking soccer?

Are we going to? Yeah, soccer's great. That's kind of the basis and where your expertise is at. Definitely we want our subjective questionnaires. First off, I think soccer is a perfect one because many of the CrossFetters that are listening to this, it's like the perfect matchup as far as energy systems and what they use to be good at their sport.

Right. So I definitely think your subjective questionnaires. If you can find a way to quantify your nutrition information, your sleep, sleep quality and quantity, your muscle soreness, even if it is just a subjective scale, if you can listen to your body and identify the amount of soreness that you have, that is helpful. So using those three simple pieces, and then combine it with, I'm a fan of reactive strength index. If you have a jump mat, now, of course, that requires technology. But that's looking at your ground contact time and your flight time. So how high you jump.

So again, going back to our impulse momentum, your feet are in contact with the ground for a short period of time. So we're trying to create a large impulse that produces a high or a long flight time. So that kind of gives us an idea as to how the central nervous system is handling training sessions. We also know that rate of force development is one of the first variables that starts to fall off when athletes get fatigued. So if we're able to look at that through reactive strength index, that may give us an early indication that something might be going on. Can you explain the reactive strength index a little bit more clearly

so they'll know exactly what you're talking about? Yeah. So the reactive strength index is a ratio between your ground contact time. So essentially what you're going to do is you're going to stand on a box. You're going to drop down onto your contact mat and then jump as high as you possibly can. So the contact mat is going to measure the amount of time your feet are on the ground. That is going to be your impulse, essentially your time period to produce force. And then you have your flight time, which is going to be how high you actually jumped.

So those are the two metrics we're looking at is your ground contact time and your flight time. And we're getting a ratio. Now, that gives us an idea as to how efficient the body is at producing force very, very quickly. And again, like I said, the rate of force development begins to drop off first when they're fit. The one caveat to the ground contact or the reactive strength index is the height at which you're dropping off from a box. I was going to ask you, what is the standard?

I've seen literature from 30, 60 and 90 centimeters. It seems like the stronger you are, the higher you actually need to jump from. Right. You see the changes in fatigue. Right. Anecdotally doing this with myself,

I needed to be at least 60 centimeters in order to see it. I didn't see changes when I dropped from a 15 or 30 centimeter box. Right. So your strength level, your athlete's strength level is also going to dictate the height at which you're dropping from. Yeah. On that, we could continue going into blood work. I mean, the GPS data is extremely valuable. Yeah. And then, of course, I would like to get HRV on our men's soccer players. Wait, that one seems easy. It does.

But it's not. We don't have heart rate monitors. We have GPS. So it's something they've got to wear all day long. Is that why or what? Well, what they would need to do is when they first wake up in the morning before they get out of bed put their heart rate monitor on right and they would have to do this before they even get out of bed and that's usually the hardest

part is getting them to do that on a consistent basis by themselves before they get up and go to the bathroom or get up and go eat or whatever the case may be oh yeah so i gotta connect you with the guys at whoop i don't know i actually this isn't uh i don't i don't know how much how much scientific data has been taken off of the whoop specific in comparison to like the aura ring and all those but those companies should be dying to help college athletes and gather all that information i would love to gather it for them. Yeah. That seems like a no brainer for those companies to start working with you guys.

And just give me, I'll talk the whole time, you know, like you see, I talk about velocity all the time. I would love to have whoop anything to measure brain waves, heart rate, ability,

you know, quality of sleep. Those are all the things I'm into like if there's company listening like i'm about it and i'll talk about it yeah sure yeah so um this has been awesome i really appreciate you having having you on the show yeah i appreciate this has been wonderful yeah Yeah, where can people find you? Should they just take your class? Should we all come out? If they want to take my class, that would be wonderful.

Yeah. It's online, right? It is online. Yeah, we can pitch a brother to you. I know about it. Right? Yeah, yeah. We're going to make sure we get a videographer out there

so you can start making Andy Galpin like – He won't do it. I'm trying to get it to him. He's like he's not concerned with that. So he's more like strength university. You know, he's like he just wants to teach people. He's not – he's a real dude. Behind the scenes, even when it comes to our GPS data with our men's soccer,

I have very little involvement. I crunch the numbers behind the scenes, and I make my suggestions to the coaches. That's where I find my niche. That's actually a great, I'd love this to be at least for my last question, but do you feel like on a team or in a training environment that there should be two people, one that's crunching numbers and making objective decisions and then another one that is the salesman that can make subjective conversations seem easy to get people to do what they need to do. Absolutely. Yeah.

I say usually that's the case where you have a numbers person that is not the best social interaction and it comes down to somebody else who is very sociable and doesn't necessarily know all the math and the data science behind it and if you can link those two people together it makes a perfect team yeah basically i would rather be that i would rather be the data guy more than the i would love to just i would rather just sit and crunch numbers and figure out you know how much data can i get this coach for him to then, you know, take that and discern with however he wants. But, yeah, that would be more fun to me too.

I just dig that. Yeah. If I could do data analysis all day long, 24 hours a day, I'd be happy with it. Me too. Call me. If you need a message delivered, you let me know. Yeah, he's our guy. I'll make sure everyone likes you.

He's our guy. I'll make sure everyone likes you. He's our guy. I'll make it the most fun time they've ever had being told to go take a seat and take the day off. Yeah. Yeah. Is there an email or if anybody has any specific questions that they want to reach out to you or connect with the university, is there a way they can get a hold of you? Absolutely. You can email me at keith.lighting at lr.edu, university email address. You can also find me on Instagram at drklighting,

and shoot me a message there. There it is. You answer your messages? I tag you all the time but i don't know if you ever i do i see the tags okay good good good absolutely yeah yeah coach travis bash mashley.com or go check out yeah there's like four people now in our little department who've heard me talking about it we got four new students now lenoir right doing the master's in exercise science it really is not to try and get brownie points from my professor.

It really is a fun program. And, like, it's actually helped me monetarily because I'm applying it with what I do. So you should do it. It's good. Yeah. We can make this a part of the course now. You got to go listen to Barbell Shrugged.

Yeah. There it is. Look at that. This would be a good intro to athlete monitoring for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Doug Larson. I'm on Instagram.

Doug Larson. Keith, appreciate you coming on the show, dude. Yeah. Every time I am either at Lenore with MASH or talking to you or anybody part of the school, I'm actually always blown away because there's, what, like 3 like 3000 kids that go to the school. It's a small school. The fact that you guys got GPS attached to kids.

And I feel like there's the, the weight room is gorgeous. It's like the perfect, it's not like Oregon where there's billions of dollars getting poured into athletics, but you guys have like a beautiful, it feels like a really tight knit sports community there with some really smart people.

So I appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us. Oh, you have no idea how intelligent some of our faculty are. Yeah. I've worked with our physics department creating essentially the Nord board and our students actually wrote- A what board? The Nord board. Have you actually wrote a what board?

What was the word board? Have you heard about that? We have not. It's pretty cool. No. Our men's soccer coach said, Hey, can we buy this? And it comes out of Australia for $10,000. I said, no, we can't buy this. So I contacted our physics departments. I built the device and then he actually had his students write the computer program that runs it. So we built it for $300.

Wow. It's done, you know, like what's it called? The poor man's glue hammer. This is why you need Instagram because now you can go sell that for more than $300. See, or don't, and just give me all your ideas and I will. So it's cool. See, that's fine with them. I love guys like this.

We know plenty of people that would love to have a $300 piece of equipment they could sell for $10,000. Just to clarify the norm for what it does, it shows how much force you're producing. Like, you know, when someone does the Russian leans is what I call them. You know, the, what is it called? I know them as Nordic hamstring curls. Nordic hamstring curls, right, right.

So, like, it measures how much force, you know, that you're applying to the ground at the knee. So, it looks at bilateral asymmetries between your left and right hamstring. Again, trying to identify if somebody's at risk from a hamstring injury. It's really cool. Very cool. Yeah. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrug.

Get over to barbellshrug.com forward slash diesel dad where all the busy dads are getting strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. And everybody in Palm Springs, L.A., Vegas, and San Diego, get into Walmart. We are in the pharmacy. Three programs on the shelf. Friends, we'll see you next Wednesday.