I feel I need to help some of you out. There is a mentality out there that you have to push it to the limit to see any results. If you aren’t crawling out of a workout or puking your guts out, then you might not have worked hard enough. Thus, you might not get stronger or faster.

When we meet with parents, occasionally we will hear phrases like, “You have my permission to kick his butt harder.” Or, “I don’t think he was sweating enough during the session today.”

I know some of those phrases are meant with a little sense of sarcasm, but in some cases I know there is some truth behind those phrases.

I want to put a STOP to this right now and clear the air on what exactly we are trying to accomplish with our training.

Speed training is not conditioning.

End of story.

There is a different way we want to speed train an athlete and it is not the same way we would “condition” an athlete.

The sooner you get this through your head, the sooner you will understand how we will go about accomplishing what we need to accomplish to get your athlete faster. In simplistic terms, I want your athlete working hard, but I am certainly not trying to crush your athlete at each and every session.

I’ve had parents pull me aside suggesting that their son/daughter can handle more. Feel free to push him/her. And I think because of this line of thinking we have lost clients. Despite the fact that their athlete has IMPROVED their speed immensely.

I can’t confirm this, but even though their son/daughter improved their speed by leaps and bounds, I think they are thinking if we had pushed them harder they could have improved that much more. Which is pure ignorance.

To develop SPEED (not conditioning) more, we have to allow proper rest time inbetween repetitions of drills. If we do not do that, then the athlete gets tired and it is harder for him/her to put themselves in the proper mechanical positioning they need to be in to run faster. Basically, once that point is hit, we need to move on to a different component of training and not continue to reinforce faulty mechanics.

Do you realize that top level sprinters who are working on short burst top end speed acceleration for 30-50M could rest up to 5 minutes or longer inbetween runs? That is how long it takes the body to recuperate before another maximum effort can be properly executed.

Now for most sports, we are looking for a maximum repeated effort over the course of a game, but during our training the same type of logic comes into play. We look for max effort with good mechanics. Allow an appropriate rest (maybe doing another drill in between that won’t tax that same energy system), then see if we can get another max effort for the next rep.

Once that starts to break down, we move on to something else. This has been our philosophy for a long time and has helped many, many athletes get faster.

So don’t confuse conditioning with speed development. If you need “extra” conditioning, that can be discussed with us and if we can work it in we will let you know. But understand our primary goal is and always will be improving speed, quickness, and explosiveness.

Your athlete should feel like they had a good workout. They should feel fatigued.  But, our goal is NEVER, I repeat NEVER, to try and see how fast your athlete will run to the bathroom to puke. That is not how we develop speed in our athletes.

As long as you are cool with that and let us do our thing, we’ll be happy to work with you.

Photo courtesy of Luke Ma on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lukema/