What Is South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club? 

South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club (SBWC) opened in 2010 as a side project of owner Paulie Steinman. He started the gym so he and his friends would have a place dedicated to Powerlifting and Weightlifting. South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club prides itself on its commitment to presenting weight training in a nontraditional gym format. SBWC physically looks like a collegiate training center, but unlike a sports team, the members have more diverse goals and obstacles. In-person SBWC coaches are able to guide each athlete in a way that is appropriate to their own circumstances.

Although the club began as a powerlifting training center for a group of friends, it has expanded to one of the premier barbell sports, strength, and performance training facilities in Brooklyn and New York City. Working with members of various levels of experience and unique goals, SBWC began to consider an athlete management system. 

Why SBWC Chose CoachMePlus 

South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club wanted a program that provided a strong balance between affordability and components. With the goal of finding a program that offered a wide selection of features to fit the needs of all their athletes, the club began by researching other programs. Although other programs were potential fits based on the features they included, most cost more than the club wanted to spend. South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club ultimately decided that CoachMePlus’s lower cost and overall features made it the most attractive, as it hit the sweet spot for their needs. 

CoachMePlus and South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club

South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club has seen a wide range of improvements in operations and in its members’ performance since implementing the use of CoachMePlus. Even after one week, SBWC staff and community were excited for their new system.  “The clean UI makes performance tracking a breeze with easy to use data entry right in the app. As part of our reopening protocols, we implemented a mandatory COVID questionnaire. Additionally, due to the functionality of the app, we were able to add both a daily wellness and an RPE questionnaire!” 

These changes have aided how the club works with new members and stays organized. In addition to tracing Covid, CoachMePlus allows members to identify pain and soreness and to track other factors that may affect their performance (like sleep or stress levels). Coaches access these responses to help members improve by keeping their subjective wellness in mind. Here is an overview of some of the most important CoachMePlus features South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club has implemented. Plus, here’s how they are helping members meet their goals!

Improved Onboarding Process

Knowing how to create a strong first impression is a must when it comes to attracting and keeping gym members. Thus, South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club has used CoachMePlus to improve its onboarding process to help new members get acclimated to and feel at home in its unique atmosphere faster. This has positively impacted its overall retention and new member satisfaction. The club has grown to over 200 members within a relatively short amount of time, crediting CoachMePlus to an improved onboarding process as being an integral part of its growth. 

Personalized Coaching in Person

With those more than 200 members comes the increased need for a strong organizational system. Training sessions – available throughout the day – have a cap of 16 members. While there is a team-like atmosphere, individuals are not necessarily all doing the same training at the same time. Workout plans must be appropriate for each person, taking into account different training loads and levels of experience. Therefore, it is important for every member to access and use a flexible system that the coaches can review with them and adjust in real time during the session.

Increased Independently Driven Learning

Although South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club workouts primarily take place in person, members also must take steps to improve on their own when they are not physically present in the club’s gym. CoachMePlus provides a wide range of exercises within their video library that can be executed with limited equipment. By taking advantage of CoachMePlus’s individual app assignments, members have experienced an overall higher level of growth. They also have the ability to remain accountable in their strength training no matter the circumstances. 

Added Opportunities to Work With Non-Local Athletes

For serious athletes and fitness enthusiasts, skipping the gym for the duration of a trip is simply not an option. As little as a week without a workout can be enough to delay or regress in different goals. Although many gyms offer some type of day pass or allow athletes to purchase a single class, they do not always offer a helpful way of making sure athletes continue to meet their goals if they only utilize an unfamiliar location. South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club could not keep accountability and tracking for traveling members until partnering with CoachMePlus. 

Although South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club functions primarily as a face-to-face environment, it is also open for remote athletes. Right now, only Paulie is offering fully remote training to athletes but CoachMePlus has made it easier for these non-local athletes to train. Through the app,  athletes get their own unique program through CoachMePlus. By using the Video Library athletes can upload videos to show their movement, or Paulie can share videos to instruct the athletes.

Increased Ability to Provide Data to Athletes

Serious athletes prioritize analyzing and tracking the factors that impact their performance and skills. By giving South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club more options for providing athletes with helpful data, CoachMePlus has increased the ability of the club’s members to take the initiative to dig deeper into the factors that are contributing to their performance and learning how to improve than their instructors have time to explicitly tell them.

Athletes are then able to combine their constant access to data with the information they learn from their instructors in person to have the most consistent and well-rounded picture of how they are doing at any given time. The data that CoachMePlus includes in the athletes’ dashboard provides insights and motivation. 

Implemented Wellness Tracking 

Athletes’ overall mood, whether they feel tired or stressed, and other aspects of how they are physically and mentally feeling on any given day can have a significant impact on their performance. Although athletes prefer to push through each workout, the reality is that their wellness can have a major effect on their ability to do so. Knowing what they are dealing with helps athletes go into the gym with a more accurate idea of what they can reasonably expect from themselves. Also, they know what the most likely cause of a less than stellar training session might be and how to fix it.

CoachMePlus’s wellness tracking feature gives both athletes and instructors an idea of how various factors may affect performance. Then, it highlights key steps athletes should consider taking to improve their overall strength and health. It can also let athletes know if meeting with a trainer prior to a class might be beneficial. Since implementing CoachMePlus, South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club has seen athletes and instructors become more in tune with their overall health. 

What Are South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club Team Members Saying About CoachMePlus? 

When asked about why he would recommend CoachMePlus and plans to continue to use it, South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club founder Paulie explained that, “for me, it’s because it does a lot, and does almost everything we need. I haven’t seen anything better at this price point. It is a very balanced offering for a ‘sweet spot’. It is easy to budget when we know how much it will cost per athlete per month. I have to watch the budget so I can keep the price for my athletes fair.” Paulie’s prioritization of taking advantage of multiple angles parallels that of many of our clients. 

South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club is far from the only gym that has found success using CoachMePlus, and we are always interested in partnering with new gyms. If you are interested in improving your gym, team, or other fitness organization and are not sure where to start, we can’t wait to work with you. Contact us today to learn more about how CoachMePlus can improve the productivity of your athletes and business. Request a free demo!

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Although rooted in a rich history, the game of baseball has undergone remarkable changes due to the advancement of data analysis. This data revolution has radically transformed not only how the game is managed, but how it is taught and played. The proliferation of personalized data and analytics is now fundamental to maximizing a player’s development and specific skillset.

From arm speed to spin rates and launch angles, KPIs are everywhere in baseball and softball. And even as technologies for gathering player data continue to improve and become more prevalent, the ability to compile and implement said data is often too costly or time consuming for youth coaches and teams.

Gamers Baseball Academy, a premier baseball and softball training facility in Union County, New Jersey, was a prime example of this problem. Overloaded with terabytes of player analytics, the Academy lacked a conduit to organize and implement its data in a manner that improved player development and performance.

The Academy partnered with CoachMePlus to transform its wealth of player data into actionable and dynamic training methods. Rather than sifting through hundreds of spreadsheets or working across several different programs, CoachMePlus enabled the Academy’s instructors to mass upload and organize player data across a seamless platform. This integration eliminated the administrative costs associated with data collection, allowing instructors to spend less time in front of a computer and more time teaching.

The adoption of CoachMePlus also provided a significant competitive advantage in the form of increased transparency and understanding of a player’s progression. Because metrics, such as sprinting speed, average exit velocity, throwing velocity, etc., are tracked within detailed player profiles, instructors can optimize their programs on an individual basis. And since all data is charted and accessible 24/7 through the app, players can plot their progress as they develop.

Whether organizing and tracking advanced player data or providing instant access to a database of training videos, CoachMePlus has proven to be a gamechanger for the Academy’s training and player development endeavors.

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It was an arm wrestling match that led Steven D. Holt to pursue a career in sports performance and weightlifting training. The former beef cattle farmer from Iowa was dedicated to learning the practices from some of the most respected coaches and trainers from around the world.

Today, Holt is the owner of Steven D’s Strength and Conditioning facility in Cincinnati, Ohio, which works with some of the best young athletes around the world. This includes working with some of the world’s best competitive athletes, such as Olympic weightlifters like 2016 Rio Olympic gold medalist Kianoush Rostami.

Holt offers world-class strength and conditioning coaching for all athletes competing in scholastic, collegiate, Olympic and professional sports. His facility also offers continuing education and instruction for strength and conditioning professionals through certifications, clinics, seminars and private consultation with some of the most well-respected trainers from across the globe.

Brayton Wilson caught up with Holt, and got the chance to learn about his practice and how CoachMePlus has revolutionized his interactions with his athletes.

Interview with Steven D Holt

HOW DO YOU TRACK AND MONITOR ALL OF YOUR OLYMPIC ATHLETE’S DATA?

CoachMePlus has helped us a ton with being able to monitor the volume and the load of everything they’re doing.

We have nine Olympic weightlifting platforms in our facility, and every single one of them has a tablet in it. When an athlete comes in, they log in and I’m able to go in and individually set the exact workout every day for every athlete in the morning. They walk up, grab their tablet and immediately know exactly how much weight to put on the bar. I can work the room a little and coach the athletes on their technique.

I’m not going to 100-percent stick to what I’ve put into the program. If I have them go down in their workload, they can put in the app their workload amount, and then I can go back at night and see how well the athletes did as far as achieving the numbers I wanted them to achieve. It has streamlined my ability to design their programming and training throughout the year, and really monitor every single athlete.

CoachMePlus lets you monitor all of your clients to provide optimal results.

HOW DO YOU COMMUNICATE WITH ALL OF THE ATHLETES YOU TRAIN?

It can create a circuit. If an athlete lifted at school, they can put everything they did during their school workout in the app. Even with athletes that do running, they can load their workloads in the app right from their phone, and then I’m able to know exactly what they did. By being able to check when they did each item, I’m also able to monitor their rest periods so I’m able to know what energy systems they’re using when they’re not at my facility.

I train athletes that are in Australia, Canada, there are distant remote clients, and the app is everything. That’s how we monitor and communicate. We’re able to message each other through the app, load instructional videos through the app. Without that, we’d be trying to Skype, send emails, or make long Excel spreadsheets which would not be near anything streamlined.

CoachMePlus allows you to stay in constant contact with your clients and deliver all of your workouts directly to them.

HOW DO YOU MAKE SURE ALL OF YOUR DIFFERENT TYPES OF ATHLETES ARE TRAINING FOR THEIR SPECIFIC GOALS?

Everything is completely individualized. We might have a similar mesocycle or block of training where we’re trying to work on volume and have less intensity. I can go in and assign everybody a general workout for the day, but I’m still specifically going in and putting the exact weight amount that I want an athlete to hit.

We still have a basic guideline of how much I want them to hit. If somebody hits that guideline and they look great, I may have them take it up a notch. If somebody is not looking up to that guideline, I’m obviously not going to work them up to it. The app allows me to go through and see the variance of change of what I expected somebody to get versus what they didn’t get. If someone overachieved, I can run reports and see all those reports as well.

Everybody’s body is different. We’ve had people that have won Olympic medals and did the polar opposite of someone in their same weight class that was nearly their same age at a different period did. Everybody’s body responds different, but the app allows us to have more data to pinpoint what each person needs quicker.

HOW DO YOU MANAGE INJURED ATHLETES?

With a recovering athlete, the biggest thing we’re able to do is to go back and look at a lot of their previous performances before their injury. That allows us to give us an idea of how quickly they’re recovering. A lot of it is day-by-day. You’re looking at their mobility and using your intuition as a coach to determine what you’re going to have them do. It also gives you a baseline as a tool to measure how fast they’re moving forward. Without having the previous numbers sorted in the app before the injury, we’d be guessing where his workload was before the injury.

WHAT TYPE OF ATHLETES DO YOU TRAIN?

We train athletes of all ages; all the way down from six, seven, eight years old up to collegiate and professional athletes. We primarily use traditional Olympic weightlifting movements. They’re the basis for our program regardless if the athlete is a competitive weightlifter or if they’re a baseball, football or basketball player.

I’ve been fortunate enough that my main mentor is Vladimir Safonov, who’s an established Russian National Team coach. He’s coached multiple Olympians in several sports and is a multiple world record holder. I was able to learn to lift from him, so that’s why we base everything around those lifts. That’s where our strongest background is.

Before I opened in 2009, I went through more of the commercial side of training like bodybuilding, figure and fitness competitors, and then just general population weight loss. As I transitioned into sports performance training and reaching out to different mentors and education, it led to my true passion, which was working with competitive athletes.

We also do a lot of continuing education seminars that are attended by multiple facility owners and sports performance coaches. We have an Olympian in the sport of weightlifting, who has won a gold, silver or bronze medal or set a world record in each of the last four Olympics.

We mostly train youth and high school athletes, and highly competitive weightlifters that come in from outside of the country. We’re not listed as their main coach because they’re not here throughout the entire span of the year, but they do come here for training camps.

I would say 85-percent of our athletic base is high school athletes between the ages of 13 and 18 years old. We get most kids when they’re in seventh or eighth grade, and we train most of them through their senior year.

I bet I’ve trained over 35 kids who have gone to power-five schools for football, baseball or something else. A lot of them will set certain records their senior year of high school, they’ll go into massive collegiate programs, and they’ll come back every summer and still train.

They go to these huge collegiate programs where there are great coaches and great facilities, but there are so many athletes that I don’t think they get the individual attention. I’ve had kids straight bar deadlift 650 to 700 pounds as a senior in high school, then go to B-programs that are nationally recognized and never be able to pull 500 pounds over the four years.

We do have athletes we work with internationally who are at the senior level. Kianoush Rostami (Iran) is a good friend of mine. He’s a Rio gold medalist and a world record holder. He’ll be coming and training here for the couple weeks leading up to the world championship and after. Am I his real coach? No. Do I get to be part of the brainstorm of decision-making? Yes. Same thing with Mohamed Ehab (Egypt), a Rio bronze medalist. Do I get the final say in his decisions? No, but I do get to sit at the table and be one of the people that gets to be a part of that.

HOW DID YOU BECOME THE HEAD TRAINER AND OWNER OF A STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING FACILITY?

I actually didn’t go to school. I was actually a beef cattle farmer by trade growing up in Iowa. I met some football players who beat me in arm wrestling, and that led me to think, ‘How did these guys get so strong? I think I’m super strong from working all day.’ That led me to learn about training in general and seeking out some good qualifying coaches and mentors.

From there, I went to every continuing education clinic that I could, certifications that I could. I’m now an Eleiko certified strength coach, USA Weightlifting strength coach, USA Track and Field, USA Wrestling coach.

I’d look around and see that there’s a really good, successful coach somewhere. I’d reach out to them, and instead of me paying them for me to be a client, I wanted to pay them for their time. I wanted to shadow them, learn from them, and I was fortunate to have some good mentors.

I was also able to reach out to some international coaches through a translator and ask, “What do I have to do to learn your system? Can I pay you for your time?’ Everybody was incredibly inviting and over that span, I have been fortunate enough to have people from Ukraine, China, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, and others who come from all over the world to come both teach myself and then I kind of steal some of their ideas and pass them along as well.

Everything that I’ve got has mostly come from the direct experience of reaching out to people and spending extended periods of time with them.

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STEVEN MACK, BS, CSCS
OWNER, HEAD TRAINER

It was while playing as a walk-on football player at the University of Missouri where Steven Mack discovered his passion for health, fitness and the well being of the human body. After discovering how to transform his own body and helping others transform theirs, he set off on his journey that led him to found Simple Solutions Fitness.

Simple Solutions is a semi-private fitness environment with the individual in mind. Mack specializes in 1-on-1 training with his clients and establishes attainable goals for the betterment of their long-term health. Mack is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist with a Bachelor’s Degree in health sciences. Brayton Wilson got the chance to catch up with Mack and learn about his business in Columbia, Missouri, and discuss his close interactions with his clients using specialized programs from CoachMePlus.

Interview with Steven Mack

HAS COACHMEPLUS HELPED INCREASE YOUR ENGAGEMENT WITH YOUR CLIENTS?

It allows me more time to communicate with my clients and focus on enriching our relationship. Now that I’m not spending time reinventing the wheel or doing the same things over and over again, I’m able to use the system to write things and deliver them very quickly. It saves me a lot of time on the weekends, so now I can spend more time learning, talking and communicating with clients and getting to help them. This gives me more time to actually coach them and to talk to them about what they have going on.

HOW DO YOU RUN YOUR FACILITY?

I like to keep things as individual as I possibly can. It’s a private studio environment. People can see me strictly by appointment, and I go anywhere from one person to no more than four. The reason why I do that is because of the individual attention. My youngest client right now is eleven, and my oldest client is 77. Everybody’s got a different individualized program suited towards a different goal, and that’s something that CoachMePlus has helped me with tremendously. I’m able to give everybody something that fits them and meets them where they’re at now as opposed to having a generalized group workout. I’m able to deliver it repeatedly to this person until it doesn’t deliver results anymore, and then I have to change something else. Or maybe I start off with this program and I make modifications because this person has got an issue with their knee, or this guy just had shoulder surgery so I need to change the program. Maybe this person’s not feeling good today so I need to adjust it. Then we’re able to do it that way. It’s all very small.

WHAT IS IT THAT YOU ENJOY MOST ABOUT WORKING AS A FITNESS PROFESSIONAL?

It is typically seeing people reach their goal. It’s going to be different for everybody. I recently got super excited just looking at how one woman with PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) lost eleven pounds and she’s doing great. My 77-year old client fell down at one point on a run with his daughter in the park. One day, he stands up in a business group and starts talking about how he was feeling strong, feeling good and how he didn’t think he would’ve been able to recover from that fall as quickly as if we weren’t working out together. I was touched by that. I had a guy who had been with his wife for 15 years, and he knew they were going to be on a beach in Mexico at some point. He’d look at her and feel so proud to be with her, and he wanted her to feel the same way. I’ve helped him and his wife and it’s been awesome every step of the way. Being able to point to a specific fitness point is always great when someone comes in and they get in way better shape and they’re able to do things that they weren’t before. They’re excited about it. Hearing about the stuff that they don’t do while they’re with me is even better.

DO YOU LOSE REVENUE BECAUSE OF CLIENTS’ BUSY SCHEDULES OR SMALLER BUDGETS?

I’ve also been able to expand business in that I can help more people who maybe can’t afford to see me as often. I’ve got some people that can only afford to see me once a week, but they still want to work with me and I still want to help them. Maybe it’s their schedule; maybe it’s their budget. But they come in; I make sure they can do all the exercises themselves, and CoachMePlus allows me to continue to coach them, to work with them, and to help them get better without actually having to physically be there with them. We can communicate on what’s going on and what kind of changes we need to make and to monitor that situation that way.

CoachMePlus lets you stay connected with your clients 24/7.

WHAT IS THE KEY TO RETAINING CLIENTS?

As long as you can prove that you’re getting great results with people, that’s not necessarily an issue. As far as showing people that they are getting better, it makes things a lot easier. If your goal is to lose weight, we want to track that trend over time. You have your chart on CoachMePlus, and your weight is trending this in direction. If I can pull up a graph and show them what their weight has been doing over the past few weeks, they can start to understand how these different parts of the process are playing into it. Being able to show people their numbers, their history, all of that has been great. A lot of people like when they’re able to see their history and see that they’re using more weight than they did before. It’s another added layer of measurement. You want to take as many baselines as you possibly can and track all of that.

CoachMePlus lets you give all your clients visual data to drive results.

HOW DO YOU MANAGE TIME WITH ALL YOUR CLIENTS AND RUNNING A BUSINESS?

I used to have a Sunday routine where I would sit down and spend the entire day from 7 a.m. till, some days, 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. writing programs and thinking about what was going on there, making sure that I had that done. When they weren’t written out and ready for me to go, it took that much time. Now that I have CoachMePlus I have several sets of programs that I know work effectively to accomplish different things, it saves me all that time because I can literally just insert all the programs to that client in about five minutes.

It allows me to learn more. That’s the majority of what I end up doing with my time. It either allows me to work more on my business, or it allows me to spend more time learning about how I can help the clients I’m already serving even better.

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Over the past year and a half, I had the opportunity to use the CoachMePlus (CM+) technology platform, which I would classify as a sports performance data management system.

“As a strength and conditioning coach evaluating new technology in the sports performance realm, I see CM+ as a potentially useful tool for tracking athlete information with one centralized system.”

Leveraging this kind of information, coaches can quickly uncover high-performance trends and key sport science indicators, making faster, smarter game-day decisions. The system can also manage all of a team’s sport science data in one central location.

“I decided to use CM+ with the collegiate hockey team I train, moving away from my “safe and comfortable” Excel-based programs to learn a new system and method of centralizing my testing data.”

With the assistance of CM+ staff, I was able to upload all my athletes’ basic information (height, weight, etc.) as well as current testing data from the season easily.

What I was now able to do, with respect to comparing data, was made my workload less (than with Excel) and make the data much easier to view and understand for my sport coaches. In addition to keeping testing data, I also used the athlete monitoring features, which I found helpful. Athletes were able to input their data on the app via their phone or a tablet in the weight room, which made it very efficient for them and easy for the coaches to monitor.

“As is true with a number of solutions on the market, the CM+ system serves as a way to impact coaches and athletes at every competitive level—from high school to professional and the varying levels of collegiate competition.”

If you choose to integrate technology into your strength and conditioning program, you can benefit from the ability to assign and track workouts and monitor hundreds of athletes as well as update training programs throughout the off-season using phones, tablets, etc. In addition, coaches with more sophisticated sports science programs can integrate various wearable measuring devices to get the data output they want through various reports and dashboards.

“The NSCA is pleased to use tools like CM+ to leverage the effectiveness of real-time sports performance as coaches and trainers.”

The NSCA is committed to assisting our members as they affect the future of the strength and conditioning profession.

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SCOTT MACKENZIE, HEAD STRENGTH COACH ON COACHMEPLUS

When I arrived at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre, they were already using CoachMePlus. Having used Teambuildr in the past, I was a little skeptical that CoachMePlus would be the right fit for what we were looking for.

“We were really looking for a way to manage the programming of about 200 athletes while being able to give individual attention to each athlete.”

We have about 200 elite swimmers in our Academy and each athlete requires personal attention. Obviously, the size of our coaching staff was a limiting factor in delivering this kind of attention to each athlete. That problem led the coaching staff to look into a full range of athlete management solutions. What we found is that CoachMePlus was the only software that was able to meet all the needs of our program.

We were spending hours on just managing athlete programming. It interfered with our ability to spend coaching time with the athlete or develop new programming.

“With CoachMePlus, we’re able to save those hours of programming time by storing all that information in their app. We can easily pull up the workout programs when we are with the athletes and not miss a beat.”

We were initially using Excel spreadsheets to run all of our training programs. Excel templates are great for general programming but once you start to tailor programs to the individual, it becomes really time-consuming. Athlete management software is great for scaling individual programming to provide better training to larger groups of athletes.

One area that we’ve saved a lot of time on is athlete testing. Testing athletes typically takes forever. You’ve got to organize the testing so that the athletes can all be assessed within your timeframe. Then, you’ve got to make sure that the testing procedures are the same for each athlete. Once you’re finished, we were having to take our testing data and create programming from it. CoachMePlus allowed us to enter the testing data during the testing sessions and visualize that information immediately. It was a huge help and saved us hours of Excel time.

“We’ve noticed significant strength improvements and lower injury rates which have corresponded with faster swim times among our athletes.”

Since we’ve implemented CoachMePlus, we’ve been able to improve on programming consistency for the athletes. These changes, in addition to training and coaching, have led to faster swim times and a decrease in non-contact injuries.

Before we had CoachMePlus, we were limited in how many athletes we could train without diluting the value of our services. Now that we have programming that can be assigned directly to athletes, we are looking forward to expanding our strength and conditioning programs to take on more elite swimmers. The CoachMePlus app has really given us the opportunity to grow while maintaining the excellent level of athletic performance training that we are known for.

“By the way, our athletes absolutely love using the app. It shows them how invested we are in their success and helps promote accountability in our culture.”

Scott MacKenzie – TPASC
BSc., CSCS, Head Strength Coach

Scott MacKenzie has overseen strength and conditioning programming at TPASC since April of 2018. Prior to that, Scott was the Senior Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach with the University of Toronto. Scott was also a Strength and Conditioning Coach at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada for about 3 years. Scott graduated with his Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology and Exercise Science in 2009.

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VELI-PEKKA KURUNMÄKI
DIRECTOR OF SPORTS PERFORMANCE PRODUCTS, EXERCISE PHYSIOLOGIST

One of the most utilized tools in the sports performance industry is heart rate monitoring. The company FirstBeat, founded in 2002, is one of the leaders not only in heart rate monitoring technology but also the study of Heart Rate Variability and athlete recovery.

CoachMePlus’s Matthew Coller checked in with the Finland-based company to find out how heart rate monitoring is being implemented into the strategies by coaches sports organizations. Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki is in charge of sports performance products at FirstBeat. He has studied exercise physiology at the University of Jyväskylä and has personal experience in both coaching and competitive sports

Interview with Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki

WHAT IS FIRSTBEAT?

Sure. Heart monitoring has a lot more to offer than just beats per minute and target zones. For example, a lot of people don’t realize that the time between consecutive heartbeats is constantly changing, and coded into those changes are respiration and lots of other information about how the body is performing and recovering.

At Firstbeat, we develop and apply the smart analytics necessary to give coaches, trainers and athletes access to all the information the heart has to offer.

When it comes to physiological monitoring, and heart rate monitoring in particular, massive amounts of data can be collected in a short amount of time. And that data is often messy and challenging to interpret. That’s why analytics are so important. It is about offering concise actionable information for better training decisions.

We also recognize that performance monitoring has multiple dimensions and the best way to account for performance through examining the combination of internal and external loading. In other words, it is about tracking how much work an athlete is performing and how their body is reacting to that workload.

Advances in GPS and accelerometer technology have really opened the possibility of external load monitoring, and a lot of teams are using those methods with great results. Our work at Firstbeat focuses on offering the other side of that equation; what is happening inside the body.

WHAT KIND OF DATA IS FIRSTBEAT ANALYZING WITH YOUR TECHNOLOGY?

There are several ways to look at heartbeat data. One way is to focus on the moments of highest intensity during training, another is using heart rate to see how hard you are working at the moment.

When we are tracking athlete training loads over time, we often begin with training impulse (TRIMP) and Training Effect. Training Effect is certainly one of our most popular metrics.  It accounts for the impact each session has on individual fitness levels.

Differences in individual physiology and changes in personal conditioning mean that similar training activities can impact players differently. When coaches and trainers can see the impact of training accumulate in real time, their ability to manage towards goals increases. It also means being able to accurately assess and adapt training plans based on individual challenges and specific player needs.

HOW DO YOUR CLIENTS USE FIRSTBEAT TO THEIR ADVANTAGE?

One of the biggest challenges in training plan development involves working out how training activities can best serve the actual demands of the game. So naturally, most of our customers begin by analyzing game requirements. Heart rate data measured during games and scrimmages is used to get a picture of in-game loading for each player and position. That information is used to inform training decisions.

In hockey, for example, the number of battle drills can be adjusted to accurately produce moderate or hard training episodes. The ability to quantify internal training loads also allows trainers to analyze specific drills to reveal contributions to the total intensity of the training session.

Quite a few teams are using Firstbeat to match load quantification data with weekly training targets. They’ll use games as the basic building block, so depending on how many games you have in a week and build the rest of the training around that.

HOW DO YOU HANDLE AN ATHLETE WHO IS RETURNING FROM AN INJURY OR JUST FROM SITTING OUT FOR A WHILE?

This has been an especially hot topic for our soccer clients in Europe and South America.

In typical return-to-play scenario, the first two weeks are a critical time. That’s when training loads are being gradually returned to normal. Our ability to clearly identify training loads and show recovery allows more granular control over the process of managing training dose-response relationships of returning players.

Although, perhaps more importantly, there are clear signs that improved control over work loads and recovery helps prevent injuries before they occur. When players are fatigued they are slower to react, have less control over their bodies, and are less able to protect themselves on the field.

SHOULD HOCKEY COACHES REQUIRE MORNING SKATES?

Absolutely, coaches and players both. And optional skates are a great example of how objective monitoring data can inform a participation decision.

This is an area where Firstbeat’s 24-hr monitoring option can be useful. We have a sensor that can be worn around the clock to capture a complete picture of player recovery. That data is evaluated to document individual recovery processes, and what works best for each player. We look at things like how long does it take after going to bed does the deep recovery process begin. CoachMePlus lets you view all this data in one place.

Teams in the KHL contest a 60 game season and playoffs across seven different time zones. For some athletes, the recovery process doesn’t really kick in until 7am the next morning after a game. In those cases, it is often much more effective to skip the morning skate, and use that time to allow body’s resources to accumulate for a less fatigued afternoon session.

HAVE COACHES BEEN ACCEPTING OF THESE NEW SPORTS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES?

“For sure, the higher the level of competition the stronger the motivation to find as many advantages as possible. That said, coaches still vary in terms of attitudes towards technology and the degree to which they want to be directly involved with  data and how it is interpreted.”

When large amounts of data can be reduced into a few key performance indicators, strength and conditioning coaches can communicate critical points to the head coach quickly and efficiently. They can highlight what aspects of the daily schedule are working well, or indicate which players are struggling to recover from assignments.

In one case, an NHL coach liked to skate the team really hard right before games to strengthen team discipline and build tough attitudes. The S&C coach utilized our system to show that these hard pre-game sessions left the team at a disadvantage in the first period and  suggested a lighter approach before the game.

They decided to use our training load parameters to modify their preparation, and it worked. The team won 10 games in a row. Of course, a ton of credit for winning those games goes to the players and coaches. And there is always some luck involved, but it was a good example of how data and analytics can be used to make minor changes with major results – especially in highly competitive situations.

HOW IMPORTANT IS VISUALIZATION OF DATA WITH PLAYERS AND COACHES?

Visualization is powerful tool for understanding. There are, of course, coaches and players who would rather just see the numbers.

“But in general, if you can show training and progress visually, reports become easier to understand and more impactful. So that tends to be the best way to influence players and coaches.”

CoachMePlus lets you visualize all your athlete’s data.

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In December 2015, the human performance and training platform Fusionetics and CoachMePlus announced a partnership agreement. The two companies combined currently work with over two hundred professional sports teams and elite university teams, providing data-driven solutions focused on decreasing injuries, optimizing performance and enhancing recovery.

CoachMePlus sat down with Dr. Mike Clark, CEO of Fusionetics, which has become well known for its work with superstar NBA players such as Chris Paul, Kyrie Irving, Dwight Howard and Kobe Bryant. Clark discussed the partnership and the philosophy behind Fusionetics.

WHY DID FUSIONETICS PARTNER WITH COACHMEPLUS?

When we’re selling Fusionetics to teams, we’re coming in as a performance health care solutions provider. A lot of teams need more on the data management side.

“When we did our own independent reviews and talked to our customer base, CoachMePlus was clearly the most advanced.”

A couple of our customers asked if we could connect together. Notre Dame and the Sacramento Kings reached out and said, “Could we create one integrated platform with CoachMePlus on the data management side and Fusionetics on the solutions side?” We discovered that we share similar visions in what we’re trying to do with our technology platforms and we thought that if we put the two together, we would have the most comprehensive athlete management solution available in the marketplace.

HOW DOES COACHMEPLUS HELP YOU?

It starts with the simplicity of being able to capture data from all the hardware and biometric wearable devices that are out there. Pulling that data in a clean, visual, simplified way and personalize (the data) based on what you are interested in, the ability to take the information and report on it in a clear way to coaches and others. I still personally work with teams, so when I go in, it’s often on of my biggest issues. GMs buy (devices) and then there’s the question: Where do we put all the data? How do you visualize it in a simple, clean way and how can you report on it? At the end of the day, if you are measuring it, you are going to be expected to manage it and get outcomes.

CoachMePlus lets you manage all this data on one platform.

WHEN FUSIONETICS MEETS WITH AN ATHLETE OR A TEAM, HOW ARE THEY EVALUATED?

We recommend that teams measure movement efficiency, segmental joint range of motion, performance, and recovery on a regular basis. For example, on movement efficiency testing, if somebody scores in the green, they can keep doing their self care corrective exercise program prior to working out in practice. If somebody is in yellow, we recommend they get 2-3 sessions per week of integrated manual therapy and very precise targeted corrective exercise. If somebody scores in red, meaning they lack mobility and neuromuscular control – which will increase their training load – those athletes should be getting 3-5 sessions per week of integrated manual therapy and corrective exercise. The goal is to maximize movement efficiency and segmental ROM, which will decrease the biomechanical, cardiovascular, and physiological stress on the athlete. We can clearly measure that from Catapult. We can see that there is a direct correlation between when training loads start going up, your mobility goes down and if you improve your mobility, which may only take 10 minutes on the table, then the training load goes back down to where it’s supposed to be.

HOW IMPORTANT IS FLEXIBILITY AND RANGE OF MOTION FOR AN ATHLETE?

We have to take care of the health of the athlete first if you want to have the best performance and get wins. To do that, you have to have a comprehensive Performance Healthcare team that is fully athlete-centered and technology enabled: Sports medicine, strength and conditioning, nutrition, targeted, recovery and analytics. Sports science analytics, using hardware, software, and wearables, will give you different biometric parameters including physiological parameters, and collecting all that data is important, but it is also important to understand what you are going to do with it.

CoachMePlus integrates with the latest sports science technology.

“We can’t lose sight of the basic needs. Your athletes need to be able to move, they need to be able to recover, they need to have the right nutrition and hydration and they need to sleep and rest.”

Out of all the things you can measure, those are the most important things. All the research will point to that.

WHERE DO YOU SEE FUSIONETICS GOING IN THE FUTURE?

We see that the current model will evolve into a comprehensive Performance Healthcare Model that delivers an athlete-centered approach focused on injury prevention, performance optimization, and recovery enhancement. Technology will help to enable this evidence-based, systematic, solutions-focused approach moving forward.

“An integrated performance healthcare model will break down the barriers and silos that currently exist between the different athlete support team (ATC, S&C, Nutrition, Recovery, Analytics, External Ancillary Providers) and provide a more seamless experience.”

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RYAN PROVENCHER, FOUNDING PARTNER

Ryan Provencher and Dave Simeur have worked with firefighters and firefighters in training to help them get into peak working condition and sustain their long-term health. Their goal is to train firefighters how to train for the rest of their lives and how to maintain a healthy lifestyle for several years.

Interview with Ryan and Dave

WHY DO YOU LIKE WORKING WITH FUNCTIONAL FITNESS ATHLETES?

There are other people involved, so I focus on the technical side. If you drew three circles, one circle is coaching the athlete and performance, the second circle is the technical application and organizing the data, and the third circle would be job applicability.

We talk about functional fitness as opposed to sports specific fitness. That’s for firefighters, police, soldiers, Special Forces, occupational athletes; if you drew those three circles, my partners with the firefighter peak performance guys have a foot in each one of the circles. I focus on the technical side, that’s working with CoachMePlus and organizing the data. Ryan focuses more on the deep dive into the sports performance.

Me working with athletes started with self-healing after some severe injuries. My journey to avoid surgery at all cost led me to wind up seeking out these different functional fitness gurus and then getting certified myself as an instructor. I wound up applying that to several national programs.

HOW DO YOU MAXIMIZE THE RESULTS OF TRAINING YOUR FIREFIGHTERS WITHOUT HARMING THEM?

The challenge is, everybody has limited timing, including the coaches. You have to really take a scalpel to all of the interactions, analyze them and figure out how do we maximize what the athletes are doing on their own, especially if they have a job like a firefighter.

The No. 1 killer of firefighters is cardiovascular disease. The other place the people get hurt is training, including initial training at the academy. So the agencies go through all this work to screen, hire, interview and background check only to injure the guy at their firefighting academy. Using CoachMePlus to keep these guys in compliance – if they comply with the program, if they’re training at the right amount of intensity for the right amount of time the right way, they will not hurt and they’re not going to get injured. Their body is going to be more resilient, and they will be able to perform what they need to perform occupationally.

TRACK AND ANALYZE DATA

If you’re a firefighter doing a buddy drag, wearing the SCBA, piking the ceiling to make a hole, running a chainsaw or a hose, or any of these things they have to do; this is a grinder at the academy where the super buff coach is going to grind the athletes’ bones into bread, all they end up with is broken firefighters. It’s expensive.

The goal of all of this is to keep the athlete training at the proper intensity over the long-term and specific to how they feel that day. The way we interact with that athlete is by collecting the right data and putting into the system where they can see it and the coach can see it, the person who is actually out on the tarmac with them. That enables us to show the coach what is expected.

Let’s say the coach wants to take these guys on a 10-mile run, just to see who can hang. Guess what happens next? They get injured. They ask what happened, and you can show that this guy who went for a run had his waking / resting heart rate is here. You show him the numbers and show that you’re going to hurt him. So being able to interact with the coaches and athlete with empirical data, where they can see the results of the program and the people who are paying the bills see their costs go down, that’s what this is all about. CoachMePlus lets you track all of your athletes on one platform.

USE DATA TO PLAN AND ASSESS TRAINING PROGRAMS

The idea is – you can design the best plan for an athlete, individually tailored for an athlete, and that plan needs to change based on how that athlete is performing. A plan is great, but we have to be able to adjust that plan to get there. It’s going to exist within a bandwidth.

Being able to tell if we’re on track, what adjustments we have to make, what adjustment have we made, why do we make them, and showing that data is what you have to do to get people to buy in and stick with the program. The program like we use is only as good as your compliance level. When we mean it’s a low-intensity day, we mean it’s a low-intensity day. If you turn it into a high-intensity day, occupationally or through your athletic training, we are asking for an injury to occur. We’re begging for that to happen.

INTERACT WITH ATHLETES

When I try to interact with the athletes, I try to interact Socratically using a Socratic method and using them the question to get them to look at the data that is displayed so beautifully in the CoachMePlus platform. By asking them to look at their own data and then correlate, this is a problem for your type-A personality. That’s the type of person who wants to run into a building that’s on fire, getting them to think it’s okay to just crush it every time they workout. That’s a heavy lift. Giving these guys permission, in fact demanding that they have to comply; if they blow out a workout and put up some high numbers, then you give them a low score because they’re out of compliance. That’s what you need. It’s kind of like a choke collar on a dog once in a while.

WHAT STANDS OUT ABOUT FIREFIGHTERS COMPARED TO OTHER ATHLETES YOU HAVE WORKED WITH?

They are a special group. They are truly team players. They truly care at a very deep level about their fellow human being, about complete strangers. They really, really do. They’re like these caregivers on one hand, because they do a lot of medical stuff; they’re just as happy to get a cat out of a tree as they are to run into a burning building. They do both of these things for the same reason.

The other way that they differ is the consequences of their failures is extremely high. It’s very serious work. People are depending on them. On the other hand, it gives these guys motivated and they’re extremely motivated.

On the other hand, their sleep patterns are garbage; they’re all over the place. They get called in the middle of the night and all over the place. They just experience this extra level of load on their system just by nature of them having to get up at all levels. That’s a big difference.

HOW HAVE YOU USED COACHMEPLUS IN A FIREFIGHTER ACADEMY SETTING?

We have a specific program for a firefighter recruit account, which it can be tailored between 12 to 16 weeks, or however long they’re in the program. What the department can do is just follow this workout program.

We did a study of the program and did it three different ways. We had several versions going through the same way in the same window in CoachMePlus. One set of athletes were doing everything completely on their own. Another groups were a mix of live and online delivery for their training. The third group was all live training. The coach took them through every single step, every workout. Everything they did was coached live. What we did was we have follow-along videos and instructional videos. Using the CoachMePlus app, instead of just showing how to do all of the workouts using a list, there are actual follow-along videos and you just play that through CoachMePlus and do the workout. There are timers and it tells you to record your score and everything. CoachMePlus allows you to send workouts to your athletes anywhere, anytime.

The athletes that were on their own did it, and then what we did is collected all the numbers and we got really good at remote coaching the online guys, and then coaching the coaches that did the hybrid and full-time coach class. We met our goals, and we didn’t hurt anybody. Everyone’s numbers were right in line with what we would expect, as far as increases in performance and mobility. Their functional movements were vastly improved. We conducted a study of it, and then we’ve done several other academies since then with great results.

The fitness tests that the firefighters do, their numbers are good or better than what they’ve gotten with their previous types of physical training, but they don’t have any injuries, they’re not getting injured at all. That’s the big bonus.

WHAT TYPE OF FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS IMPORTANT FOR FIREFIGHTERS?

There are two chunks to it.

No. 1 is how much load can the firefighter withstand? How much training load and occupational load can they withstand? But more importantly, how well do they know that they’re approaching their load max. You want to increase the load they can take, but, more importantly, they need to know when they’re reaching that point of failure so they can live to fight another day, or they can ask to go get another firefighter to help them with this task when it breaks down.

No. 2 – A lot of people think functional fitness is just simulating a work task with another object, but it would be more accurate to say that the functional training of whatever motion they have to do at work – the job-specific fitness, the task that they have to do, a buddy drag, for example, you compare that to a kettlebell swing. It’s really simple.

The functional fitness has to do two things in that regard. It has to unload the occupational load. If all day I’m doing a task that makes me upper-cross posture-wise, or rounds my lower-back, then I want to get very specific exercises that drive my hips and my lower-back into place – the functional opposite of what I’m doing all day. And if you think about the tissues that they have, you can increase your strength, your range of motion, the quality of your connective tissues, and our thought is if you focus your training on improving your posture, your mobility, your connective tissue, and your range of motion, strength will take care of itself. That’s typically what happens Whereas most people will go in and work on strength, those other things just get tighter and tighter until they eventually snap. That’s what we see happen to the firefighters.

When you watch somebody who’s been through this program, they just move differently. One guy commented to me that he threw his truck in reverse and looked over his shoulder to back out of his driveway to go to work. He was amazed when his arms were planted on his steering wheel and he turned around and his head turned around like an owl. No pain, he’s totally loose, his shoulders are loose, and he felt great.

It’s things like that that make the big difference for what these guys are doing.

HOW DO YOU HANDLE THE STRAIN ON FIREFIGHTERS’ CARDIAC HEALTH?

FireFighters go from sedentary life to emergency situations very quickly. This causes huge spikes in their heart rates and this can be dangerous for many of the responders. Self-monitoring and self-care is important. Being able to do an assessment of yourself, of your readiness to train, all of it is wrapped up with diet and exercise. One of the unique things about our program is that we emphasize throughout the entire program their ability to self-assess and their readiness to train. We check the morning heart rate, we know their hydration levels, and we check their performance and they learn how to equate some objective numbers for their performance, which enables them to self-assess and prepare a little bit better.

They’re able to make a better risk assessment and decisions as a result of it.

HOW DO YOU BUILD PROGRAMS FOR YOUR FIREFIGHTERS?

We’ve pre-loaded our program for additional future functionalities. One of the things I’ve done is gone in and described all of our motions that the system can help the coach. We’ve got so much data plugged in there about the exercises themselves, so many tags associated with it that the program can help you figure out the best adaptive exercise. That’s pretty amazing and pretty unique.

Click here to see how the Chicago White Sox are redefining the way MLB teams train.

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