[Craig Kleinberg is a Performance Coach at Athletic Lab where we regularly integrate Velocity Based Training] As strength and conditioning coaches, understanding how our athletes are responding is of utmost importance, namely understanding work intensity and fatigue management. There are many ways to monitor fatigue. Some are more intrusive, such as blood cortisol levels, while others, like Relative Perceived Exertion (RPE) and repetitions in reserve (RIR), are subjective and easy to assess, but leave room for high degrees of variability. One easy and objective method of monitoring that is becoming more popular is Velocity-Based Training (VBT). Researchers have been exploring the relationship between barbell velocity and its relationship to relative intensity, or percentage of 1 repetition max (1RM) for quite some time now (2, 6, 8, 10). Briefly, by determining the relationship between velocity and the percent of a 1RM, you can determine an athlete's Load-Velocity Profile (LVP). This can help prescribe relative training intensities on a given day, accounting for accumulated fatigue from previous workouts and it is the foundation on which velocity-based training is built upon. For the sake of this article, I am not going to go into much more detail on LVP, but if you would like more information on the ins-and-outs, you can find it on one of our previous blog posts here. Before moving on, there are a few considerations that should be mentioned when discussing the use of velocity-based training. First, the more individualized a LVP, the more accurate your profiles will be (4). If it isn't feasible to create a profile for each athlete, it is possible to scale the LVP based on position group, or team. Another consideration to be aware of is that velocity may [...]