Jake Rauch is a Performance Scientist at Peak Performance Project (P3) in Santa Barbara, CA. He works primarily as a biomechanist at P3 where he is involved in the research and assessment of elite athletes. Jake has several terrific papers on force-velocity profiling and clustering athletes based on their countermovement jump kinetics/kinematics and we talk about them in depth here.

Jake is also currently working on some research that will try and establish more of a relationship between training interventions in the gym and on-court performance for basketball players. He details some of the obstacles to such research and some of his theories about how to make the process more feasible.

Jake and I have been co-workers for the past eight months. He has taught me a tremendous amount about the research process and what matters in data collection and analysis. So I also ask him to share his recommendations for those looking to establish their own reliable testing process and database of athletes. Then we talk about how we can marry our data observations to the subjective art of coaching and "miss" less often on creating adaptations in each athlete.

While I have spent a lot of time interviewing coaches based on unstudied models and concepts, this was a route I would like to travel down more often. Research has become more refined and is a valuable tool for measuring what we as S&C practitioners do. Jake does a great job kicking off this little foray and I look forward to more of these.

You can find Jake on Twitter @JTRAUCH and check out all of Jake's papers here https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacob_Rauch