We have all seen the fancy marketing videos for “SPEED TRAINING”. Speed ladders, training in the sand, and a million different cone drills run one right after another.
The problem is, none of the activities listed above actually build any speed.
“Speed training” has become the most popular performance training catchphrase in the United States, and for good reason. Every coach and scout in the world looks for it and every athlete wants more of it. The problem is that simply saying you do “speed training” and actually making someone faster, are two vastly different things. In this blog, we will walk you through the different types of speed, how they are trained, and most importantly, how we measure them to know if the athlete is actually getting faster.
The 6 components of Speed
Speed has six main components and each one is trained slightly differently. There is:
Absolute (The maximum speed you can reach, 20-50+ yards)
Overcoming (speed in the first 0-5 yards)
Acceleration (speed in the first 5-15 yards)
Change of direction (speed moving from one direction to another)
Multi-directional (Speed while moving sideways or backwards)
Endurance (Ability to maintain the same speed)
Common Training variables
The items below MUST be included in training any component of speed.
Displacement:
The first thing you need to know about speed is that it only matters quickly you can move your center of mass. When you look at things like speed ladders, the feet are moving quickly but the center of mass is barely moving. This means the person in NOT going anywhere or creating any speed. If moving limbs quickly produced speed then why doesn’t everyone do boxing on the speed bag to make themselves faster?
Rest Periods:
If you are training speed, you are resting. Depending on the component you are training, that time will vary. Absolute speed training requires the most rest and speed endurance training requires the least. If you are NOT resting at all, you are jogging, and no one cares who the most consistently slow athlete is.
Posture:
Posture must be coached at all times. If someone is simply having an athlete run around without any coaching of posture, they are just keeping the athlete busy, not making them better.
Speed Overview
To specifically go through how we train each component of speed at The Spot Athletics would take an entire book. Looking at the descriptions of each component gives you a sense of what each component entails. Different sports and age groups require slightly different ratios of each of the components and/or rest times.
To get a general idea of how we approach speed, we will use the analogy of a car. The technical work and repetitions done in each category are like tuning the engine of a race car. Crucial for winning. Power and strength training is like adding horsepower to a race car. Crucial for winning as well. Neither is more important and both must be done to create the fastest athlete possible.
Absolute speed is
the king of kings!
The foundation of the Speed, Agility, and Quickness (SAQ) program at The Spot Athletics is the development of absolute or maximal speed. To put it simply, increases in maximal sprinting speed will improve all of the other components of speed. Besides affecting all other qualities, there is one huge benefit to training maximal speed work that makes it as close to a non-negotiable as we will have at The Spot. You cannot become fast if you don’t train fast.
Lifting weights is great, and certainly has a big value, however, there is not a barbell/kettlebell/ or any equipment based lifting movement in the arsenal that happens anywhere close to the speed of maximal velocity sprinting. And that is why when you come to The Spot, you will see your athlete doing maximal sprinting work. These are sprints done at maximal velocity from 20-50 yards. This also means you will see them resting to full recovery in between these sprints. You can NOT build absolute speed if the sprints are not done from full recovery. We usually fill this recovery time with belly breathing, some education, or an upper-body pre-hab exercise. But make no mistake,
if you do NOT want your athlete resting because you want them to “work hard”, then you will prevent them from ever becoming faster!
In sport, things occur at high velocities, including the impact of stresses on the body. There is a concept called the Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands, or S.A.I.D principle. This states that the body creates changes specifically in response to the stresses placed upon it. To save you from a bunch of scientific jargon, the SAID principle essentially means the body builds itself to handle whatever type of training you throw at it. In order to build resiliency in athletes, we must expose them to the stresses that they are going to have to deal with in sport. To bring this point home, what you must understand is that the vast majority tissue injury in athletics happens at high velocities. In Layman's terms, when an athlete is playing fast, the potential for injury is higher. However, we can minimize that risk by exposing the athlete to high speeds of movement throughout training cycles, thus allowing their bodies to adapt to the exposure, which leads to their tissues being better prepared to handle the stresses that come with sport.
Testing Speed
There are many different ways to test improvements in speed. At the Spot Athletics, we have found, in our 20+ years of experience, that one test stands above all else. The 10-yard fly. This is a test that measures an athlete’s speed over 10 yards at maximal velocity. This is done by giving an athlete 20 yards to reach maximal speed and measuring how long it takes them to cover the next 10 yards. We measure other tests as well, such as the pro agility and the broad jump, but nothing tells us if an athlete is getting faster quite like the 10-yard fly.
The Finish Line
Speed work is a massive part of our program. We want to make sure our parents and athletes have the information to understand that what we are doing is thoughtfully designed with the intent of making better athletes. We simply aren’t concerned with doing what “looks good” in some marketing video or making athletes tired, just because it is perceived as “hard”.
At The Spot Athletics, you will also see all 6 components of speed training. You will also see movement skill development, races, games, and tests. At the end of the day, it all serves one purpose; to ensure our athletes are prepared and motivated to attack their sport with their full athletic potential!
If you ever have any questions on speed training or any other aspect of how we deliver world-class coaching here at The Spot, please don’t hesitate to reach out.