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Making Speed Training More Functional

This is an excerpt from New Functional Training for Sports 3rd Edition by Michael Boyle.

In 2017 I had an epiphany that drastically changed our program. I realized that although we did sprint drills and drills we called sprints, we probably weren’t really sprinting. I also came to the realization that if you aren’t timing your athletes, which we now do twice a week, you aren’t sprinting. True sprints need to be at minimum of 90 percent of top speed. If you aren’t timing sprints, you have no real reference point. The question becomes “90 percent of what?” If you don’t know exactly how fast someone is, how do you know if they are getting faster?

As you evaluate your current speed-improvement strategy, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Do my athletes consistently run fast in training?
2. Do they run fast twice every week year-round?
3. How do I know they’re running fast?

The third question is the key. If you don’t time your athletes, you don’t know if they’re running fast (or fast enough). You may think they’re running fast, but are they? Unless they are track-and-field athletes, there won’t be meets to base things on. This is where data matters and where information is power.

When athletes lift, it’s easy to look at the weight on the bar and make a simple judgment. Heavy and light are obvious. With untimed speed work, it’s not so easy.

Remember, speed development goes back to Drucker’s quote (what gets measured gets managed) or, as track coach Tony Holler says, “Record, rank, publish” (Holler 2014).

Strength coaches often say they want to develop speed, but they rarely test speed, and as a result, they probably don’t actually train it. Doing technical sprint drills and working on sprint mechanics aren’t speed training; they’re the warm-up for speed training. Too many coaches test speed twice a year with a test like the 40-yard (37 m) dash as a pass-or-fail proposition.

The best analogy I have read about sprinting was in the book Most Likely to Succeed. The authors described the flawed way that bike riding might be taught in school:

Teachers would lecture and assign reading from bicycle textbooks. Students would stay up late at night memorizing the names of the various components of a bike. They would be marked down on tests—and lose confidence—for misspelling derailleur. Some students would excel; others would struggle. No one would ever ride a bike. (Wagner and Dintersmith 2015, 28)

How did you learn to ride a bike? If you were like most of us, you just got on a bike, and then Mom or Dad gave you a push and yelled, “Pedal!” You certainly didn’t spend hours practicing for one or two bike riding attempts a year.

The parts of the bike don’t really matter; riding the bike is what matters. This is how I now view most speed training programs. Coaches do A skips, B skips, dribbles, and so on but no timed sprints. What matters for us is how fast athletes get from point A to point B, so line them up and instruct them to get from A to B as fast as possible. When you do, amazing things happen.

I’ve seen too much time wasted trying to turn people into pretty runners through lots of drills. Sadly, many of them just end up being pretty slow. On the flip side, I constantly see videos of fast people being critiqued for not being pretty runners—but they are pretty fast.

The central problem is that most coaches view timed sprinting as a test. This test is done perhaps two or three times per year. The days leading up to these sprint tests are generally filled with anxiety and trepidation:

• Will my athletes improve?
• Did my “speed” program work?
• Will anyone get injured?

Test-day hamstring pulls are almost a given. Not only is the coach anxious but so are the athletes.

The real key to speed improvement is to get coaches to reorient their lens and see sprinting not as a test but as a training tool that needs to be used twice a week. In order to use the tool properly, you have to time your athletes!

When athletes want to get faster, the first thing we need to know is how fast they are now. We need a “before” to have an “after.”

More Excerpts From New Functional Training for Sports 3rd Edition

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