There are a few drills more than any other that I see corrupting the training of any others:

Agility Ladders

These are probably the most popular offender and while I thought they had fallen by the wayside as coaches became more well informed, they seem to have found a resurgence recently partly due to the proliferation of a few clips of some athletes with particularly fancy footwork in them. While these drills make for an entertaining watch, their transfer to sport performance is almost null. Drills in these ladders interfere with gait and reinforce closed chain movement patterns that can serve a purpose in general coordination for young athletes and potentially as part of a warmup for more advanced athletes, they aren’t doing anything besides making you good at ladders.

Sand Sprints

Rocky and Apollo Creed may have made sprinting on the beach look cool in their tiny shorts and head bands while they awkwardly embraced in an ultimate bromance but sprinting on sand has little place in actual speed training. To run fast, you need to run faster; you need to give yourself the opportunity to reach new maximal velocities and the long ground contact times that inherently accompany running in soft sound will limit your output too much for speed gains. There is limited application for running in sand as a special strength exercises for the legs and particularly ankles/feed but as a velocity developer, it is a mistake.

Parachutes/Overly Resisted Runs

Resisted running has a proven positive effect on acceleration, when its done properly. When its not done properly it can negatively affect mechanics and deteriorate reactivity. Parachutes are a really cool looking thing to have attached to you while you run because you look like a human dragster but the inconsistent resistance they provide do to their unstable nature and different wind angles can turn a maximal velocity sprint into an exercise in staying the course. These side to side forces will disrupt mechanics which isn’t what you want when trying to develop velocity. Overly resisted runs, such as very heavy sleds or pushing cars can have similar negative affects to sand runs in that they cause the athlete too run too slowly to develop speed. They can be a useful tool in teaching acceleration mechanics and body angle but even then, the resistance should be very submaximal for best transfer.

If you want to sprint faster you need to develop technique, powerful strides and reactivity in foot contacts. Avoid drills that interfere with these ideals.

In all my years of coaching and training, I’ve seen a number of mistakes that athletes make when they get  tunnel vision and think a specific drill or exercise will make them faster on the field and catch them up to their peers.  Becoming the fastest athlete that one can be is a holistic venture, which revolves around a speed training program that emphasizes the right mechanics, the special strength work to bolster those mechanics, and the strength work that improves the size and coordination of the specific muscle involved. Choosing the correct training regimen is important, but how you perform that training regimen is also a critical issue in getting faster.

Over time, I’ve found seven glaring mistakes that aspiring athletes tend to make when pursuing the task of increasing their speed.

Not doing enough actual sprint or specific speed practice

Athletes often forget that to get faster, the most important thing that you can do is to practice the sprinting you’ll be performing in competition.  Slow athletes will become the kings and queens of drill work, but when it comes time to drop the hammer in an actual footrace, they are left behind.

Drills don’t make you fast; specific speed work does.  Sprint drills as we know them were largely invented to help with the special strength conditioning of the muscles of athletes who trained in cold weather regions and didn’t have good indoor facilities.  To get fast, you must practice the specific type of speed you wish to improve with strong focus and intention.

If you are a basketball or football player, this means that there is a priority on things like 20m dash time, or specific, timed change of direction work.  You get faster at running 20s by actually sprinting 20s all out with good recovery in between each sprint.  If you are a track and field athlete, you get faster primarily by practicing maximal efforts at your specific race distance.  I’ve seen plenty of athletes who can rock sprint drills with great rhythm and coordination, and then get blown away when it comes to actually sprinting.  Looking cool because you can do the fancy C-skip doesn’t look as cool anymore when you are the last one to cross the finish line in the actual race.

Not sprinting fast enough when you practice

Many athletes forget that speed training is not a casual venture.  Simply performing a sprint, plyometric, or drill will not in and of itself make one faster.  Sprinting fast makes one faster.  By timing a sprint, three great things happen:

1. The athlete gets immediate feedback as to the quality of their attempt, which helps them to both consciously and subconsciously formulate a method of improving their performance.
2. Having an outcome goal preset will improve the level of performance.  External goals give the subconscious mind a clearer view of what is trying to be accomplished.
3. Giving immediate feedback on a specific sprint attempt is a very important method of teaching athletes to deal with the results of their performance, whether good or bad.  Some athletes struggle with fear of their results, which leads them down the drill route, but they must learn to always come back to the most important thing, which is solid, timed, specific efforts.

Some coaches will even tell you that unless you are timing your sprints, then you aren’t really training speed.  Put a stopwatch or timing system on your next speed training session, and you will feel the difference in both the mental approach and your body’s response.  Compare this to strength training: Speed training with no timed goal would be similar to lifting weights without ever noting how much weight was on the bar.

Not competing enough during speed practice

Along with timing speed training efforts, athletes need to compete in the pursuit of maximal velocity.  Many athletes who are less fleet of foot than their peers will generate a fear of competition, and gravitate toward drills and exercises that they can perform on their own to make themselves faster.  This mentality will cripple the speed development of any athlete.  Not only does competition offer an athlete an adrenaline boost, increasing their speed output, but it also helps athletes to overcome fear of outcomes, which improves not only speed, but is a valuable mental athletic skill.

Compete with others to build your sprint engine or you’ll get left behind.

Doing too much extra work on top of sport practice

An athlete’s ability to recover from training is finite.  We cannot train 10 hours a day and expect to recover, and this is a pretty obvious statement.  What about five hours a day?  Two?

Speed training – real maximal speed training – is a taxing venture.  Elite track coaches will generally recommend at least 48 hours of recovery after a maximal speed training session, sometimes more.  If you are competing in a sport and playing several times each week, then sport play itself is already providing you a potent speed stimulus.  Doing lots of extra plyometrics and drills on top of lots of sports play is often counterproductive.

So how do you know if you are in a good state to train speed?  By timing your efforts and not performing low-quality work.

If an athlete had five sport practices in a week and wanted to get extra speed work in on the weekend, but then noticed his performance was much worse than in the past, is the extra work helping him?  The short answer is no.

The long answer is that athletes need to be aware of the volume present in replicating the same repetitive movements they see in sport in their practices, or they will overload those pathways, and performance will subsequently decrease.  We’ll tackle what to do about building speed in the midst of heavy sport practice in the next point.

Not doing strength training

Many beginner and intermediate athletes are not slow because they don’t sprint enough.  They are slow because they are unable to produce large amounts of force!  Since young athletes are constantly running, jumping, and playing, there is a good chance that they don’t have too many issues with expressing the force their muscles are able to produce.  What is more pressing for these athletes may simply be the ability of their muscles to produce large amounts of force in a coordinated manner.  A well-designed barbell program helps athletes to coordinate the firing of their large muscle groups together more efficiently, as well as allowing each muscle to learn more efficient and effective force patterns.  Over time, it helps the athlete add muscle mass to the prime movers of speed, but this must be done in a carefully planned pattern to help eliminate the compensation patterns that are so often present in advanced athletes who began heavy barbell training too early and in excess volume.

Strength programs often have immediate, significant effects on the speed of developing athletes due to the “nitrous boost” of muscular coordination they offer on multiple levels.  This is why the effect is often much more dramatic on a younger athlete compared to a developed athlete who already has good levels of coordination and skill in his or her body.

Doing too much strength training

Although strength training can create a breakthrough for many athletes in speed development, doing too much of it forms an early plateau for those on the road to maximal velocity.  The reason why is that excessive volumes of strength training do a few things that are detrimental to speed:

• Take adaptation reserves away from building speed and shift them to strength and stability in common strength training positions (such as the bottom of a squat, or the start of a deadlift). This is a more common problem for athletes who specialize in speed (such as track athletes) than it is for team sport athletes, who need to be more well-rounded and have joint stability in a variety of positions that they might see in the course of their competition.
• Prolonged strength training done in large volumes will gradually build muscles that are responsible for compensation patterns in sprinting.  For example, the spinal erectors and hamstrings are synergists to the glute in sprinting.  They help with the movement of hip extension in a sprint, but shouldn’t be the main contributors.  Doing lots of squats, cleans, and deadlifts will gradually start to shift muscular development toward that of the spinal erectors and hamstrings over the glutes.  Give a CrossFit athlete a glute driven hip extension test, and you’ll usually find that their hamstrings and spinal erectors pop up to drive the movement well before the glute.  These high-volume lifting situations lend athletes toward relying on their glutes less (glutes as a driver of hip extension are key to speed) and on accessory muscles (spinal erectors pairing with hamstrings) more.
• Excessive bilateral strength work can shift athletes into a level of anterior pelvic tilt that can hurt things like top-end velocity and sprint posture.

Most athletes are certainly not in danger of too much strength work in their speed development, but the gym rat who thinks that achieving a particular squat weight will be the key to running faster is heading down the wrong path.  Always put speed work above strength to become the fastest you can ultimately be.  This isn’t to say that pockets of heavy strength training aren’t useful for many athletes, because they are, but the ultimate road of training must be a specific one.

Doing too much of the wrong strength training

Strength training is important, but doing the right strength training might even be more important for speed development.  A good speed program is going to help an athlete combat weaknesses, while nurturing strengths.  Athletes who have poor starting speed off of the line of play will tend to achieve great gains through pistol squats and front squat variations.  Athletes who have trouble hitting that second gear immediately after the start (10-20m speed) will do well to work on their explosive strength, which can be developed through force oriented plyometric work, such as depth jumps and standing jumps for distance.  Explosive barbell lifts such as cleans and snatches are also helpful for developing the explosive aspect of this second gear speed.  Athletes who struggle with top-end speed will do well to maximize the strength and power of their posterior chain, so hip thrusts, single leg 45-degree back extensions, split squats (particularly oscillating and reactive versions), and single leg deadlifts are a nice remedy in this situation.  Specific isometrics and activation protocols are also solid gold for athletes who can accelerate well, but struggle past 20-30m to keep up with their peers.

Common mistakes include overuse of bilateral deep squats and full-catch Olympic lifts for an athlete lacking top end speed, or the overuse of plyometrics or posterior chain work for an athlete that can’t get off the line of scrimmage or the starting blocks well in those first few steps.  Much of the exact route of developing speed is going to depend on exactly what the athlete’s particular goal is.  Team sport athletes should seek to be more well-rounded than their track and field counterparts when it comes to various aspects of the speed equation, as they must be masters of the 0-20m speed realm, compared to a track athlete who must not specialize in those arenas of training that cater more toward acceleration than top end speed.  Not all training methods are created equally.

Generally speaking, once an athlete has been strength training for a few years, less is generally more in the weightroom when it comes to speed-seeking programs.    

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The first thing our incoming athletes do is go through a Functional Movement Screen and some performance testing. This will give us a pretty good idea where deficiencies are and what the common trends are. Common deficient areas are normally ankle mobility, T-spine mobility, lack of overall posterior strength, and lack of core strength. We will also do a video analysis of their linear and lateral running mechanics to identify any energy leaks or inefficient movement that we can help correct. Once we are done with the evaluation process, the athletes enter our Stage 0 program where we work on correcting their deficiencies and building up their work capacity. We also begin our lifting orientation process at this time. We begin with establishing our standards of what we expect every time they enter our facility. Attention to detail, tempo and intensity are a few. Stage 0 is all about becoming brilliant at the basics. Relative body strength exercises such as inverted rows, chin-ups, push-ups, etc. are emphasized. We will begin taking our athletes through our hinging, squatting and Olympic lifting progressions as well.

What advice do you have for a young coach/student who is interested in breaking into the college coaching scene?

Find coaches you respect in the profession and go visit them. Read everything you can about them and their program. Be very persistent and be a scavenger for knowledge. You must also be passionate about the profession. Find a niche within the field such as speed, corrective exercise, nutrition, etc. The college coaching profession is very competitive, so having a specialty is a good way to set yourself apart. When I hire I am looking to hire great people who will be excellent role models for our kids. They must be low ego and high output coaches who are great teachers.

What are some of the most impressive feats you have seen by your athletes through the years?

I’ve seen many but I’ll keep it to the last two years. I’ve seen Sammie Coates, one of our receivers who weighs 210lbs, do three strict chin-ups with 3 45lb plates hanging from his waist. Jay Prosch, a fullback of ours who is now with the Houston Texans, squatted 365lbs with 100lbs of chain and hit .80 m/s on the tendo. One afternoon I came out of my office onto the weight room floor to find Greg Robinson squatting 315lbs with 80lbs of chains and hitting .85m/s on the tendo. It wouldn’t have been so impressive had he not been wearing flip flops. He was actually waiting for the St. Louis Rams staff who were on their way to work him out. In no way am I advocating wearing flip flops and squatting obviously.

What is a piece of advice that Ryan Russell the coach in 2014 would like to go back and give Ryan Russell the player and Ryan Russell the coach in 2004?

I would tell myself to focus more on recovery. I trained two or three times a day, five or six days a week. I always thought more was better and never let myself recover. Another thing I would have done more as an athlete is open reactive change of direction work. Being an old track guy, I did a lot of running fast and leaning left and spent little time on change of direction. The linear speed training helped me get fast straight ahead, but did very little to help my change of direction. Seeing the impact this type of training has had on my athletes the past few years has been amazing.

What sets apart what Auburn football strength and conditioning does from other top programs in the country?

I don’t know if anything really sets us apart. I know there are a lot of programs doing a really good job. I always tell our guys psychology trumps physiology. We can have the best program in the world and if they don’t buy in and work hard they aren’t going to get better. On the flip side, we could have the worst program in the world and if they give us all they’ve got they’re going to get better. Now I believe we have a good system in place but our guys work extremely hard as well. Attention to detail really matters around here, and our players know it pays to be a “detail guy.” I believe we do a nice job finding our guys limiting/deficient areas and correcting them, in essence helping them get out of their own way. They progress through a stage system where, if they do what they’re supposed to, they will progress through three or four different stages/programs throughout their careers. There are performance standards as well as screening standards that must be met to graduate into the next stage. At the end of the day our guys know that my staff and I are extremely passionate about their development, and that goes a really long way.

Everyone knows that to succeed in the SEC you’ve got to be fast, what are some of your favorite speed training drills/concepts?

We follow a non-competitive → competitive → pure competitive progression. Our last 3-4 week block will be purely competitive with our guys broken up into groups based of their 10yd dash times. It gets extremely competitive, and we are now having to film a lot of the drills to decipher winners and losers. We live by the quote “the best way to get really fast is to go outside and run really fast.” It’s simple but true. We have our guys broken up into 3 different stages as well for speed training. One of our favorite drills for acceleration is pairing heavy sled drags with electronically timed 10’s. Heavy sled drags are an awesome way to teach our athletes to feel the “lean” they will need for optimal acceleration. We will normally do 3x15yd drags with 3x10yd timed 10’s contrasting the two. With our stage III athletes we will do some French contrast training. A pairing we have used looks like this, A) Heavy sled push x10yds  B) sprinter stance start x10yds  C) chain sprint x20yds  D) assisted sprint  x20yds. Our athletes will go through this sequence three times. The gains we have seen in force production through these two methods have been impressive. The French Contrast Method has specifically helped many of our older athletes break through speed barriers late in their careers.

I want to say thanks to Chad and Juggernaut for the great job they do and the wealth of information they put out. We purchased the Juggernaut football manual and gained many valuable ideas when it comes to programming and implementation. Keep up the great work and thanks for the great product.

Ryan Russell has been the Director of Performance for Auburn University Football since 2012.

First off I felt very honored to be asked to review James Smith’s new book, Applied Sprint Training (AST), as his work has been a major influence for my own personal training and as a coach.  When I first found his previous work years ago, prior to interning with Juggernaut, it work was my first real exposure to the complexities of physical preparation.  I was in my senior year of undergraduate work in Kinesiology and the information he was providing just made sense.  It was the things I was doing intuitively but I did not have the correct structure and reasoning behind it.  After I read his work I knew the only place I was going to do my internship at was with him and Chad Smith at Juggernaut.  I wasn’t interested in learning from anyone else.  I wanted to learn more in person from both him and Chad.

To say the least James has had a direct impact on my current knowledge and has helped guide my studies both directly and with my decision to do a special studies track for graduate school.  I feel AST really allows coaches and athletes begin to understand the truths of training that I stumbled upon years ago.

Overview

AST is rooted in the principles and teachings of one of the greatest and brightest minds in coaching, Charlie Francis.  James pays homage to Charlie throughout the book with quotes, references and methods.  Charlie Francis, whom many may know was Ben Johnon’s late track coach.  James does a great job in the beginning of the book explaining the importance of sprint training and how to migrate what track athletes do for speed development into a variety of other sports seamlessly by looking at a time motion analysis of the sport in question.  “Movement is a commonality shared by all sports and the eventual winner is the one who can move the fastest to get to the desired point the first.”

Many training concepts these days are about going beyond the sport limits- longer duration runs, shorter rest periods, destabilizing the surface, etc. in an attempt to improve athletic performance.  When you get too far away from the demands of you sport you get less transfer to your training.  Training in a lactic environment for an alactic-aerobic sport is not going to yield the greatest results.

Obviously we want athletes who can both run fast and be ready for the energetic demands of their sport but the sport specific conditioning will come later in the yearly calendar and with the sport itself and does not have to be left alone to the physical preparation coach.
“Enter a season fit and the game itself will take care of the rest.” – Charlie Francis

Conditioning is so highly valued that many college and even pro athletes have yet to do one single true speed training session in their entire lives.   This may seem crazy but it is a harsh truth and it is due to the improper education for speed development.  Coaches are so concerned with getting the athletes able to run 20 40’s that they forget to get the athlete to be able to run fast once first.  Getting athletes good at running slow doesn’t seem highly logical or beneficial for athletes.

James does a great job at explaining how to develop your speed training both in the micro and macro to give you an insight on the why’s and how’s to develop a comprehensive speed training plan.   AST also teaching you how and why you should implement a HIGH/LOW sequencing of training to maximize speed training days and how to categorize exercises to fit into those days. The HIGH/LOW system is one of the easiest to follow for an athlete who is training for multiple goals.

Contents

This book is jammed packed of information that will really help answer so many questions athletes and coaches have about sprint training.  From timing, rehab, energetic demands, plyometrics, mechanics, tempos to biomechanics, James puts it all together into a logical flowing package.  He does a great job of laying the foundation of sprint training in regards to track and field and branching it off with practical applications for a variety of sports.  The programs in the back of the book are extremely insightful as they are actual workouts James has written for his athletes.  You can get inside the mind of the author and see his rationale for his program design based on the specific needs of the athlete.

Summary

This is a must read book for coaches who have an interest in systematically implementing a structured off-season program.  The current nature and structure of the model being used today across the country in Strength and Conditioning should heed to the messages in this book.  Most of the problems, issues, misconceptions and improper training methods that are out there in the strength and conditioning world, in regards to sprint training, could be cured if they could just grasp the concepts outlined in this book.

Sprint training seems to have some mystery behind it.  Most athletes and coaches think you can’t teach speed-that speed is God given- and that if you want to get faster you need some magic shoe or some special program. AST gives you the tools and understanding of how to get yourself or your athletes faster.   Speed is a skill and like any other skill you must practice it over and over again to get good at it.

Get Applied Sprint Training from James Now

1. What are your top 3 weight room movements to improve speed?

Throws

Throws, either of shot puts or medicine balls, are a tremendous tool to build acceleration and true explosive strength. One of the qualities that is often touted of bands and chains, is that they teach the athlete to accelerate the bar through the completion of the lift. While they do allow for a more complete acceleration of the bar than straight weight, they cannot truly accelerate through the end of the lift because the bar will remain in the athlete’s hands or on their back. Compare that to the true explosive quality of throws which accelerate through the completion of the exercises because the implement leaves your hands, making throws one of the best ways to build acceleration and explosive strength. Throws like Overhead Backwards Throws, Scoop Throws, Diving Throws, Rotational Throws and Punch Throws can all be used in your training to build GPP and general explosive qualities. Specific throws can be used to build explosive strength qualities needed to improve the squat, bench and deadlift.

Squat: Squat to Press Throw for Height-Perform this throw standing near a high wall so you can mark the height of the throw on the wall. This throw is designed to develop the squat, so focus on your legs creating the power and your arms merely finishing the movement.

Bench: Power Drops-Make sure to catch the ball with your arms extended and reverse it powerfully right before it reaches your chest. You should use a ball that you can throw at least to the height of your partners face.

Deadlift: Scoop Throw for Height-Try to recreate the starting position of your deadlift as well as possible and leave your arms long and relaxed like ropes, to ensure that your legs, hips and back are creating the power in the throw. These should also be done near a wall so you can gauge your throw’s height and progress.

My own background as a shot putter has had a huge influence on my success as a powerlifter and strongman…

One of my favorite athlete’s I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with is Ray Holley. Ray and I began working together during his 2^nd year at Orange Coast College after a season in which Ray rewrote the school’s rushing record books. Still without a major scholarship offer though, Ray came to me to prepare for the unknown. The day Ray received his scholarship offer to Louisiana Tech University is still one of my favorite moments in this field. He was literally sprinting around the gym, screaming and crying with joy, after receiving the call.

Check out this interview with Ray after his great Pro Day performance…