These athletes may be explosive, but on the field, they play stiff and rigid. Again, this results in poor play in sport because of a lack of fluidity and coordination. They may be hitting on the measurables in the weight room heavy one rep maxes, impressive vertical and broad jumps, blazing fast 10 yard dash times and 40 yard dash times but that doesn’t translate to the field. The literal term I would give to these guys is “Weight room Warriors”. They are the type that lift all day because they are good at it and tend to avoid specific skill work.
On the other hand, I have worked with numerous athletes who possess elite “game speed” but produce head scratching measurements in the weight room. They have slower times on the 40 and 10, average vertical and broad jumps, and weak numbers on compound lifts. Still, they somehow make plays and appear lightning fast doing it. I termed these guys, “Field Junkies” and as you can imagine they excelled in their skill set. They could be found at your local field paying the sport over and over but rarely came into the weight room.
In addition to these two types of athletes, there’s a third type. The third type of athlete possesses a special type of speed in which they put up elite times in training AND fill up the stat sheet in competition. As you can imagine these athletes typically go on to compete at the professional level. Seeing this difference in athleticism across multiple sports, such as football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and others, I was determined to identify exactly what allowed each to possess these attributes.
Now, one may account these differences in performance to genetics or skill. And that may play a role. However, as a strength and conditioning coach, I wanted to break these differences down into tangible attributes I could control to develop athletes more sport-specific speed in our training. In my experience since then, I’ve found that athletes who possess elite game speed, but are lacking in the weight room are the easiest to develop. Now this is common sense if you think about it, if you have a great competitor in their sport who is weak and slow you have a high potential to increase their athleticism. I would simply build their strength, improve their explosiveness, and develop their speed. Then they would produce great numbers the next season and this made me look like a miracle worker.
The difficulty came in training the athletes who already had proficient speed and strength in a closed training environment, but couldn’t put that on display in competition. It was easy to tell them to simply play and practice their sport more, but I was still determined to find that missing piece in their training that would translate their linear speed into their sport.
This is what made me educate myself with a deeper understanding of agility, quickness, and sport-specific speed training. That said, your ability to perform explosive, quick, and appropriate movements is crucial to your athletic success. This reflects a need for agility, speed, and quickness training in your off-season. However, far too often coaches place too much emphasis on loading an athlete’s body for resistance training. Really, athleticism is based on movement proficiency, not strength. The bench press and squat are strength movements that enhance movement proficiency. However, those movements alone are not the end all. Both resistance training and sports-specific agility are needed to elicit adaptations that will support an athlete on the field.
So, our goal is to apply and progress the specific stimulus needed to elicit the adaptations we want to see in the athlete. This means that whatever we’re doing in the weight room must apply to what the athlete is doing in competition.
When applying the right stimulus it’s important to understand the difference between change of direction drills and true agility drills. We as coaches and athletes can favor randomized cone and ladder drills thinking we are elevating an athletes performance when in reality we are elevating their ability to perform that drill. I say this because just like learning a dance, the athlete is learning to perform that specific cone or ladder drill. In reality, cone and ladder drills can be used effectively as change of direction drills to teach an athlete to decelerate, transition, and accelerate multi directionally in a controlled environment. Meaning they know what they are performing prior to doing it.
However, true agility is actually change of direction with a reactionary component. A simple example is a coach pointing which direction an athlete should lateral shuffle as the athlete reacts to the cues from the coach. The athlete here must process the information in real time just like they would in competition.
Both change of direction drills and true agility are needed to elevate an athlete’s performance but it’s important to understand the distinction between the two.
Now that we have an understanding of what real agility training consists of, it becomes our goal to ultimately apply and progress the specific stress needed for the agility adaptations we wish to elicit. This means that our training should be transferable to what the athlete is doing in competition. To do this, there are some key factors to consider. First, we must understand what movements the athlete needs to be proficient at. This varies from sport to sport. For example, shortstop in baseball will need different change of direction stimulus than a defensive back in football.
Next, we must regress these movements to their base form to ultimately build back up. For example, enhancing the shortstop’s lateral change of direction begins with training inversion/eversion of the ankle, as well as hip abduction/adduction independently. Essentially, we’re reverse engineering movements in sport to enhance those unique abilities.
In creating a program for sports-specific speed, we must progress the stress presented to an athlete during each phase of training. This stress accumulates, and allows us to improve specific components. Eventually, these components compound on top of each other like building blocks, and allow us to achieve a larger goal.
The creation of programming of any sport specific-speed program requires our ability to progress the stress during each phase of training to stimulate and accumulate that component and build each component on top of each other like building blocks to a larger goal.
This is the explanation behind my phrase “isolate and elevate”. We must isolate the simplest component of a movement, then raise the threshold that component is performed at.
As an example, if I want to enhance an athlete’s ability to change direction laterally, I must start by raising the stability in the ankle. I would do this through the use of inversion and eversion focused drills such as lateral line hops. Then, we’d progress into full speed lateral shuffle work.
Sure, we can cut to the chase and have an athlete perform repeated bouts of lateral shuffles. However, in my experience, this pales in comparison to stripping down the movement and rebuilding it. When you then finally progress to the high velocity shuffle, it results in a faster more powerful movement.
In addition, before we move into focused high velocity work, we want to ensure the body is not fatigued performing drills. To do this, we must build an optimal level of muscular and cardiovascular endurance. This builds an athlete’s work capacity, and allows them to perform high quality repetitions in advanced drills. After we build that foundation we can reintroduce the sports-specific movement, and begin training the key factors that support that movement’s proficiency. Then finally, we can add the reactionary component to these sport specific drills aka agility to elevate the athlete’s performance.
To close the gap on the competition, an athlete not only needs to train, but make their training transferable to competition. Many times, athletes develop elite linear speed in their training, but don’t see that carry over to their sport. The way to get this carry over is not with ladder drills, or hurdle hops. Sports-specific speed, or agility, is a combination of an athlete’s cognitive abilities as well as his physical abilities applied directly to his sport. To elevate an athlete’s agility quickly, these two attributes must be trained in isolation at first, then combined to give the athlete quickness and speed that helps him fill up the stat sheet. This is easier said than done.
Elevating sports-specific speed takes attention to detail, patience, and consistency. Just as physical gains take a while to occur, cognitive gains take a while too. These times vary from athlete to athlete, but it’s important to know that if you do the work, the results will come.
You see, knowing is one thing. Doing is another. Now you have the know, it’s up to you to do.
As always, if you have questions about the concepts or training, feel free to reach out to directly so I can support your Speed Mission.
Victory Starts Here.
