In-season speed.
It’s a topic that I’m seeing a lot lately, especially with Football starting up again.
It used to be something more people avoided, and still is in some places, but I’m happy to see more discussion and emphasis getting placed on it.
Truly it is not only a huge opportunity to keep your athletes playing fast during the season, but also a way to help mitigate injuries.
That’s why today I’ll be sharing a few key points on in-season speed as well as what I’d consider the most important thing to look at when training speed throughout the season.
Let’s dive in…
Sportsmith Round Table Discussion
First, in case you missed it the Universal Speed Rating recently partnered with Sportsmith as an official educational partner.
I’ve loved Sportsmith and the material they produce for a long time, so it’s awesome to be officially partnered with them.
We launched the partnership by hosting a discussion on In-Season speed with Rob Pacey, Kyle Bolton and I. Kyle is killing it at Oregon right now, so getting to talk with him about the ways he’s thinking about training this season was huge.
You can catch the full recording here if you missed it, or keep reading to hear some of my highlights.
Takeaways from In-Season Speed Discussion
First, I was asked by Rob how to manage in-season speed when working in teams or group settings.
There are 2 main things I think about when it comes to in-season speed at the group level:
When I’m talking about dosage, the first thing I think is really important to understand is that your real speed coach is actually your head coach.
Because he or she is the one managing and monitoring most of what happens.
Around 80% of the work the athletes are doing happen to be practice.
And in practice, if you think about playing fast and running fast, beating teams by being faster, it's not just straight-line sprinting.
There's accelerating, there's decelerating, there's running at high speeds, there's running at very, very, very high speeds. There's running at high speed, change of direction.
All these different components make up what we call speed.
So understanding your day and your week and your micro cycle and figuring out “what days do we want to push which category” is super important.
For example, there might be a day that's heavier on the accel/decel. It's a short area, could be a red zone day. It could be a day where you're running more in football. In rugby or soccer, it will be small-sided games.
There could be a day where it's a high-speed day where there are big open spaces, with fewer people involved in there so there's more room to run.
You could have a more extensive day with big open spaces, probably more people involved in there, and longer duration.
But remember that your main speed coach is your head coach. So understanding how you can manipulate, talk to your coach and adjust things there would be the first thing.
Second, would be the response.
And if you’ve been following along for a while you’ve probably heard me talk about this before because it’s ingrained in my brain, but how do your athletes respond to the work that you gave them?
This is super important!
If you gave them a high-speed stimulus in practice, how do they typically respond to that work? Is practice fast enough? Did they reach 90, or 95% velocity?
Maybe we need to add more.
And in a group setting, the hard part isn’t getting people to reach 90% right? That part is easy.
The hard part is the dosage and response part of it - I think these two things are super important.
As a performance coach, my role is to assist the head coach by filling in those buckets or gaps that might be missing while understanding how athletes might have a physiological reaction to that style of training.
During the round table I talk about a lot more like the interventions, as well as filling in the gaps of what athletes are not getting at practice, so be sure to check out the recording to hear the rest.
Biggest Mistake I’ve Made Training Speed In Season
This was another question I was asked during the discussion.
I think early on a mistake I made was looking at it from the perspective that in-season is a time to pull back on training, or just coast now that the hard offseaosn is over.
In reality, In-season is a massive opportunity for training.
I think what happens is teams will pull back too much. So by the time they get to playoffs they’ll think that they’re just “tired” but in reality, they’ve detrained a lot of the qualities that should have been training throughout the season.
And there’s obviously a ton that goes into that, managing the ebbs and flows of your schedule, locking in the dosage and responses as I touched on earlier, but this is kind of the point of this whole discussion.
In-season speed is important, and if you’re not hitting the qualities each and every week at the right dosages, your athletes will get slower, performance could drop, or they could get hurt.
That leads me to my answer to the final question I was left with…
What’s the Most Important Thing to Prioritize for In Season Speed Training?
The answer is exposure.
Just make sure you’re hitting the bucket.
Whatever your main bucket is, 90%, 95%, etc, make sure you’re filling this at least once a week.
That’s the main rule of in-season speed training.
LET'S BUILD.