What is a Velocity Profile
Or: How to Turn Your Barbell into a Lie Detector
The most dangerous phrase in the fitness industry isn't "no pain, no gain" – it's "that was a 3 @ 6.5" Because, much like a politician's promise, what people think they can do and what they actually can do are often separated by a chasm of self-deception so wide you could park a CrossFit gym in it.
This is where Velocity Profiles come in – essentially, they're the psychological equivalent of putting your training claims through a polygraph test.
The Truth About Human Perception
Here's something fascinating: show two different people a barbell moving at 0.31 metres per second, and one will tell you it's "flying up" whilst the other insists it's "grinding." Both are right, and both are wrong, because they're missing the crucial context. It's rather like asking someone if £50,000 is expensive – well, is it for a house or an SBD belt?
A velocity profile provides that context; it’s a personalised Rosetta Stone for your training fatigue. It translates the objective reality of how fast you're moving into an empirical value of how many more Reps you have left.
Beautiful Specificity
Velocity profiles are wonderfully specific. The profile you build for your paused bench press can be wildly different from the profile you create for your Deadlift.
This specificity isn't a bug; it's a feature. Each lift and each lifter has its own velocity fingerprint, as individual as your actual fingerprint and considerably more helpful in making smart training choices.
The Lie We Tell Ourselves
Take two lifters: one hits 0.31 m/s on their final rep, and the other manages 0.21 m/s. Without context, you'd assume the second person is having a harder time. But plot their individual profiles, and you could discover they're both working at the same relative intensity.
How do I get my own Velocity Profile?
Strength Analytics has a simple protocol you can follow; it takes about 20-30 minutes and as long as you have decent technique, at least 6 months training experience, and a spotter you trust (if you train in a commercial gym this might be the sticking point!) then it’ pretty easy to follow. At the end of the process, you’ll get a chart which looks something like this:
The values in the right-hand column are in meters per second. Now you’ll have exact markers for different levels of fatigue. Here’s how it looks on a graph:
The Elegant Solution
The truly clever bit is that velocity profiles solve a problem most people don't realise they have: translating your body's honest feedback into actionable training decisions. Your barbell doesn't lie, it doesn't flatter, and it doesn't tell you what you want to hear. It simply reports velocity, and velocity, when correctly interpreted, becomes the most reliable training partner you'll ever have.
Think of it as having a conversation with your fatigue levels, except the conversation is conducted in the universal language of physics rather than the subjective dialect of "I think I can probably manage another rep, maybe…what do you think, Bob?"
The barbell is already telling you everything you need to know. The question is: Are you listening?
Want to know more?
Click on the link below to find out more about our completely free Velocity Programming Mini-Course, which will launch soon.
