Autoregulation with VBT.

Autoregulation is any method that adjusts today's session using today's information instead of a plan written six weeks ago. Historically that meant RPE, a readiness questionnaire, or the coach's eye. All three work. None of them are objective, and none of them scale past the athlete standing in front of you.

Velocity changes that, because you get an objective readiness number on a warm-up set the athlete was doing anyway. No extra work, no extra fatigue, no honesty problem.

A well-autoregulated session moves three variables and freezes everything else.

Exercise selection, order, tempo, rest and technical focus are fixed by the program. If you find yourself autoregulating those too, you are not autoregulating — you are improvising, and you will not be able to tell later what worked.

Pick one reference load per athlete per lift — 60 to 70 percent of the last known max — and never change it inside a block. Two reps at maximum intent, record the faster one, compare to their rolling baseline.

The reference load must stay identical for this to mean anything. Changing it mid-block is the single most common way coaches destroy their own baseline.

Instead of prescribing a load and hoping the effort is right, prescribe the effort and let load self-select. "Work up to a heavy triple at 0.55 m/s" is 155 kg on a good day and 137.5 kg on a poor one. In both cases the athlete trained the quality you asked for.

Two ways to write it, and they are not interchangeable:

• Target with a floor — "triples at 0.55 m/s, do not go below 0.50". Protects the quality of heavy work.
• Target with a ceiling — "doubles at 0.80 m/s or faster". Protects speed work from creeping heavy, which it always does.

Target velocities are not guesses. They come off the athlete's own load-velocity profile, which is why a testing day precedes a velocity-prescribed block.

A velocity-loss cutoff ends the set when the fastest rep of that set has decayed by a set percentage. A rested athlete gets more reps; a tired one gets fewer; weekly volume becomes self-adjusting without you counting anything.

Rough mapping: 10 to 15 percent for strength and peaking quality, 20 to 25 percent for the mixed strength-hypertrophy middle, 30 percent or more when the goal is accumulated fatigue and size. Pair the cutoff with the target velocity and you have bounded both ends of the set.

A real session, written the way it would go on the calendar:

1. Warm-up: to reference load, 2 reps, maximum intent. Record.
2. Adjust: apply the table in section 03 to the day's top-set load.
3. Main lift: work to a heavy triple at 0.55 m/s, floor 0.50.
4. Back-off: 3 sets at 0.65 m/s, 20 percent velocity-loss cutoff.
5. Accessories: unchanged, unmeasured. Not everything needs a sensor.

Notice what is absent: percentages, rep targets, and any judgement call the athlete has to make about how they feel.

Individually this is easy. On a floor of twenty athletes, three things make it work:

• Assign the session, do not explain it. Reference set, target velocity and cutoff live on the workout in the Coach Portal, so each athlete's app shows their own numbers without you repeating anything.
• Let the cutoff coach the volume. The set ends on its own; you spend your attention on technique.
• Do the load adjustment in one sweep. Warm-up numbers land on the portal live — walk the floor once, adjust the outliers, leave the middle alone.

The next morning, the velocity alerts on the dashboard tell you which of those adjustments needs to persist into next week.

• Autoregulating on one rep. Two reps, take the faster. One rep is a coin flip.
• Reacting to 3 percent. Inside the noise band. Doing nothing is a decision, and usually the right one.
• Moving the reference load. Then you have no baseline, only numbers.
• Autoregulating every lift. One main lift per session. Accessories do not need it.
• Only ever adjusting downward. Half the value of autoregulation is the day you add weight because the bar said you could.

If you make one change: pick one reference load per lift, log its velocity every session, and move the top set by 5 percent whenever the warm-up is more than 5 percent off baseline. That single rule is most of the benefit of full autoregulation at almost none of the cognitive cost, and it requires no change to your program.