The Future of Strength & Conditioning: More Data, Same Mission

By Samuel Johnson

As someone just finishing grad school and entering the strength and conditioning profession, I’ve had a front-row seat to the buzz around technology. Velocity-based training systems like Perch, force plates from Hawkins, AI-driven recovery tools—everywhere you look, there’s a new device promising to change the game. And while I see the value some of these tools can offer, I’m not convinced they change the core of what we do.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned came from my mentor at Georgia Tech, Steve Tambora. He’s been a strength coach longer than I’ve been alive, and he’s seen technologies, training styles, implements, and recovery modalities cycle in and out like clockwork. He reminded me that strength and conditioning isn’t immune to trends—if anything, it’s especially prone to them. But in the end, none of these fads change the fundamentals. If you want to improve athletic performance, your job is the same as it’s always been: get athletes bigger, faster, stronger, and more resilient so they can perform better in their sport.

That’s where I land on tools like force plates and velocity trackers. Take force plates, for example. They’re often used to collect data for jump profiles, readiness scores, and return-to-play decisions. And yes—being able to measure rate of force development, asymmetries, and total force output in newtons per leg is useful. But a good coach can often see these same discrepancies with their eye. If an athlete looks unstable, is underperforming in change-of-direction drills, can’t load a leg the same way in a leg extension or hamstring curl—those are clear enough signs that they’re not back to baseline. Do we really need a thousand-dollar plate to tell us what we can already see?

Same with Perch and bar speed tracking. It’s great to get a readout of how fast the bar is moving—especially when training power. But I can also tell an athlete to move a submaximal weight as fast as possible, observe their speed, and then increase the weight to slow them down and train the zone I’m targeting. The process doesn’t change. The athlete still needs to move fast, then move heavier loads fast. The coach still needs to cue effort, measure progress, and apply overload. Whether you’re reading bar speed off a screen or watching it in real time, the intent and outcome can be the same.

To me, these tools don’t revolutionize coaching. They refine it. And in the right hands, they can be helpful. But in the wrong hands—or in the hands of someone who leans on them too much—they can become a crutch. We already have data: bar weight, movement quality, rep speed, athlete feedback. These are still some of the clearest signals we have. And they don’t require calibration or a subscription fee.

That’s why I believe a good coach, with nothing but their eye, experience, and an understanding of training principles, can produce results just as well as a coach with the latest gear and metrics. The tools are optional. The fundamentals are not.

Maybe someday we’ll see a real shift in the profession—cybernetics, AI-integrated systems, real-time adaptive programming. But that future isn’t here yet. Until then, the best strength coaches will still be the ones who know how to train athletes—not just measure them.

In my eyes, this new school data and all these gadgets are fine—they can be helpful. But they also take time, prep, and extra attention to manage. And when the old-school cues and a coach’s eye can do the job just as well, I think we have to be careful. These tools can bog the weight room down if you’re not disciplined. So use them if they help—but take it all with a grain of salt, and make sure what actually needs to get done still gets done