Your first 30 days with a roster on ORCA.

The failure mode is always the same: the sensors arrive, everything gets measured, and by Thursday there are eleven new numbers per athlete and no decisions being made with any of them. The coach concludes velocity is "interesting but not practical" and the kit goes in a drawer.

The fix is to invert the order. Collect one number before you use any number. Make one decision before you make five. For the first month, treat every metric except mean concentric velocity on your main lift as noise you are not looking at yet.

Do this once, off the gym floor, and the rest of the month is frictionless.

1. Create your groups first, athletes second. In the Coach Portal, build the groups you actually coach — by squad, by session slot, by training age. Every dashboard view, alert and assignment flows through groups.
2. Pick one reference lift per group. Back squat for most, bench press if that is what everyone trains twice a week. One lift. Not three.
3. Pick one reference load per athlete — roughly 60 to 70 percent of their last known max, rounded to something they can load in ten seconds.
4. Build one workout template containing that reference set plus your normal session. Assign it to the group on the training calendar for the whole month.
5. Label your sensors and decide who mounts them. One athlete per sensor per station, sensor stays with the bar, not with the person.

Setup is deliberately boring because it removes every decision from the gym floor. The only thing anyone does in week one is press start.

Rule for the week: you change nothing based on the data. Program as written. Every session, every athlete records two reps at maximum intent on the reference load during their warm-up, then trains as normal.

You are buying an anchor. Individual velocity at a fixed load is highly repeatable but wildly individual — two athletes with the same squat max can sit 0.15 m/s apart at 65 percent. Population numbers cannot tell you anything about your roster. Two weeks of your own data can.

In the Coach Portal, the athlete profile chart is the only screen you need this week. Look at it on Friday, not daily.

Now you act, but only through one rule. Compare each athlete's fastest reference rep to their week-one average, and apply this:

One rule, four outcomes, five seconds per athlete. This single rule is most of the value of autoregulation, and it is the rule your athletes will feel first — the session that got shortened before it broke them.

With two weeks of clean warm-up data, run a load-velocity profile on the reference lift. Four to five ascending loads, two reps each, maximum intent, full rest. Twenty minutes per athlete, no maximal attempt, no spotter drama.

What you get out of it is worth the session: an individual estimated 1RM you can re-estimate any week without testing again, and each athlete's velocity at the loads you actually program. From here, "75 percent" stops being a guess inherited from a max they hit in March.

Run it as a group testing block rather than athlete by athlete — that logistics problem has its own playbook.

Convert one slot per week from load prescription to velocity prescription. Not the whole program. One slot.

• Strength slot: "work up to a heavy triple at 0.50 m/s" instead of "3 x 3 at 82.5 kg". Load self-selects to the day.
• Volume slot: attach a 20 percent velocity-loss cutoff instead of a fixed rep count. Reps self-select to the day.
• Speed slot: a floor, not a ceiling — "doubles at 0.80 m/s or faster, stop when you drop below".

Everything else stays exactly as it was. That is the whole point: velocity is not a new system, it is a better input to the system you already run.

Say three things, and say them on day one:

1. "Every rep is now timed. Half-effort reps will show." Intent is the input the sensor cannot fake for them.
2. "Some days you will lift more than the sheet says, some days less. Both are correct." This is the promise that makes the bad-day sessions acceptable instead of demoralising.
3. "You get to see your own numbers." Athletes with the app on their phone check their own trend, chase their own bar speed, and stop arguing about load.

Do not present it as testing. Present it as feedback. The full script for the athlete who loves their percentages is in the buy-in playbook.

At the end of the month you should be able to answer all five of these without opening a spreadsheet. If you can, the conversion is done.

• Which athletes are trending down two weeks in a row?
• Which athletes are stronger than their programmed loads assume?
• What is each athlete's current estimated 1RM on the reference lift?
• Who is training at real intent and who is coasting?
• How many sessions got adjusted before they turned into a bad week?