Last week I introduced the DRIP method - Dose, Response, Intervention, and Profiling.
We reviewed the Dose & response specifically. Today we move on with intervention and profiling.
If you missed last week’s email, catch up here. Otherwise, let’s dive in…
Intervention
“What stimulus do we need to do based on the response to the dosage?”
Based on the athlete’s response, what do they need next?
As you can see in the diagram below, the first intervention is always recovery:
We’re always going to need recovery, it’s the most important part of the puzzle.
Recovery could be nutrition, cold/hot, or some sort of tech/tool like Firefly for example.
The reason recovery is always first is because there will always be training stress.
Second, is strength.
We’re always going to have strength in our program.
It could be isometric, weight room, or something reactive, but we’ll always have strength.
Finally, the last thing is movement.
Does the athlete need more speed exposure? Less speed exposure?
Do they need decel exposure?
We’ve got to understand these things.
Circling back to recovery, we can get super individual here. I talked about the external loads last week, the diagram below shows good recovery methods based on each stressor:
For metabolic, general volume, it does really good with heat therapy.
If I have a lot of mechanical stress (start/stop, accel/decel), cold helps along with soft tissue.
And then finally for neuro-muscular, sleep is going to be the best thing.
Obviously, it goes a lot deeper than this. We could talk nutrition, diets, etc but these are the general principles I’ve seen be effective.
Finally, to put a bow on intervention, I think of this formula:
Right Dosage + Right Intervention = Adaptation
Look at the example below of force plate jumps throughout the entire season for a team of 120 athletes:
This is from when I was working with Arizona.
They got better throughout the season. Their jumps were higher at the end of the season, which isn’t typical.
Right dosage, right intervention, better adaptation.
Profiling
“What are each athlete’s strengths and weaknesses?”
That’s really the question we’re trying to answer. And if you remember a few weeks ago when I talked about the things that will always be true about sprinting, they apply to profiling.
The cool thing is that we can get a pretty solid profile from a single run.
So profiling takes those things that are true about sprinting, and it gives a framework to start to look at and assess these things, and eventually improve these things.
So here’s my profiling framework:
On the speed side, I need to know how the athlete accelerates. How they reach their top speed.
Second, I need to know what type of risk the athlete’s under.
Third, is there anything technical we need to adjust? And this one is the least important.
And then if you continue looking at the diagram, there are 3 things that are true:
1. We need to create big force
So we’re going to have some sort of power profiling and force profiling.
2. We need to produce force fast
We need to produce force in very short time frames. Power lifters for example can produce a lot of force, but they can’t produce it fast. They don’t have impulse.
They have force, without the time part. So that’s impulse.
They also don’t have stiffness on contact. And that’s something that’s very specific to running.
I get questions all the time about how sprinting can affect all these things, and really I think it creates strength in ranges you wouldn’t normally create.
You can’t get the ranges you do from sprinting in the weight room. Nothing has more impulse than sprinting. High force, short time.
So stiffness is a huge factor.
There’s also a huge isometric component to running fast. When my foot’s on the ground and I hit down, I have to maintain that position as my hip crosses over, which is isometric strength.
3. We need a big range
This is at both the hip and the ankle. You don’t necessarily have to have flexibility in the ankle, but you do have to be able to create a range in the ankle to be dorsiflexed through contact.
So those are the things we need profiling to help us uncover, now here are the tests we use to get those:
I could write another email on each of these, but most of them are pretty simple and really don’t take much time at all.
From these tests, the DRIP continues. Programming begins. To simplify programming, I have rules.
If an athlete can’t produce force vertically, get in the weight room. If they don’t have ankle, knee, and hip force -> Isos.
Not reactive? Do more plyos.
The system is in place to make it as simple as possible to apply no matter the setting.
And that’s the point.
It’s my way of contextualizing speed.
It’s not just how fast we run or how to make people faster, the goal is that it’s the whole picture.
And it can be applied at any level.
So let’s say I’m talking to a high school coach, I have to talk in this framework.
He’s asking me about speed training - I’m asking him about his practice.
He’s asking me how guys can get faster - I’m asking him what he did after the game.
He’s asking me what the workout looks like on Wednesday - I’m asking how guys are responding from Monday’s practice.
No matter the level, it’s all in this framework.
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If you want more resources or information on the profiling aspect of things, I have an entire course on acceleration profiling, Art of Acceleration.
There’s also a bunch of videos on my YouTube channel.
But I hope learning the DRIP method gives you a clearer picture on the simplicity of Speed training.
Try it out, apply it in your setting, then let me know what you think.
LET’S BUILD.