The Modern Quantification of Athletic Performance

In Part I of our 21st-Century Athlete series, we learned about why a stronger athlete is a faster athlete. We then added Part II, which built on that to discuss the best way to develop explosive power.

Part III rounded out the “explosive and powerful” discussion by showing why the use of ARX is the best way to increase the expression of an athlete’s fast-twitch muscle fibers.

But it’s not just the increase in athletic performance that makes ARX superior for the modern athlete. Part IV showed why ARX involves a smaller risk of injury during training while helping to prevent injury during competition.

And Part V showed how ARX allows the athlete to save hours of training time each week—time that ARX-equipped athletes can now spend watching the film, engaging in recovery modalities, or practicing the specific skills of their sports.

Now, it’s time to talk about yet another aspect of ARX that places it above the “competition” in the realm of athletic training: advanced quantification.

What gets measured gets managed.

Without quantification of results, an athlete’s strength & conditioning program is just a fun hobby.

When you are limited to counting reps, sets, and weight, there’s only so much you can learn from your data.

Sure you did one fewer repetition, but are you sure you were going at the same rep speed? What about different speeds between lifting and lowering the weight?

Are you sure you remember your reps from the workout eighteen weeks ago? Your form, your range of motion?

Are you positive you had the same duration of rest in between reps?

How are you standardizing all of that?

How Does The Fitness Industry Measure Athletic Performance?

Unfortunately, the fitness industry has athletes flying blind.

If there’s no way to standardize your performance, your numbers are meaningless. Like GPS directions that are zoomed out to a full state view when you’re trying to get to a place in your town.

Some innovative people have developed very high-tech ways to quantify barbell work that take into account things like Rep Speed, Power, Velocity, Rate of Force Development, and other metrics.

But this is akin to installing a speedometer and odometer on your horse. New ways to measure the performance of old tech. Yes, you’re measuring very granularly, but you’re very carefully measuring a sub-par stimulus that’s less efficient, less effective, and less safe than ARX.

We have access these days to things like Oura, Whoop Band, sleep trackers, continuous glucose monitors, heart rate monitors, step counters, meditation biofeedback devices, pulse oximeters, stride diagnostics, 3D imaging software for body composition, and a million other ways to measure the human body.

But for some reason the fitness industry is mostly still using sets, reps, and weight to manually measure strength training performance? If you’ll pardon the pun, something doesn’t add up!

ARX Combines the Latest in Performance Measurement with an Innovative New Form of Resistance.

Not only does ARX provide this form of resistance that is superior to gravity-based resistance, but ARX also tracks Speed, Distance, Positioning Data (down to the hundredth of an inch), Momentary Force, Average Force, Cumulative Work, Reps, Time Under Tension, and other derivative measures like Rate of Force Development and Work Rate/Capacity.

But arguably the biggest innovation is the ability to compare your current performance with a previous performance while it’s happening.

The biofeedback is right in front of you, motivating you to put up your best effort and exceed your previous performance.

The data is then displayed in both absolute terms and relative terms so that it’s intuitive and simple to determine progress.

This data is also available from any browser on any internet-connected device, for the purpose of building reports, sharing data, or analyzing more deeply.

No more “reading the tea leaves” of an inscrutable chart full of scribbled chicken scratch.

No more taking your coach’s word for it.

As W. Edwards Deming famously put it, “In God we trust. All others must bring data.”

Why ARX is Superior to Other Strength and Conditioning Tools

So now we have to update our list of superior elements of ARX for modern athletes when compared with other strength and conditioning tools:

• ARX provides a superior training stimulus compared to weights
• ARX provides this stimulus with a lower risk of injury during training, while making athletes more resistant to competition injuries in the process
• ARX takes a fraction of the time commitment of traditional programs
• ARX allows for more granular tracking of its superior training stimulus, as well as superior interactive software feedback during a session

Even the first couple would be enough to cause coaches to select ARX over traditional strength and conditioning tools, but all four of these considered together make our Adaptive Resistance™ a truly unique offering to athletes and strength coaches.

But stick around for the final installment of our series to round out the advantages that ARX offers with the last consideration: the arms race between you and the competition—who might get access to ARX first!