What makes an athlete fast?

I have been coaching athletes at various levels now for years, and I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of performance training is speed development.

If you open social media for more than 5 minutes, you will see fancy agility ladder exercises, your favorite NFL wide receiver doing sprinting drills that you want your kid to do, all with the promise to make your athlete faster and more agile.

The premise of this article is to tell you the three main factors I believe help to actually get your athlete faster.

The truth is that it takes a lot of work over a lot of time.

Truth is, becoming a big, fast, and strong athlete takes a lot of time and dedication. It is going to take years to develop your body to be able to perform the way that you desire.

Before I sat down to write this, I looked at my last 15 athlete intakes over the last couple months, and there was one common trend with all of them: every single athlete wanted to get faster.

Speed is king.

Speed is what is going to set you apart from everyone else.

If you are really fast, the chances of you getting recruited to play higher levels of athletics dramatically increase.

The skill set between D3, D2, and D1 athletics is not that far apart from one another. When you get into those Power Five schools, the biggest differentiating factor is going to be their strength and ability to produce force.

Relative strength

This is a low-hanging fruit approach with our youth athletes. A vast majority of our youth are between the ages of 9 to 14 and all possess low relative strength, and what I mean by low relative strength is how strong they are compared to their body weight.

Without a high level of strength, you are not going to be able to move your body forward in the manner of which you desire. The only resistance you are experiencing during sprinting is your body weight.

Trying to sprint with low strength is trying to go from 0 to 60 mph in a Prius.

Suffice it to say, if you have a low level of relative strength, all the agility drills in the world are not going to make you faster by themselves.

Let’s zoom in for a second.

If you have an athlete who weighs 180 pounds and can deadlift 365 pounds, and then you have another athlete who weighs 260 pounds and can deadlift 365 pounds, I am willing to bet that the 180-pound athlete is going to be faster.

I hate speaking in absolutes because there’s always going to be variance and gray areas, especially when it comes to performance training.

Here are some standards of strength that we use at the gym:

Male Athletes:

1. They can perform 10 or more chin-ups.
2. They can perform 25 or more full-range of motion push-ups.
3. They can trap bar deadlift twice their body weight.
4. They can front squat 1.5 times their body weight.

Female Athletes:

1. They can perform 5 or more chin-ups
2. They can perform 15 or more full-range of motion push-ups
3. They can trap bar deadlift 1.5 times their body weight
4. They can front squat 1.25 times their body weight

Long story short… Get in the gym and get strong. That will automatically make you faster.

Mobility

Now we are onto the boring stuff that most people ignore. Basically because you can’t put it on social media, get 6,000 likes and make a bunch of money off of it.

Speed and acceleration are simple. The person who has a longer stride or who can cover the most amount ground with each step is going to get there first.

If you have tight or restricted hips, your athlete is not going to be able to cover as much ground as possible.

This does not mean they need to be yanking on their joints at all time because there is a difference between mobility and flexibility training.

Flexibility means passive range of motion, or in other words, when you try to bend down and touch your toes.

Mobility is an active range of motion, or more specifically, it is the ability to get in and out of desired positions with any unwanted movements.

By simply making an athlete more mobile, they will automatically get faster and move better on the field.

Being able to increase your stride length requires more than just flexibility training; it also has mobility requisites that need to be trained with each and every weight training session.

Core strength

Does a lion worry about its core strength when it’s chasing down a gazelle?

No, it doesn’t because it’s a lion.

Since we are not lions, we have to train our core.

Simply put, the core is meant to keep your midline stable while your arms and legs are pumping.

Your core is the foundation for literally everything you do, inside and out of the gym. If you have a weak core, you will not be able to squat as much. If you have a weak core, you will not be able to run as fast.

Fairly simple to understand.

Having a strong midsection allows you to transfer energy from your lower body to your upper body. If you have a weak midsection, there will be a bunch of “energy leaks.” Which means your spine is not rigid, and without that transferability, you’re not going anywhere quickly OR you will not be able to put as much force into the ground.

Even worse, having a weak midsection increases your injury risk dramatically.

Remember, all of the qualities we spoke about today tie in with one another. Without good core stability, your relative strength is going to be low, which 9/10 times means your mobility is going to need work as well.

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