About
The follow-up an elite athlete gets.
Prime Performing is a strength and conditioning practice working with athletes, clubs and teams across the Gold Coast and the Northern Rivers.
The coach
Henrique Alitolip
Measuring athletes daily and steering their training on what the numbers say is not a method Prime Performing adopted for this business. It is the job Henrique did, full time, inside elite sport.
He began by monitoring and testing athletes’ physiological responses to their training, in the sports physiology unit of the sports training centre at the Federal University of Minas Gerais — work carried out with the athletics, swimming and taekwondo squads.
Two years at Minas Tênis Clube, one of Brazil’s largest multi-sport clubs, followed, doing that same job at professional level as a sports scientist: measuring the squads daily, testing them through the season to see whether the training was being effective, and telling the coaching staff what the numbers meant for who should push and who should back off. Volleyball, basketball, futsal, judo and swimming, with Olympic and Brazilian national team athletes among them. A period with the youth performance department at Cruzeiro Esporte Clube came next, and also a season as performance coach at Ormeau Football Club in the FQPL 3 — where, alongside the monitoring and the testing, he wrote and ran the squad’s strength and conditioning.
The work was the same throughout: establish where an athlete stands by testing them, measure them daily, read what the numbers say about load and recovery, and adjust the training on what comes back. What has changed is who it is available to.
He has also been on the other side of it — a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu who has competed for much of his life, so what training and competing actually ask of an athlete is something he has lived through rather than only measured.
Qualifications. Bachelor of Physical Education, Federal University of Minas Gerais. Level 1 accreditation with the Australian Strength and Conditioning Association. Certificate III and Certificate IV in Fitness, Australia.
What gets measured
Where the numbers come from
| Measurement | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Strength | How much force you can produce, and how fast you can produce it. Force production underpins a great deal of what you do in sport — accelerating, holding a position against an opponent, controlling your own body under load — and how quickly you reach that force matters too, because sport rarely gives you a full second to get there. That rate is measured here directly, rather than inferred from something else. Each side is tested on its own, which also shows where you are unbalanced. |
| Vertical jump | How high you leave the ground, and how quickly you turn a landing into the next effort. That second quality — reactive strength — is what separates an athlete who is quick off the ground from one who is merely strong, and it carries straight into sprinting and changing direction. It is also the fastest way to see whether your legs are fresh or flat on a given day. |
| Power | How fast you can move a load, which is what power actually is. Measured rep by rep, it shows how heavy a given weight really is for you today — something that varies far more than most athletes expect — tells us whether your power leans on force or on speed, and estimates your one-rep maximum without you ever attempting one. |
| Grip strength | Quick, repeatable, and a useful general marker of how you are holding up. In grappling sports it is also a performance quality in its own right. |
| Daily load and recovery | What the training actually cost you, and how well you are absorbing it: session load, wellbeing, and a morning reading — all judged against your own normal rather than someone else’s. |
Measurement uses the same class of equipment professional clubs use.
Your data
How the information is handled
Personal and health information is handled in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. What is collected is what is needed to deliver the service — identifying details, health information, and training and monitoring data — and it is used only for delivery, communication, reporting and legal compliance. It is stored in secure cloud services with two-factor authentication. It is never sold, and never shared with third parties for marketing.
Athletes on daily monitoring receive a personal dashboard showing their own data, filtered to them and not shared with other clients. Where a short video of a jump test is used, it is used only to measure jump height and is deleted once the measurement has been recorded.
See what your numbers say.
One session, measured properly, and a document you keep.