Ever since I’ve been in the strength and conditioning/physical preparation field, I’ve had people come to me with the goal of getting faster.

As we all know, in the sports world, speed kills.

One of the most common things you hear when an athlete moves to the next level (i.e. high school to college, college to pros) is how much faster the game is.

So it’s not uncommon to have parents call IFAST with the singular goal of getting their child faster.

But the funny thing is, they don’t want anything else.

No strength training.

No mobility work.

Just one hour of speed and agility training, please!

Part of the issue here is the facilities that promote this kind of nonsense.

I’m sorry, but if you’re doing “speed and agility work” for an hour or more, it’s no longer fast and explosive.

It’s conditioning, and it’s making you slower as a result!

But what many people don’t understand is that speed and/or agility work is like the icing on the cake.

So the simple question becomes:

How do you help an athlete get fast?

In my Performance Pyramid (which I’ve adapted from both Al Vermeil and Robbie Bourke), you can see that speed is at the top of the food chain.

Does that mean that you don’t train speed or agility until you’ve mastered all of the elements below it?

Absolutely not.

But what you must understand is that speed is directly influenced by all of the factors below it.

I’m going to cover all of this in-depth at the Elite Athletic Development 2.0 seminar, but let’s focus on a few basic areas that will greatly affect how fast or agile an athlete is.

Movement Quality

One of the easiest fixes to help someone get faster is to improve their movement quality.

We’ve seen this time and again in our gym. You simply get someone to breathe more effectively, and that repositions their core and allows a better transfer of force throughout the kinetic chain.

If you can get someone’s pelvis in a better position, now they can internally rotate their hips the right way.

And if you can internally rotate your hips, you can load your hips to explode in and out of cuts.

But this is just one simple example. It could be teaching them to extend at their hips versus their lower back.

It could be showing them how to shut off some of that extra tone they’re carrying around. Because what many fail to realize is that the fastest athletes in the world not only turn muscles on quickly, but they can relax and shut them off quickly as well.

It’s not uncommon for many of our athletes to get much faster in 6-8 weeks of training with us, simply because we respect the value and importance of movement quality.

Body Composition

Body composition is another huge factor. We will talk more about general/max/relative strength here in a minute, but body composition is critical if we want to be as fast and explosive as possible.

Quite simply, extra fat mass is going to slow you down.

My friend Dave Tate loves to say “you can’t flex bone.”

Well, you can’t contract fat either!

Typically if someone has excessive body fat, they actually need to work on areas even lower on the pyramid. In fact, training is often one of the last things we will actually talk about.

Instead, we start by doing a diet history to see what they’re putting in their mouth every day. You might just be shocked at what some of your athlete’s consider “fuel!”

Second, we’re going to dive in and look at recovery, with sleep being the cornerstone there.

How much are they sleeping?

What is the depth, or quality, of their sleep?

And most importantly, do they wake up feeling rested and refreshed?

As you can see, there’s a lot more to it than simply blow-torching body fat with the awesomest training program on the planet.

Instead, we often have to dig much deeper to kick start the fat burning process, and get body composition to acceptable levels so that speed potential can be realized.

General/Max Strength

Once body fat is at an acceptable level, it’s time to put a premium on strength.

While many athletes are focused on maximal strength, the more appropriate term is probably relative strength.

In other words, how strong are you relative to your own body weight?

Every sport, position and individual athlete probably has an ideal playing weight – that weight where they can balance all of the critical factors that make them successful in sport (speed, strength, power, conditioning, etc.).

And even if they don’t have an ideal weight or number, they have an acceptable range that they operate in.

The goal in most cases is to get stronger without a huge increase in body mass. When you get an athlete stronger relative to their body weight, they’ll immediately have a better foundation to demonstrate speed.

I’m not the first one to talk about this, but strength has a spillover effect. Quite simply, the stronger you get, the more potential you have to demonstrate speed or power.

Developing a strength base is another one of those magical times in an athletes career. All of a sudden you see an athlete who is rapidly getting faster, stronger and more powerful than ever before.

And the really cool thing about this is the confidence that comes with it. All of a sudden this athlete is carrying themselves in a whole new manner.

But while strength is definitely a huge player, it’s not the end-game.

Explosive & Elastic Strength

Remember what I said above?

About how strength can give you the potential to demonstrate speed or power?

Strength training alone can definitely make you faster and more powerful.

Up to a point.

At some point, if you just keep trying to push heavier and heavier weights, it’s going to work against you.

At some point, you have to take all of that potential and convert it into speed and power.

In other words, you have to start training explosively!

What we’re chasing here isn’t just a bigger muscle, or even still, a bigger squat, bench press or deadlift.

What we’re actually chasing is rate of force development, or the ability of the nervous system to express itself as quickly as possible.

Once you’ve started to teach the nervous system to be explosive, now it’s time for the specific element of training.

And Now, Finally, Speed

It may seem like it took forever to get here, but I hope that helps illustrate my point:

Being fast and explosive depends on a lot of things – not simply training speed!

At this point in time, you’ve built all of the constituent parts of a fast and explosive athlete.

In other words, they are primed to be as fast, explosive and efficient as possible. So all you have to do is know what to coach, and how to coach it, and you’ll be on your way to building some freakish athletes.

If you’re serious about helping your athletes get as fast as possible, I can’t recommend the work of Lee Taft enough.

He’s been much like a mentor to me over the years, and his new Complete Speed Training product covers everything from acceleration work, to top-end speed, and even multi-directional speed and agility.

Quite simply, it’s the best product on the market of it’s kind, and it’s a must-have resource in your collection.

Check it out ASAP!

Summary

As you can see, getting faster isn’t as simple as busting out a couple of agility ladder or cone drills.

They’re are tons of constituent parts that help make an athlete faster or more explosive, and the actual training of speed is just one component.

But if you have a training philosophy and build the right kind of foundation, it’s amazing the success you and your athletes can have when it comes to speed and agility training.

All the best
MR

P.S. – Lee’s new Complete Speed Product is on sale through this Friday for $100 off. Lee has been a mentor to me for years, and I can’t recommend his work highly enough.

If you want to take your speed and agility skills to the next level, definitely check it out!

(Lead Photo courtesy of Mark Sadowski)