Today’s guest is Cody Hughes. Cody is a strength and performance coach at Farm & Forge in Nashville, blending over a decade of collegiate and private-sector experience into a practical, athlete-centered approach. His work bridges foundational movement with modern tools like VBT and GPS tracking, always anchored by the belief that health drives performance.

With the rising influence of technology in training, it can become more difficult to look clearly at the core facets of athletic force production, as well as how to optimally use technology to fill gaps, inform decisions, and even motivate groups.

On today’s episode, Cody traces his shift from heavy-loading bias to a performance lens built on force management, eccentric RFD, and training that actually reflects sport. We unpack depth drops vs. “snapdowns,” why rigid “landing mechanics” miss the mark, and how movement literacy, variability, and velocity drive speed and durability. On the tech side, we get into velocity-based training (VBT) as a feedback and motivation tool, using it to gamify effort and auto-regulate load, and knowing when to remove the numbers to protect recovery and intent.

Leaderboards, incentives, and smart stimulus design all matter, but Cody keeps it clear that data supports the human element that produces real power.

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Timestamps

0:00 – Early lifting story and the hip replacement turning point

5:31 – Coaching development, biases, and error-driven learning

19:29 – The snapdown debate: context, progressions, and purpose

25:44 – What eccentric RFD tells us about athletic durability

30:42 – Strength as expression: assessments and force-plate logic

42:31 – Movement literacy and using competitive, decision-rich drills

49:30 – VBT explained: feedback, governors, and gamification

56:50 – When to hide feedback: elite athletes and psychological load

1:01:35 – Where VBT shines: youth and early training ages

1:25:28 – Wrap up and where to find Cody

Quotes from Cody Hughes

"You gotta have a minimum of like 135-140 minutes a week of training to be effective to get some type of minimum effective dose."

"Movement efficiency is everything to be able to express any type of movement skill."

"Too many people running high school weight rooms are simply sport coaches that felt like they know what they're doing. They pull out a manual from what they did or they think that they used a very shallow thinking model of X football team won X amount of games, therefore their program must work."

"If you can't explain what you're doing with your program... it's just this carbon copy. It's a dead static program, not a living environment or a living complex system where you're making decisions based off of your kids."

"Performance coaching... it's such an art. There is no straightforward answer, like period."

"Load is inversely correlated with speed. Great. So now we can match velocities to the type of stimulus we're looking for on top of trying to gamify the training in order to amplify the stimulus of the training that already existed."

"If you stand on a force plate, I can take three measurements with propulsive power, breaking power at MRSI and learn a lot about what you can do and how you express it."

"You don't just want to reward the fast kid because if the fast kid may always be the fast kid, they need to be incentivized to try to be a more fast kid."

About Cody Hughes

Cody Hughes, MS, SCCC, CSCS, PSL1, is a strength and performance coach at Farm & Forge in Nashville, Tennessee. A former collegiate athlete with more than a decade of coaching experience across NCAA Division I and II programs, high schools, and the private sector, Cody brings a practical, athlete-centered approach to performance training. His work focuses on building strong movement foundations, using technology like velocity-based training and GPS tracking to inform programming without losing the art of coaching.

At Farm & Forge, Cody leads programs for athletes ranging from youth to professionals in sports such as football, hockey, and tennis. Whether guiding a developing athlete or a veteran player, Cody’s goal is to help each individual move well, train smart, and perform consistently at their best.