Strength Training for Speed Development PT1 Exercise Selection and Adaptations for Athletic Speed Development
In traditional strength and conditioning, we use “strength training” as a blanket solution to cover up for our gap in understanding how the body was truly designed.
We use phrases of the like:
Strength improves neural intent
Strength increases sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar growth
Strength improves tissue quality and cross sectional area
Strength improves force development
Strength training improves our ability to “grind”
All of the above are true, but all of the above are relative to the needs and deficicines of the individual. Strength is a tool that is used to help an athlete or individual enhance their athletic qualities. Remember, health and performance are mutually exclusive. Unless your sport requires you to perform certain lifts for outcomes - your time might be best spent elsewhere.
To be truly fast, we need to have the core of our program based outside of the barbell lifts and properly training speed through maximal velocity acceleration and top end efforts.
So, before we can actually provide strength training regimens and programs,
How Do We DEFINE Strength as it Pertains to Sports Performance?
Getting strong is multifactorial. The weight room serves as GPP for any sport. Of course, certain strategies in the weightroom will elicit better performance in one’s respective sport.
The thing in the weight room, the biomechanical and neurological “transfer” is not very straightforward, and in many cases, the velocities at play in utilizing barbells are not even close to what is seen in sport. Why practice a movement that is 5-10 times slower than what you will actually do in sport, with an exaggerated, and often hyperextended, moment arm of the spine (axial barbell loading) and no factor of horizontal velocity, to enhance something dynamic like sprinting?
With that being said, we understand the force vector component may be missing, however, there are certainly MAJOR benefits to strength training that will help improve your speed and performance. Ultimately, strength as it pertains to sport is force potential.
Sprinters have greater muscle lengths in key movers. A longer muscle has a greater to shorten a high velocity than a short muscle. Training at length is the key for prime movers to be able to contract more efficiently in sprinting.
Traditional strength training can improve sarcomere length in untrained athletes but fails to do so in trained athletes. This increase in fascicle length in young athletes can be a contributing factor to rapid gains in performance along with improved muscle coordination, and neurological intent improvements.
A trained athlete will be able to display their force potential with greater technical abilities. Furthermore, where it can be misinterpreted as “not applicable” to sprinting this holds true if you don’t understand the reason. Basic exercises such as skips, marches, and the likes are all ways of developing coordination within the brain that help make harder cues and drills easier to understand. You wouldn’t have an athlete barbell free squat if they lack the technical ability to perform a bodyweight squat, a goblet squat, or squat to box.
Getting stronger happens on many levels in human physiology, and is not just expressed in one's ability to lift the most amount of weight from point A to point B. Being “strong” for athletic performance, in a truest sense, means that an athlete (or individual) is able to produce the right forces when needed in relation to their sporting skill.
This begs the palpable question, how strong is strong enough?
Although research and empirical experience have not clearly identified a range, we have some anecdotal evidence that has proved valuable.
The above image is based on the research of Suchomel et al 2016 & our integration of unilateral strength training with our athletes over the last year.