The quicker the better…a brief article about speed

In most team sports, speed kills…the opposition that is. I can’t think of one team field based sport where speed is not a game changer. If one team is fundamentally faster than another they already have a huge advantage. Many coaches of sporting teams want to develop faster athletes (myself included). There are some however who are not sure how to go about doing this. 

As such, I thought I would shed some light on the issue and do my best to help anyone who would like to get the jump on the opposition (either athlete or coach). Of course, if you just like reading my writing then I’m OK with that too. 

What is speed?

Speed can be split into two broad categories – first, there is top speed (maximal velocity for those sports science geeks out there). This is essentially how fast you can run when in full flight, think Usain Bolt at about the 60-metre mark in a 100-metre race. This is important for track athletes but less so for team sport athletes. It's nice to have, but the other form of speed is slightly more important. I’m talking about acceleration – the first 5 metres. This is where games can be won and lost. If you are quick over this distance then you have a distinct advantage over your opposition – first to the ball, quick to get the intercept, quick to the net in tennis – all situations that give you an advantage.

For the purposes of this article, I will focus my thoughts on acceleration as it is more relevant to more athletes. My apologies if anyone wants more information on top speed training. If you do, feel free to drop me a line and I can either answer your questions individually or if there is enough interest, I can write a second article outlining top speed training.

Technique

Firstly, I want to talk about technique. It’s not that important really. OK, so that is a bit of a blanket statement, but to be fair, it’s really not. Well not for team sport athletes anyway. Here’s why. You know in the Olympics how all of the top sprinters seem to have a perfect technique? Well, that’s because for the most part, they do. You know what they don’t have? They don’t have a rugby ball under their arm, a football at their feet, or a hockey stick in their hand. You can probably see where this is heading. 

While the perfect technique may be ideal on a track, it’s less important on a rugby field. Now that doesn’t mean that as a coach you shouldn’t be concerned if one of your athletes runs with all the grace of a baby horse taking its first steps – then maybe you should invest some time in some basic technique work. I’m just saying don’t overdo the technique drills to the detriment of other work – think near enough is good enough in this case.

In the gym

Next, I want to talk about gym work. One way to increase speed is to get in the weight room and start moving some weight around. In order to increase the ability to move your bodyweight through space rapidly, your body has to be used to moving weight rapidly. This seems like a pretty basic concept, right? But many athletes or coaches still feel that team sport athletes don’t need to spend time in the gym. There are literally hundreds of exercises that will help an athlete improve their speed. My advice would be to find a good trainer who knows how to programme for speed and strength and get them to write a programme for you (or your athletes if you’re a coach). 

There are a few different programming techniques to use so generalising them here is not ideal as there really is not enough space without boring you so I won’t go there. But again if anyone is interested in the finer points of programming for speed feel free to get in touch. My one piece of general advice though is to get stronger before you try and get more powerful. This may seem odd but let me explain. In order to move weights explosively (think Olympic weightlifting), you first need to be able to move them safely. 

Get a good trainer, learn proper form and then look to increase the speed of your lifts or move to the more power-oriented lifts. You need to ease into things to ensure that you don’t suffer any injuries.

Hop, skip and jump

Plyometric work is another way to develop speed. Plyometric training is just a fancy way of saying jumps and hops really. These are great to include in your training sessions prior to technical work if you are a sports coach or can be included on their own in a separate session if you prefer. The thing to remember with plyometric work is that the rest periods need to be long enough to recover fully and the work periods need to be short enough to train power rather than endurance. 

This means that you might only programme 5 box jumps and then rest for 2-3 minutes. This seems an extremely long time but it is needed in order to fully recharge the batteries, otherwise, you are not going to get the proper benefit from the drills.

One important part of speed training that is often overlooked by coaches and/or athletes is the ability to slow down and/or change direction. This is like bolting a massive turbo onto your car’s engine and not bothering to upgrade the brakes. In order to fully utilise speed, an athlete needs to be able to change direction at high speed or reduce speed quickly.

Exercises such as depth jumps are excellent for this. Essentially a depth jump is a box jump in reverse where the athlete starts on top of the box, steps forwards and focuses on landing softly on the ground. This is training the muscles to absorb the pressure of the body moving through space. Not only does this increase the ability of the athlete to change direction/stop from speed, but it also assists with injury prevention as the athlete’s muscles/joints are being trained to get used to rapid deceleration. 

Once an athlete can deceleration safely, reactive power can be added. This is as easy as adding a jump following a depth jump. This trains the athlete to decelerate and then accelerate quickly immediately afterwards. Once an athlete is used to these movements and competent in carrying them out, you can bring some uncertainty into the situation. For example, you could set up a drill where the athletes are performing sidesteps once they reach a tackle bag (to use a rugby example). 

Initially, you could have them all stepping off a particular foot for a certain number of reps, then switch feet. Once they have perfected this, you could use partner initiation to determine some randomness. This would be having a partner telling them which foot they are stepping off just before they reach the bag. This makes it harder in terms of them having to think through the process and react before hitting the bag. A very useful skill in both executing a skill under time pressure and also decision making.

Positioning

One final thing to remember is to ensure that you or your athletes are working from the appropriate positions. Often as coaches, we simply line our players up and ask them to do sprints without much focus on the positions they are starting from. I will admit to being guilty of this on occasion in the past. However, it is rare that a team sport athlete will be in a standing start position during a match. 

As such it is important to try and replicate game situations when doing speed drills. This means altering starting positions – such as using left and right foot starts, starting from the ground (either lying or seated), starting side on and more. There are endless possibilities to think of but as long as you are training athletes in multiple positions you will be helping the skills transfer to game day.

This is an extremely basic outline of some ways in which you can improve acceleration in team sport athletes (well all athletes really). As I mentioned earlier these different aspects of speed training could really have an article written on each in their own right so if you would like more information or have questions on anything feel free to get in touch and I will do my best to answer them. Also, feel free to ask any questions you have on our Facebook page or send me a message on Instagram. That way anyone who might be interested can find out also.

________________________________________________________________________

I would love to hear what you think about this article.  Feel free to comment or recommend this post to a friend via social media.  It would mean a lot to me.