When you are a speed coach, you get athletes from all different sports trying to run faster.  It isn’t just linear speed that needs improved, but also lateral speed.  This becomes important when you are planning out your training for this athlete.

For example, if I’m working with a track athlete and a soccer athlete, my linear development might be similar for those two athletes.  But, when it comes to lateral training, I’m not doing any with the track athlete because all he/she is doing is running around in a circle.  The soccer athlete will be incorporating a decent amount of lateral speed development for obvious reasons.

The tried and true way to improve lateral speed.

You will see a lot of speed programs that utilize all sorts of drills to try and improve lateral quickness.  Whether it be the use of step hurdles, agility ladders, or cone drills, you could spend hours on the amount of drills that are available for one to use.

In fact, I’ve seen that happen.  In a 30 minute session, the speed coach will immediately pull out the agility ladder right after the warm-up.  Then they bust through rep after rep of ladder drills.

“Alright, let’s do a backwards icky shuffle.”  “Great, now let’s do a cartwheel through the ladder.” “Awesome!”

Don’t get me wrong, I do find some use with the agility ladder, but I don’t think it is the end all be all to developing lateral speed.  In fact, I think developing lateral speed can be as simplistic as developing linear speed.

The nuts and bolts to improving any type of speed.

If you have read any of my blog posts about speed improvement, speed can be developed with two things: running mechanics and strength gains.  That is very simple, but that is what it boils down to.  Whether it is linear or lateral speed improvement, that is the recipe.

Once those two items are addressed, then you can start throwing in some of the sport specific speed/quickness development.  That would probably include ladders or step hurdles to improve that lateral quickness.  It does no good to do those ladder drills if your faulty mechanics are still slowing you down.

Get that core and leg strength improved so that your body can maintain the proper positioning it needs to do those agility drills efficiently and correctly.  If you aren’t correcting that and your mechanics, you might improve your speed a little bit just because you’re reinforcing movement patterns, but it isn’t anything like what it could be.

Improve your lateral speed by doing nothing at all.

Here is my secret for improving lateral speed and quickness: I don’t spend that much time on it.  For me, linear speed is tougher to develop so I spend much of my time doing that.  I improve the mechanics and leg strength to the point where it is almost second nature for them to run efficiently.  I sprinkle in some agility/foot quickness drills and PRESTO, quicker lateral speed.

Here is a good example.  One of our athletes that just finished up our program was wanting to improve his speed for track, but he also played football.  So, for his pre-test we did a T-Test (one of our agility drills testing lateral quickness, forward/backward movement).  During his program we didn’t do any lateral training, no cone drills, nothing that was for lateral movement.  It was all straight ahead development.

When we post tested him, he improved his T-Test from an 8.12 to a 7.37.  We didn’t do the T-Test in our sessions and we did no lateral training.  He basically improved because his running mechanics improved and his strength and power were optimized.  Now, if we were to do some lateral training we would probably make sure his good running mechanics were carrying over properly, but we’ll wait until he’s training for football.

A .75 second improvement on an agility drill for lateral speed doing no lateral drills during his training sessions.  I only have so much time to spend with my athletes.  So, based on what I just showed you, I’m not spending 20 minutes on agility ladders or step hurdles when my athletes can be better served doing other drills that will help their overall speed.  Try it sometime.  You’ll be impressed at how much more you can get in your training session when you are eliminating some non-essential drills.

Photo courtesy of ralphhogaboom on Flickr