When I first opened my facility over a decade ago, I had a real nice setup.  I had these two Olympic lifting platforms with awesome bumper plates and real slick bars.  I had two racks that were sturdy as heck and loaded with weights.  I was ready to work some athletes out.

What happened was no one trained on them.  We had very few athletes that were coming to us for strength training.  Just the speed work.

Why?

For several reasons.  We had younger kids that probably weren’t ready for “big boy” lifting.  We had athletes that were doing workouts at their schools.  I’m not saying they were great workouts, but they were dangerous enough that I had to be careful I wasn’t overlapping exercises.

And we also had athletes who played sports that traditionally didn’t lift weights.  Soccer, field hockey, track, etc.  These athletes did not want to lift.  Eventually, I decided not to promote strength training and the only lifting we would do would be for legs and core at the end of a workout.  Something simple, but effective.

Recently, I’ve changed my stance on this and now am promoting total body strength add-ons to my athletes.  Specifically to all high school athletes other than football.  Because at most high schools, the football team is always in the weight room utilizing some program that someone found that is supposed to be top notch.

The other sports usually do not.  If they get into the weight room, they are usually put on some generic program that never changes.  Basically, a list of exercises with sets and reps and you do that routine EVERY SINGLE WORKOUT.

I’ve been a speed and strength coach for almost 20 years now.  Almost.  I’ve got connections to some of the best strength coaches in the country.  So, I’ve been known to put together a pretty mean strength training program.

Here was my working theory (like I needed a theory, but it’s always nice to have proof).

We had three female track athletes start training with us in August.  Since track wasn’t starting up in awhile, there was no point working on speed mechanics and training just yet.  So all we did for the first three months of their program was strength train.

My theory was the improved strength would get them faster anyways and lay a good foundation to developing speed when we started doing the speed work.

That is exactly what happened.  One girl was playing soccer at the time, one was running cross country, and the other was doing no sport.  All we had them do was a strength training program we designed.  No mechanical corrections, no plyometrics, no acceleration work, no speed work of any kind.

And you know what happened….they all got faster and more explosive.

These athletes strength trained with us 2-3 times a week.  We incorporated Olympic lifts, squats, lunges, push/pull lifts, posterior leg work, and core work.

Here were the average improvements:

  • 10 Yard Dash – .13 improvement
  • 20 Yard Dash – .17 improvement
  • Vertical Jump – 1.7″ improvement
  • Broad Jump – 5.3″ improvement

One of the athletes set two speed records for her age group.  AND WE DID NO TRADITIONAL SPEED WORK WITH HER AND SHE STILL SET THOSE RECORDS!!

Bottom line: to make a faster runner you need to be a stronger runner and we will do that by any means necessary – weights, plyos, resistance runs.

A combination of all that though will really benefit your athlete.  So, if you have a high school athlete that doesn’t play football and wants to work with us to get faster, be prepared for us to say, “not only do we need to do our normal speed training, but what will really help is the total body strength add-on.”  The proof is in the results above.

 Photo courtesy of Carlos Varela on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/c32/