but how does one determine the degree of undulation in a given week?
fuck my brain hurts...I'm just gonna shell out the dough.
Thanks for all your time regardless
@Docd187123 @weighted chinup
Your first step is defining your training goals accurately, precisely, and in great detail. From my understanding, you do a lot of Oly lifts, you like agility and explosiveness, and generally performance oriented more than aesthetically oriented. Can you expand on that and/or correct it?
This is the most important step in tailoring a good program. It's critical.
The bar speed tracker you get will be of little use unless you know how to interpret and apply the metrics to your training. There's some very neat ways to incorporate it from what I've read so if you do get it I'd love to hear about your experiments with it.
An example of how to use it in training would be let's say your running a 4-6wk macrocycle or block in your training geared towards improving maximal/absolute strength. You'd choose lifts to include in this block based on certain factors like which lifts improve maximal strength the most, which lifts you're able to do, which lifts have the most carryover to your sport or goals, etc. Certain lifts or variants should always be in a good program like squatting movements, pulling movements, pressing movements, etc.
Let's take squats for example. You want to auto regulate your training with VBT and a bar speed tracker. With typical old school soviet periodization, you'd use Prilepin's table to calculate daily volume. This would be based off a percentage of your max among other factors. You'd do 6sets of 3 @ 80-85% or 7 doubles at 90-95%. No matter how you felt that day that's what you have to do. If you have a good coach they'll regulate your training based on their expert eye. You want to do it yourself. You know you'll need higher intensities and the volume therefor will need to be low to moderate. We know maximal strength tends to be in the 0.1 - 0.35m/s velocity range. So if you're working up to a max effort single or attempting a new PR etc, you would expect to see a bar speed in this range. Let's say you worked up like this
405x1: 0.65m/s (we know bar speed was too fast to be a true max, add weight to bar)
420x1: 0.50m/s (still too fast but getting closer, add weight to bar)
430x1: 0.30m/s
Now at 0.30m/s we know we are in the range of max effort but a good coach or a trained eye should be the final word if you stop here or try again since you could get closer to the 0.1 mark. How much form breakdown did you have, how much rest did you take between attempts, how has training been leading up to this, how did you sleep, etc? Based on these kinds of questions you might want to make another small jump and try again or call at 430.
Let's say you try again and get
435x1: 0.20m/s. We call it here since it's pretty damn close. You now have your initial stressor. Your daily max, top working set, whatever you want to call it. Let's say furthermore that this is a high stress training day or high stress week in your training and you're working towards 10% fatigue. To auto regulate your volume with velocity based training and bar speed tracker at 10% fatigue, you take 10% off the initial/top set load, 435 x 0.90 = 391.5lbs. Load the bar up with 390 let's say. You can keep doing sets of 390x1 until your bar speed tracker shows your bar speed has taken a significant hit. At this point you know you've accumulated enough volume to get the 10% fatigue.
390x1: 0.40m/s
390x1: 0.37m/s
390x1: 0.32m/s
390x1: 0.27m/s
390x1: 0.18m/s (by this one you felt exhausted, form suffered, etc)
You ended up with 5 volume sets and we know this auto regulated dose of volume is enough to get the desired fatigue levels bc of the metrics we were able to track.
Another metric that's useful during multi rep sets is peak velocity and average velocity. Let's say the average velocity for a set of 5 was 0.50m/s. We kind of tell if you're giving it your all throughout the whole lift or letting off the gas after the sticking point. If the difference between peak velocity and average is larger it means you're pushing through to the end. If it's a smaller difference you're likely cruising through the reps without putting 100% effort into it.
There's much more that can be done and talked about but first step as I said is you need to define your training goals. What are they and we can go from there.