WSJ: New Tech gives LSU huge training advantage

From today's WSJ:

No. 2 Louisiana State heads to Atlanta this Saturday as the favorite in the Southeastern Conference Championship. The Tigers’ rise is due in large part to its new-look offense, anchored by quarterback Joe Burrow’s devastating efficiency and an unstoppable run game.

But the Tigers’ success may also be partly owed to a technological advance in the weight-room arms race that has gripped college football in recent years. And it might not have happened if an unsolicited email last January from an unknown fitness startup founded by a trio of 20-something athletes-turned-entrepreneurs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology slipped through the cracks.

LSU strength and conditioning coach Tommy Moffitt received the unusual email in January from Jacob Rothman, the chief executive and co-founder of a company called Perch. The fitness startup wanted LSU to test a device it created to collect data in the area of “velocity-based training,” a weightlifting technique in which coaches prescribe and measure how fast athletes move a weighted barbell in addition to total weight and repetitions. This kind of training increases power and explosiveness, key aspects of impeding defensive linemen and breaking tackles.

The Perch device works by pointing an XBox-Kinect-like camera on top of a weight rack and tracking an athlete’s movements, uploading data to the cloud in real time, and allowing coaches and trainers to see the results immediately on a tablet. Existing systems are clunky and error prone: wires with magnetic sensors attached to the barbells record data, but they are prone to falling off and tangling.

“What we’re doing is essentially making a weight rack smart,” said Perch CEO and co-founder Jacob Rothman, who first began working on the product with fellow mechanical engineer Nate Rodman and computer science grad student Jordan Lucier in 2017.

Perch was looking for a major team to serve as a pilot program for its device, without much luck. “We were just doing cold outreaches to Power Five schools and universities and professional programs,” said Rothman.

LSU’s Moffitt, who oversees one of the country’s most highly regarded conditioning programs, was the first coach to respond. Moffitt was intrigued, if a little incredulous, by Perch’s claims. The company didn’t yet have any clients in college football’s top level Football Bowl Subdivision, but its founders were convincing in subsequent phone calls. He ordered assistant strength coach Jeremy Jacobs to test a demo unit the startup sent to “see if it was legit.”


Three weeks after Perch installed units on each of the 22 weight racks at LSU’s indoor football facility on Oct. 1, Tigers coach Ed Orgeron said he noticed differences in his team’s performance on the field.

“I think our guys are stronger and quicker and faster,” he said in late October. “I think as the season goes on, there’s not as many injuries this year as there were in years’ past and that’s because of our strength and conditioning.”

Existing systems that are used in velocity-based training are reliable, but tedious, Moffitt said. Assistant coaches had to manually record the velocity readouts for every player, which the junior trainer on staff then entered into Excel after the team’s Monday and Thursday lifting sessions.

“We were glad to stop using it,” said senior defensive lineman Breiden Fehoko.

Now that players are lifting with Perch twice weekly, they say the benefits are tangible.

“When we get into short yardage situations, that’s when you really see the explosion of the hips and the lower body workouts come together,” said center Lloyd Cushenberry III.

No position group has become more explosive on the field than LSU’s running backs. Consider Clyde Edwards-Helaire, the Tigers’ 5-foot-8 running back who has racked up 1,234 rushing yards and averages 6.8 yards per carry, both second most in the SEC.

“Clyde—he’s a short guy, but he has so much power in his lower body,” said the 6-foot-4, 315-pound Cushenberry. “He’s a great power cleaner and squatter, so you can definitely see that transfer to the field.”