Tony Holler is a track and field coach and a football and basketball physical trainer. He works at Plainfield North High School. He is also a member of the Illinois Track & Field Hall of Fame and co-director of the Track Football Consortium with Chris Korfist. Tony Holler is the author of the “Feed the Cats” training method. In this post we´re going to talk a little bit about speed reserve and sprint capacity, two things that you need to be equipped.

First of all there is the speed reserve. If you’re training at 100 miles per hour, 80 feels comfortable. We realize that nobody is truly playing football at their absolute top speed. They’re playing at maybe 90%, maybe 85%, who knows. The idea is that the higher your ceiling, the higher your floor will be. Even at a comfortable pace you will still be faster than your opponent if you can get your top speed.

Training at 60 miles per hour is the traditional approach: lots of conditioning, lots of toughness, lots of slogans in the locker room… If you’re training at 60 miles per hour, which is still looks like very high effort, it’s just continuous motion high effort which means it’s slow. Then 80 miles per hour might be out of the question. You might not be able to hit 80 miles per hour or when you try to do it, you’ll cramp up in the first game or maybe in the second game. You’ll get tired fast. You’ll drop passes because you’re not used to running at that speed. So speed reserve is the whole idea that the faster your max speed is, the faster your submax.

Speed reserve

• If you train at 100 mph, 80 mph feels confortable.
• If you train at 60 mph, 80 mph will wear you at.

Speed creates endurance. Endurance negates speed.

These silhouettes look like a cross country team or something. There’s a lot of cross country coaches say that all football players should run cross country now. But running cross country will not improve a football player´s speed. Running cross country is a lot better idea than going home after school every day. There’s nothing wrong with it and you know maybe it will be something that changes their life and they’ll run marathons at the age of 60 and all that kind of stuff. But we cannot pretend that this type of running creates the mechanics or the central nervous system needed to be a great football player. So we say that speed creates endurance but endurance negates speed. What we mean here is that if you can run 22 miles an hour, you can be tired in the fourth quarter and run 20 miles per hour. Once again, that is speed reserve. If you can run 22 miles an hour, you’re really fast, you’re still really fast in the fourth quarter because your ceiling is so high. Whereas if you are constantly neglecting speed and power and elasticity in your workouts, and you are constantly training in a state of fatigue which is traditional, that actually negates speed. So if you possibly could have been a 22 miles per hour guy, but you’ve never trained to do it, maybe you’re a 21 mph guy who’s tired, so he’s really like a 19 miles per hour guy. That guy is just not he’s slow. That’s all there is to it.

Speed creates endurance. Endurance negates speed.

Why slow players have more trouble with fatigue? When you are fast and you learn sprint mechanics, you are elastic. Remember “elastic” means like a rubber band. By the way, a stretch rubber band doesn’t shoot very far. A tired rubber band doesn’t shoot very far, so you want to stay fresh. So if you think about the best runners, a guy that wins a race seldom does that guy look tired. He’s probably not because he’s so efficient, he’s not using much energy. He’s so elastic that his ATP molecules and his muscles are not being used very much. It’s unfair. And the person who gets last, he’s huffing and puffing because he’s like pushing and straining and use those muscles that he built in the weight room. Coach Tony Holler thinks that slow guys get tired. So we want fast guys all the time. If we really want fast guys, we need to stop being tired. Aerobic running fucks up mechanics, confuses the CNS and kills cats.

Aerobic running fucks up mechanics, confuses the CNS, and kills cats.

It’s not just the wide receivers we’re talking about here that we want to make our offensive tackles more cat like. We want our linebackers to be more cat like. By the way, linebackers in the NFL right now are faster than running backs. Think about that for a second. They are faster than running backs. The only running back taken in the first round was a guy from LS went to the Chiefs and he’s slow. He’s like a stumpy slow guy with good hands. He’s a great blocker. He’s an additional blocker and a release guy in the passing game, whereas there are many linebackers who were like nearly state champions in the 100 meters. So we need to really train all of our athletes as cats and if we don’t, they’re just going to have strides like these pitiful distance runners.

Remember endurance never creates speed. Coach Tony Holler sees people like at schools doing workouts all the time when he´s doing speed training with some kid, and he’ll see people working their ass off and he’ll just shake his head like: “OK. You’re working your ass off but you’re getting slower.” He means like: “What sport are you in where you want to run 100 stadium stairs? What sport is that going to do?” He probably has some conditioning test that he’straining for which. By the way, how crazy is that you condition all summer to pass a conditioning test that does not reflect football type of skills? Just think about that. It’s absolutely crazy.

Endurance never creates speed.

Speed creates sprint capacity. Sprint capacity does not improve speed. Sprint capacity is your ability to run fast, let’s say 50 times for example. If you can run 22 miles an hour, you can run 19 miles an hour 50 times. So speed creates sprint capacity because you can submax it and feel pretty good about it. But let’s say you get it backwards as a coach. Let’s say you’re training your guys to run 50 sprints all summer. Well, that doesn’t improve speed because you’re at submax all summer. You’ve got to be at max all summer to improve your speed. So it’s always been 100% wrong that we put sprint capacity ahead of absolute sprint ability. So before we start trying to get a guy to run 50 sprints at 19 miles an hour, we want to get that guy to go 22 miles an hour, so he can do that. The idea that we’re gonna take somebody that runs 18 miles an hour and train him by doing 50 sprints every day is a shoot. We’re gonna coach him all the way down to 16 miles per hour or get him hurt.

Speed creates sprint capacity. Sprint capacity does not improve speed.

“Sprint as fast as possible, as often as possible, staying as fresh as possible.”

“Rest, recovery, sleep.”

“Tired is the enemy, not the goal.”

“Do less, achieve more.”

“Never let today ruin tomorrow. Never burn the steak.”

“You don´t plant beans and grow corn.”

“Speed grows like a tree.”

“Speed is the tide that lifts all boats.”

“Speed is the best barometer of health.”

Tony Holler

“In speed development, the nervous system only understands quality.”

Boo Schexnayder

“Always choose quality over quantity.
This rule applies to every life situation.”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

“The quickest way to destroy fast twitch muscle fibers
is to bathe them in lactic acid for prolonged periods of time.”

Kelly Baggett

Bibliographic references:

• Holler T. [Coach Tony Holler]. (2023). Creating Speed Reserve and Sprint Capacity (Sprint-Based Football) [Video]. Recovered from https://youtu.be/HtJ_cd_kHrw?si=Rr6EPoq17yjfsjIq