Bridge Athletic: Post 2

​Bridging the gap between technology and Strength and Conditioning
 
One of the biggest obstacles facing collegiate strength and conditioning coaches is effective and timely program implementation. Coaches are competing with class schedules, practice times and NCAA hour regulations to get the time to work with their athletes in the weight room. Beyond limitations with scheduling, strength and conditioning coaches have to program for multiple positions, injured athletes, and scale appropriately for athletes with vastly different abilities and training ages. Bridge Athletic provides solutions for any Strength Coach looking to overcome these obstacles. Any program written in Bridge Athletic can be delivered to athletes as an out-of-season program, which allows coaches to remain NCAA compliant over the summer. The ability to change between a playlist or scheduled program allows coaches to be more flexible with teams that have variable travel schedules, or athletes involved in clinicals in their field of study. Bridge also allows coaches to program regression and progression exercises within a training session to accommodate injured or less advanced athletes, as well as assign positions to athletes and adjust programs accordingly.
 
 Our partnership with Bridge Athletic has allowed for us to deliver high quality programming to the athletes we work with over the past several months. By creating and delivering our programs in Bridge, the athletes utilizing the Bridge Tracker app can see a history of every set rep and exercise they’ve done, adding precision to their training process. Bridge also allows coaches to add video and audio comments to blocks within a program, or individual exercises, allowing us as coaches to provide our athletes with more context than just words on an excel sheet.
 
Our department is gearing up to get all of our coaches and athletes on Bridge Athletic for this semester, as well as begin the use of Bridge in volume load tracking for research.  Stay tuned for updates on how we're using BA to improve our performance coaching and sport science research.  For more information on the partnership opportunities and possible research conducted by our laboratory using BridgeAthletic please contact nelsonda1@etsu.edu.
 
Luke DeVirgiliis, MS, CSCS
ETSU Olympic Sports Performance Coach and Weight Room Supervisor
Doctoral Student, Sport Physiology and Performance
East Tennessee State University