Episode #22: Embracing Weight Room Tech with Tom Newman

Tom Newman joins us on this episode of the TeamBuildr Podcast. Tom is the Chief Innovation Officer at weight room hardware & data company Hawkin Dynamics, and former Director of Performance at Yale University. Tom’s innovations at the helm of the Yale strength program garnered him a lot of attention in the S&C community, and as a TeamBuildr user he has helped us refine our product countless times over the years.

We chat with Tom about the changes he has seen the industry go through, how demands on strength coaches and staff have grown, and how old school coaching and new school tech have become intertwined in the weight room. Tom and his staff fully embraced technology and data at Yale, believing it increased accountability for both his coaches and athletes alike.

Tools like TeamBuildr that pull in athlete data allowed his strength team to make adjustments to summer programming on the fly, and to correct poor form on exercises while athletes trained remotely. Tom and his staff would hold meetings at the end of each week to grade each team’s workouts, and ensure their team’s weight room numbers were still on trend to hit performance goals.

“To go forward, we spent more time looking backwards probably than most”

Tom’s experiences using technology on the weight room floor have made his transition to Hawkins a smooth one. The company sells force plates that analyze how athletes land from jumps, providing data coaches can use to make athlete load management decisions and help prevent injuries. The vision of the Hawkin’s founder and the data the tool is able to collect are what won Tom over, and he dives further into the product’s capabilities in our discussion.

We learned a lot talking with Tom, and we hope you will too. You can see more of what Hawkins is up to by following them on Instagram

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