Published! My first velocity based training research paper

Published! 🎓

My first academic paper, and I was super excited to be part of the experience. You can check out our paper: The effects of verbal cueing for high intended movement velocity on power, neuromuscular activation, and performance, at this link.

Had a great time being involved in this honours project, looking into intent to move, a key principle of velocity based training.

I wasn’t much help in the later stages of getting the paper over the line for publication, but helping with the initial study question, research design and then trying to keep things practical along the way was a super interesting experience. Huge thanks to Michael Rheese, Dr Ash Hendy and the rest of the study team for their hard work and having me along from the very start.

Our findings: Intent to move coaching on velocity controlled leg extension training for three weeks does not improve vertical leap or neural outputs any more than standard cueing.

However, this study certainly had its limitations (including a broken leg for our study lead Michael!) so my key learnings:

1. Studying intent to move in isolation is hard, the very act of cueing someone to lift as fast as possible tends to change actual movement velocity, which therefore becomes it’s own variable, confounding the study. Our solution was to use the isokinetic leg extension, but then that leats into problem number two.
2. Isolated knee extension training - whether done for maximal intent or not - is a poor way to train for multi-joint power expression such as jumping.

Who would have thought? 🤷