Building Context with VBT — A White Paper by the RepOne Strength Team

RepOne Strength
The Next Dimension in Strength
3 min readJul 8, 2018

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Background

About a year ago we noticed an issue in our OpenBarbell data set. Although a lot of people logged RPE, it wasn’t consistent or plentiful enough to tackle a lot of the data science problems we thought were most interesting. One of the most fascinating aspects of Motion Based Training is the fact that we can correlate subjective measures like perceived exertion with objective measures like velocity. We decided to start an internal data collection study at S&S Barbell, our testing facility, to fill in these gaps, and began initial work on some initiatives that are important for RepOne. We wanted to share the results of this initiative with our waitlist.

Purpose

The initial purpose of collecting this data was to build better computational models of athletes. If we could fully characterize an athlete via motion data, we could help coaches make more informed decisions about training loads and overall progress. Furthermore if we can minimize the amount of data we need to build athlete models with high confidence, we can reduce the amount of time from installation of RepOne to full utilization.

Enter your observed data in our RPE/Velocity Calibration Table Generator Part of our methodology involves creating RPE/Velocity Calibration Tables, which can be a relatively simple way to build an actionable athlete model. The Building Context White Paper includes a a few handy tools like the reference Calibration Tables above, individualized tables, and tools to generate your own. We believe they can be useful in a team weight room today.

How to Read the White Paper

The paper is not a piece of scientific research, rather it is a presentation of our ideas along with a few tools to make it easier for you to replicate our methods if you so choose. We believe there is a lot of progress to be made in building fast, accurate athlete profiles, and are always working to improve. The information presented in our paper gives coaches another option in implementing VBT strategies with resources that are currently available, as RepOne is awaiting release.

‘How Do You Coach’ Survey #2

This is the second survey in our ‘How Do You Coach” series, this time the topic is how you group athletes in a rack. You can find the first survey here. If you want a chance to win one free RepOne device when we launch, you can choose to add your email address in the form below. The individual who fills out the most surveys when we ship our first batch will win. If multiple people filled out all of our surveys we’ll pick one person from that group at random.

Click here to fill out the second survey, and have a chance to win a free RepOne!

As usual, feel free to send us an email with any questions. We’re very interested in your feedback about RepOne, keep an eye out on our social media and blog for new app features, content, and more! Thanks, Jordan

Founder @ RepOne Strength

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