Marc Lewis: Building Athlete Monitoring Systems That Actually Work

In this episode of #VALDCAST, our host Ryan sits down with Dr. Marc Lewis — Director of Applied Sports Science for the Houston Texans and co‑founder of the Sport Science Network — to unpack what it really takes to build and run a high-performance system in the NFL.Shaped by his military background, Marc shares how systems based thinking underpins everything from in‑season decision‑making to long‑term performance strategy in the NFL. Together they explore how to manage the chaos of a season, individualise care across vastly different positional demands and build monitoring systems that athletes actually buy into.The conversation dives deep into jump and isometric focused test selection, how to interpret meaningful change (beyond asymmetry percentages), why CMJ's remain the cornerstone of in‑season monitoring and how both objective and subjective data must be tied directly to intervention. Marc also outlines his four‑construct athlete monitoring framework — a scalable system that works at any level, with any resources. If you’re a practitioner looking to build better systems, improve athlete compliance and turn data into meaningful action, this episode is for you.