Velocity-Based Training Matched Traditional Lifting in 16-Player Football Trial

A small randomized trial pitted velocity-based training against a conventional percentage-based program in young footballers for eight weeks. Both groups improved on several measures, and velocity-based training produced no clearer advantage on any of them.

Velocity-based training did not outperform traditional resistance training on jump height, anaerobic power, balance, fatigue or soreness in a group of 16 trained male football players, according to a trial published in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation on October 2, 2026.

The study came from Ahmet Mor and Hakkı Mor of Ondokuz Mayıs University with Gürkan Selim Çelgin, Zehra Kargın and Erkal Arslanoğlu of Sinop University, and Fatih Karakaş of Ondokuz Mayıs University. The authors set out to test a method that, as they describe it, has emerged as a prominent way of optimizing neuromuscular adaptations by accommodating the daily fluctuations in an athlete’s performance.

Sixteen players were randomly assigned to one of two groups of eight. One trained with velocity-based training, the other with a traditional program. Both completed two resistance training sessions a week for eight weeks alongside their regular football work.

The primary comparison produced nothing. No significant group by time interactions appeared for any outcome, at a threshold of p greater than 0.05. In plain terms: whatever changed over the eight weeks changed about equally in both groups, and velocity-based training did not pull ahead on a single measure.

What Velocity-Based Training Actually Changes in a Session

In a conventional program, load is set as a percentage of a tested one-repetition maximum and held there for weeks. The number on the bar is the instruction. How the athlete feels on a given Tuesday does not enter into it.

Velocity-based training replaces that fixed percentage with a bar-speed target. A device measures how fast the bar moves, and load is adjusted up or down until the lift sits in the intended velocity range for that day. The logic is that speed reflects readiness in a way a stored percentage cannot.

The case for velocity-based training has drawn real interest from coaches, and it rests on a solid measurement literature. Our earlier report on how a 0.36 m/s bar speed estimated deadlift one-rep max with low error covered the same underlying idea from the testing side.

Who Was in the Trial

These were not beginners. The 16 participants averaged 19.60 plus or minus 1.26 years of age, 174.75 plus or minus 5.49 cm in height and 73.49 plus or minus 5.24 kg in body mass, with a body mass index of 24.09 plus or minus 2.35 kg per square metre.

Most notably, their training age averaged 10.10 plus or minus 1.37 years. A decade of football behind them means the easy adaptations were already banked, which makes any eight-week programming tweak harder to detect.

The protocol was approved by the Sinop University Ethics Committee under reference E-57428665-050.04-278713 and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The work was supported by the Sinop University Scientific Research Coordination Unit under project number SBF-1901-24-002.

What Improved in Both Groups

The null between-group result sits alongside genuine within-group change. Vertical jump improved over the eight weeks (p=0.013) with a partial eta squared of 0.56. Anaerobic power improved too (p=0.018, partial eta squared 0.53).

Balance showed the largest time effect of all, at p=0.003 with a partial eta squared of 0.70. Fatigue index (p=0.042) and muscle soreness (p=0.014) also shifted significantly across the study period.

Those are not trivial effect sizes. They do, however, come from a design with no non-training control arm, so the eight weeks of football the players were also doing cannot be separated out from the lifting.

Why a Null Interaction Is Not a Null Result

The authors state their conclusion carefully: no significant group by time interactions were observed for any outcome, providing no clear evidence that training adaptations differed between velocity-based training and the traditional approach. That is a statement about the absence of evidence, not evidence of equivalence.

A trial with eight athletes per arm has very little power to detect the kind of small advantage that velocity-based training would plausibly produce in trained lifters. A result of this shape is exactly what an underpowered study looks like whether the true difference is zero or modest. Nothing here argues that velocity-based training fails; it argues that this trial could not have seen a small win.

FLM has covered this pattern before. A trial in which cluster training matched traditional sets for neuromuscular gains in 24 athletes landed in the same analytical place, and the honest reading there was the same.

Where Velocity-Based Training Still Has a Case

None of this retires the method. The argument for velocity-based training was never that it adds a large increment of strength. It was that it keeps load appropriate on days when an athlete is under-recovered, which is a fatigue-management claim rather than an adaptation claim.

This trial did measure fatigue index and soreness, and both moved over time in both groups, with no separation between them. That is the result most relevant to the fatigue-management argument for velocity-based training, and it does not support it in this sample.

Related work on acute velocity monitoring has been more encouraging on the readiness question. Our coverage of how jump height rose 5.5% at 30 hours after a velocity-loss-capped priming session shows the same measurement tools used for a different purpose.

What Eight Players Per Group Can Settle

Very little, on its own. What a trial like this does contribute is one more data point to the pooled literature on velocity-based training, and that is how questions of this kind actually get answered.

Football-specific training studies in small squads have the same constraint. Our report on how eight weeks of plyometric training was linked to more match running in 18 U20 players carried a near-identical sample size and the same caution.

What This Means for Your Own Lifting

If you already lift with percentages and a sensible autoregulation habit, this trial gives you no reason to adopt velocity-based training. If you already train that way and like it, it gives you no reason to stop.

A few readings that stay within what the evidence supports:

• Both groups produced measurable improvement over eight weeks. Velocity-based training was not what distinguished them.
• Consistency over a training block is doing more work than the load-prescription system layered on top of it.
• The trial studied trained young men with about a decade of football behind them. It says nothing about beginners, women or older lifters.
• Bar-speed tools remain useful for testing and monitoring even where their programming advantage is unproven.
• Any athlete returning from injury should set load with a qualified coach or clinician rather than from a trial of 16 players.

For the broader strength-adaptation picture in young athletes, our coverage of how suspension training added 4.8 cm to jump height in 71 untrained teenagers shows how much larger the effects are when the starting point is lower.