Speed for Team Sports Coaching Clinic
A 3-hour workshop in July
I’m running a workshop for sports coaches next month to help them get their players faster. It will be jargon-free and coach-friendly. It will cover three main concepts of speed training that can be transferred/integrated into existing team sessions.
It is based on my lessons learned from some of the world’s best sprint coaches and my experiences transferring those lessons to athletes of all ages.
Coaches can book onto the course here.
Three basic tenets of speed training:
Posture.
“Good posture always wins.” Vince Anderson, Texas A&M sprint coach.
If one part of your body is slack or out of alignment, then the whole body works inefficiently. You can pedal on a bicycle with a wonky front wheel as hard as you like and get tired, but you will still be slower than if you had a straight front wheel.
The same applies to sprinting: are you wasting time shouting at players to run faster and watching them sweat buckets, only to find other teams run around you in matches?
Can you spot the difference in the photos above? It’s the same footballer, in the same session, but with improved posture on the left.
It sounds simple, but it is often ignored. Simple exercises can be done in the warm-up to help improve your players’ alignments.
Coordination.
The ability to run fast requires a highly coordinated action of power, skill and technique. To run faster, the front foot must drive down under the hip with extreme prejudice, and then recover immediately.
Less coordinated players overstride and take too long for their trailing leg to recover.
Those with better technique also reduce their chance of injury, such as hamstring strains and ACL ruptures.
Young players, with little ‘free-play’ or ‘playground’ experience, need an opportunity to develop this coordination.
Application. To run fast, you have to practise running faster. It sounds simple, but so many coaches encourage their players to run slower by putting slow runs into their sessions.
The drills I use are more conducive to your sport than mindless jogging. Players like running fast. Every player can get faster: they might not become the fastest, but they can get faster.
Imagine if every player in your team improved their speed by 5%?
Imagine if, with improved technique, they reduced their chances of non-contact injuries?
Coaches can book onto the course here.