How We Use Athlete Monitoring to Train Smarter w/ Doug Larson, Dr. Mike Lane and Coach Travis Mash #849
Barbell Shrugged
Doug Larson
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Doug Larson, Dr. Mike Lane, and Coach Travis Mash break down athlete monitoring, readiness testing, and how coaches can use simple data to make better training decisions. Travis explains how his master's thesis used daily depth jumps, subjective questionnaires, and warm-up performance to track fatigue and readiness in weightlifters. The big lesson: testing only works when you minimize variables, collect enough data to understand normal fluctuations, and know the athlete behind the numbers. The team discusses why reactive strength index, vertical jumps, drop jumps, and counter movement jumps can reveal useful trends in central nervous system readiness, but only when paired with honest communication and smart coaching judgment.
The conversation expands into how to adjust training when performance drops, why a 10% decrease may mean it is time to send an athlete home, and why volume is often the first lever to pull before reducing intensity. They also explore broader performance monitoring for everyday athletes, including deadlift strength, pull-ups, mile or mile-and-a-half run times, mobility screens, DEXA scans, VO2 max testing, bloodwork, blood pressure, wearables, and input tracking. Whether you are a coach, lifter, athlete, or performance-minded adult trying to stay strong and healthy over decades, this episode gives you a practical framework for measuring what matters, spotting problems early, and using data to guide better decisions without losing the human side of coaching.
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| 0:00.0 | Shrugged family. Doug Larson here. And this week, I'm Barb Bell Shrug. I'm joined by Mike and Traffs to talk about athlete monitoring and how to use simple data to train more intelligently. |
| 0:09.3 | This was actually Travis's primary focus while he was in graduate school. So our man Travis knows a lot about this and he uses it on a regular basis with his high level weightlifters. |
| 0:17.6 | And it lets him know exactly when his athletes are fatigued and when he needs to therefore tone it down as well as when his athletes are performing quite well |
| 0:24.9 | and are fully recovered and he can therefore really push them to their limits go for a PR etc |
| 0:29.5 | and do it in a in a safer manner than he would otherwise because he has some data which is always |
| 0:33.2 | nice so if you want to for yourself or you have athletes that you coach and you want to know |
| 0:38.3 | when they are ready to go and when they very likely need to kind of pull it back and go a little |
| 0:43.1 | easier that day. This episode is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbell Strugged. I'm Doug |
| 0:49.5 | Larsen here with Dr. Mike Lane and coach Travis Mash. Travis, you did your your master's thesis on |
| 0:56.1 | athlete monitoring, which essentially like assessing testing and retesting athletes to track their |
| 1:01.7 | progress over time. We're going to dig into that here today. Can you start off by just |
| 1:06.5 | kind of defining that in a more precise manner and tell me about your thesis and what you did for |
| 1:12.5 | graduate school and then we can talk about what you currently do with your athletes. |
| 1:15.6 | Sure. |
| 1:16.5 | You know, the goal is this was to like really look at ongoing fatigue levels. |
| 1:22.9 | And but using like we used a 24 inch, not drop jump, but a depth jump. |
| 1:29.6 | And so we used that compared to the, you know, the warm-up sets for their first exercise, |
| 1:36.4 | which became kind of the problem and a subjective questionnaire. |
| 1:40.2 | So we used this three elements. |
| 1:41.5 | And we saw how they, you know, how did they compare it together and, you know, like how insightful was the athlete versus like what the, you know, what the data was telling us. |
| 1:52.0 | And some of the things that I learned from that is, is like minimizing variables, for example. |
| 1:58.0 | Like the thing about a depth jump is like it's, it can be very, it's so |
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