How to Align Your Strength and Speed Work

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of acceleration as it pertains to speed development, acceleration as a tool for hamstring recovery, and acceleration as a means for developing strength potential. 

One of the most important concepts in true speed development is marrying what happens in the weightroom with what is happening on the field. Time and time again I see this as the determining factor in a successful or unsuccessful training program. 

As sports performance coaches, our job is to induce and reduce stress for desired outcomes within training. As we know, there are some many stressors (both physiological and psychological) that can affect a given training session. The lowest hanging fruit to mitigate unwarranted fatigue is picking exercises that compliment what is happening for a speed and external playing standpoint. 

The easiest way to understand how to categorize exercises is to compartmentalize the sprint in different stages of development based on what is happening both kinematically and kinetically. In a linear sprint for the given distance of 0 to 40/50 yards you have 4 components: 

Phase 1: The Start | 0-3 Steps 

Phase 2: Acceleration 5-15 yards (Acceleration Accumulation) 

Phase 3: Attaining Velocity (Power Intensification) | 15-25 yards 

Phase 4: Max Velocity ( Absolute Speed) | 25-40 yards 

Each Phase of the Sprint the kinematic motion of one’s body in space will dictate how much ground contact and force is generated into the ground. Longer ground contacts are associated with more force production, Weywand et all 2000. This is more net peak horizontal force. 

Through our extensive data, we’ve found that athlete’s who can accelerate faster and generate more force often have higher max peak velocities. This requires a tremendous amount of torque, timing, and coiling. In the weightroom, you are training stance, swing, load, and propulsion. How you choose your exercises should be predicated on the kinematic position of the sprint based on phase. 

Horizontal force is the number one contributor to faster sprinting speed, Hunter et al, 2005. What is the most powerful lever (fulcrum) during sprinting? The hip. How can we train the hip in alignment with producing horizontal force? 

Zweriful, 2017 showed anterior posterior exercises (hip thrusts + supine variations) involved greater forces closer to hip extension while axial loaded (squats) tend to produce greater forces in higher degrees of hip flexor use. At VH, with thousands of times recorded, we’ve found a continuous improvement in times in acceleration when sagittal supine hip dominant exercises were used as our primary movements during acceleration to help strengthen the hip as it is used as a primary lever. 

Take this with a grain of salt when programming for true linear speed development.