How do you train to play faster? And why is it important?
If athletes are improving by our standards but that’s not translating to results in their perspective sport, we may be training the wrong things.
I think we have an opportunity to change this and improve this so I’m going to share a few ideas how to do that below…
Not Just Drag Racers
First, I need to address what it means to play faster.
I heard a really cool analogy from John Griffin, the High Performance Director for the Atlanta Falcons.
Think about Drag Racers.
Lined up. Side by side. They accelerate super fast off the line, they’re skidding, they’re kicking up dust, and they’re flying. They’re going in a straight line super super fast.
I think a lot of us think of speed training in this view. That’s what we need to do to run faster and play faster.
And although that certainly plays a role the reality is that game speed is more like a James Bond movie…
Ever see a car chase in a James Bond movie? It can cut. It can stop. It can break. It’s going up and down stairs. It can turn really sharply, it can even do 360s.
And that’s the game. The game is random. The game is high speed in different directions, it’s changing speeds, decelerating, and accelerating. It won’t just be in a straight line.
The hard part is that our training doesn’t always reflect the ability that we need to build.
The things that we’re doing with our athletes in the off-season, in the winter, during Summer - those things should prepare us for these moments.
So when guys are going into Spring season and practice is going from 1 to 3 hours, they’re prepared. When their high speed yardage increase, and accelerations double, etc. did they do enough in the Winter period to prepare for that?
So I believe there has to be a system, a monitoring system, and a programming system that prepares for this. I call it the DRIP Method.
What is the DRIP Method?
Dose - How much did we do?
Response - How did we respond to that dosage?
Intervention - What is our intervention based on the dose and response relationship?
Profiling - How do we individualize and monitor this within the team setting?
My hypothesis is that this will optimize the on-field performance and this will lead to games that are won through athletes being prepared for the game and for the high-intensity moments of the game.
One reason that it’s so important to implement a system, is that throughout the year you’re fighting against time. Time is a significant limiting factor.
Looking at college football as an example - during the non-football periods, you may not have as much time. Athletes need to squeeze in the time on the field, in the weight room, etc.
Then enter the transfer portal and guys are coming in and they might be brand new to the program, mixed in with guys that have been there four years, five years.
There's there's less development time for those new guys that just came in.
So you've got this mixture of people and you have to figure out how to train through this period to not only be developmental for the guys, but also looking ahead at spring and fall camp which is where you start getting more time.
Today we’re going to take a closer look at dose and response, and next week we’ll dive deeper into interventions and profiling.
Dose
The main question I asked for Dose is:
“What did we just do?”
How many yards, how fast, how much? That’s our dose.
I think of does in 3 levels, and here’s a visual of them:
At the bottom is time/rep/plays.
Let’s say I’m talking to a coach who doesn’t have GPS, doesn’t have any external load monitoring - so I might just be asking him how long they practiced.
Or how many reps did your team get?
When I’m working with my guys in the NFL, It’s not always easy for me to get all of their data, so I can just ask how many reps they got. How many routes. How many plays.
Second, internal load.
Typically for internal load we’d be talking about heart rate, heart rate monitors, things like that. It’s a little less popular now, so you could just say internal load is self-reported RPE.
At the end of practice or a workout, one player could say it was a 3, another could say 6, and someone else could say 10. That’s internal load.
Third, external load.
This is typically GPS.
And GPS isn’t just used for speed, which is where I see a lot of people using it. Primarily we use GPS to see how much they do. We use it to see their dose.
If we measure a session just by high speed, if we try to understand how hard it was just from how high of a speed we hit, we’re off the mark.
You can run fast and feel fresh, that’s easy.
So we need other variables to tell us about our session.
This brings us back to the high-speed car example from above…
All the moving, tuning, and reacting from a game- that’s going to create stress.
Yes, running fast is a stressor, but so is everything else - contact, deceleration, acceleration, etc.
There’s a cost to everything that I’m doing.
If I take my car and step on the gas, slam on the brakes, step on the gas, slam on the brakes, the car isn’t lasting, I’m going to need to take it to the shop.
So that’s where we also have these external load categories:
1. Metabolic: How much we do.
This is general volume. It’s the knife. If we do enough of it, it’s going to chop you up. Probably not going to kill you, but it’s going to chop you up.
2. Mechanical Load: Acceleration, deceleration, starting and stopping.
There’s an effect. If I slam on the gas or brakes there’s an effect.
3. Neuromuscular: Sprint Distance
You could use GPS or check your metrics for this but you could also just think through it mentally.
If a wide receiver has 50 plays and 10 of them are go routes, high neuromuscular. Is he’s running all slants and comebacks, high mechanical. If they jog two miles, high metabolic.
Next is the response…
Response
“How did each athlete respond individually to the work completed?”
Important to remember here that it is individual.
Maybe an athlete got 2 hours of sleep the night before practice and thought the workout was hard, even if it was an easier workout. That’s still that athlete’s response.
Each athlete will respond differently.
There are 3 levels here as well:
1. Pre-existing individual factors
This could be genetic, injuries, etc.
2. Wellness/stress
How’d you feel, how did you sleep, what’s your mood/stress?
3. Physiological response
How does your body respond to that stress? This is objective.
Remember - responses to stress are individual. So athletes will respond differently based on age, training age, stressors, etc.
So the easiest way we can track this is CMJ - countermovement jumps. Why CMJ?
1. It’s easy.
2. It utilizes the entire stretch-sorting cycle - eccentric, isometric, and concentric.
3. It’s low-stress. It takes a few seconds and no one gets hurt doing it.
We use Output for CMJ, and have found it to be the easiest to use for these.
Next week, I’ll go deeper into the next two stages, intervention and profiling. Until then, think about your current setting wherever you’re training athletes.
Do you know your athlete’s doses? Are you monitoring their response?
Think about these things and next week we’ll keep going.
LET’S BUILD.
P.S. Want to join a community of coaches to help implement these systems with your athletes? Learn more about joining the Speed Lab Community.