MAKE SPEED A PRIORITY IN YOUR SPORT

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Hugo Noya Enríquez

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, you’ll learn how to make speed the priority number one in your program.

One of the first things coach Tony Holler thinks is that it’s always important to review the whole idea about what is the mission of “Feed the Cats”.

Mission statement of “Feed the Cats”:

  • Speed is the tide that lifts all boats.
  • Rest, recovery, sleep. (Foundation of high performance).
  • Record, rank, publish.
  • Tired is the enemy, not the goal. (Racehorses, not workhorses).
  • Never let today ruin tomorrow. (Never burn the steak).
  • 100% healthy, 80% in shape. Not the other way around.
  • Perform in practice. (Moderate exercise never leads to high performance).
  • Let the game be the hardest thing you do.
  • Kids are good at what they like, great at what they love.
  • Make practice the best part of a kid´s day.

CULTURE

Culture is kind of a weird subject because a lot of people that consider themselves big on culture are just people that have a lot of rules, or they do some fun things like a scavenger hunt, or they visit the sick, or they read books to first graders or something, and they call that culture.

First of all, Tony Holler´s team rules. They’re just one of them: “Show up every day for practice”.

Team rules

Show up every day for practice.

It’s important to understand that good families, good teams or good classrooms don’t have to be a police state. So what is culture for Tony Holler?

First, he got from Steve Jones that everybody has culture, either intentional or by default. Tony Holler used to think he didn’t have culture because he didn’t have a lot of rules, regulations and consequences. But he does have culture and he´s proud of the culture that we’ve developed. Basically we have high expectations and we teach those expectations. We don’t drive expectations by rules or by punishing kids. We teach expectations and he thinks that’s sometimes a forgotten thing. We’re teachers. And if you really have great culture, rules and consequences are pretty unnecessary. Now once in a while you might do something where a kid acts up and you send them home, but he doesn’t think you have to have a written rule for everything. He believes in leadership by example. He loves servant leadership. He thinks that anybody that wants to complain about leadership on their team probably needs to read “The Twin Thieves“ by Steve Jones. He thinks we always have to talk about a tradition of excellence. No matter how good your team’s been in the past. You still talk about the tradition of excellence and that’s the excellence in the culture, not necessarily the number of games you’ve won. He´s really big on the idea of being happy and healthy. By happy and healthy he doesn’t mean like a goofy fun, like it’s a birthday party happy. He´s talking about kids being mentally healthy and physically healthy. They just have a rule on their track team: “If you’re banged up, you don’t run.” Period. What that does is kids appreciate their health. They miss practice instead of like browbeating a kid about it: “Why you’re not practicing today?”, “You better practice”. Their kids want to practice and that’s part of their culture. They compete all the time. They compete more in practice than any track team he’s ever seen. If Tony Holler had a football team, it be the same way. It was that way when he coached football for 25 years. He thinks it’s really important that kids learn to win and lose in practice. That’s a learning experience. We don’t always get to win. If you don’t compete in practice, then your kids will only lose in games and then it’s like catastrophic. And Tony Holler is just such a teacher. He taught for 38 years and he’s coach for 43. He really believes in the high school experience where teachers are coaches and coaches are teachers. His dad was a teacher and his parents did not have a bunch of rules and consequences. They taught him how to act and they got madass when he didn’t act right and he learned from that. So Tony Holler thinks we all need to think about culture and what it means to us. 

Culture

  • Intentional or by default.
  • Expectations taught.
  • Rules and consequences unecessary.
  • Leadership by example.
  • Tradition of excellence.
  • Happy and healthy. No one runs broken.
  • Compete daily. Learn to win and lose.
  • Teach kids. We are educators.

WEIGHT ROOM

The weight room obviously is a part of training. Coach Tony Holler likes to say you need to:

  • Be general in the weight room. “General” means let’s work on pushes, pulls, squats and hinges. But there’s all kinds of variations of all those things and there’s absolutely no variation of any lift that will make you directly fast. There’s no lifts in the weight room that fast people do well and slow people do poorly. There is no way that you can pick your 4×1 team by watching them lift weights. 
  • Be extreme in speed training. What that means is we want to spike up and get timed. We want to be maximal in our effort. We don’t want to run, we want to sprint. Our goal is to sprint faster than we’ve ever sprinted before. Tony Holler is not a believer of intensity percentages and he really don’t like people who talk about it. You try to be loose and efficient and all those kinds of details because you want to be fast. So it may not be trying too hard (veins popping in your neck and all that kind of stuff) but we are really trying to run fast. 
  • Be specific in practice. Of course in basketball we shoot, and in baseball we throw and hit. But there are so many coaches that are not specific in practice. They do a lot of general bullshit and practice is when we get good at our craft, our sport. So away from our sport we create athletes.

So we have to be general in the weight room, extreme in speed training, and then in the sport we get better at our sport.

Be general in the weight room. Be extreme in speed training. Be specific in practice.

Coach Tony Holler has two big rules about the weight room:

  • Never let the weight room interfere with speed. That means if your leg day is Monday and guys are sore for 3 days, he doesn’t like you as a strength coach. You are interfering with speed. Why in the world wouldn’t you wait till the end of the week to destroy their legs? And why are you doing that anyway? If you are interfering with the pursuit of speed, you are making athletes less athletic. They are missing out on a great opportunity to learn how to move fast. 
  • Never let the weight room interfere with the sport in season. There are so many track coaches Tony Holler hears about where the football coach doesn’t care if they have a meet or not. He doesn’t care if the State meet is the next day. They’re going to do what they do in the weight room and to hell with track. Tony Holler doesn’t think that’s a good way to be with kids. That football coach is hurting the kid. It’s not just hurting the track team, it’s hurting the kid too.

So we need to work together and never let the weight room interfere with the sport or with the pursuit of speed.

Never allow the weight room to interfere with speed.

Never allow the weight room to interfere with the sport in season.

SPEED DAYS: 2-3 PER WEEK

We work on speed 2 or 3 times a week. That’s max. During the winter they go 2 times a week. They have 2 speed days and their athletes are at max velocity for less than 10 total seconds. Think about that: less than 10 total seconds of max velocity speed. That 10 seconds is the most important thing those kids will do all week. Not the weight room. It is so crazy microdosed that the return on investment with sprint training just blow your mind. We do not spend that much time sprinting but it’s still our priority.

ATOMIC SPEED WORKOUT

The atomic speed workout is the smallest possible workout that could possibly improve your speed. Its design is inspired by the ideas of the great book “Atomic Habits“ by James Clear. You can do this workout in 15 minutes and only take 60 seconds: 15 minutes of time and 60 seconds of work. You get out of the house twice a week and do the atomic speed workout. It’s small but it’s powerful.

So what we do in that workout is 10 speed drills, and then we run two sprints. That’s it. If you want to do coach Tony Holler´s full workout, then you do three sprints. If you want to do a fourth or fifth sprint, you can do it too. Tony Holler time with Freelap. We must take 5 minutes of a long rest time between timed sprints. But if you’re doing 10 speed drills in 10 minutes, and two timed sprints with 5 minutes rest, that’s 15 total minutes and that’s 60 seconds of work. So it’s a great way to form a habit and that’s what atomic habits is all about: starting small and developing a consistency.

Review of “ten in ten”

  1. Fast march
  2. A-skip
  3. High knees
  4. Box jumps
  5. Bounding
  6. Pogo jumps
  7. Short prime times
  8. Big prime times
  9. Bent knee prime times
  10. Accelerate to top speed

“Two in six”

Two 40 yard dashes separated by 5 minutes of rest

There’s a lot of football teams that have incorporated that into their warm-up or actually replace their long slow tiring prefatiguing work or warm up. They’re doing this instead which allows them to time sprints and the guys stay healthy and all that stuff. It’s really become a part of sprint based football.

X-FACTOR

Our speed workouts are fairly boring because we’re repetitive. Well, you know, you got to be repetitive shooting the basketball if you’re a basketball player, you got to be repetitive with throwing and hitting as a baseball player, you got to be repetitive in tackling, catching and passes in football. We have to repeat the things that are essential and sprinting is essential.

But we also must understand the other half of the coin. That is that we must learn how to adapt to new stimulus. That’s what we do with X-Factor. Originally when Tony Holler coined this phrase, he called workouts where athletes were going to do different types of exercises. We are going to stay extremely varied and that X really means unknown that the kids are going to come in, they don’t know what we’re going to do that day. They just know there going to be a lot of different types of things. But X also really sounds like the start of the word “exercise”. So these are days that we don’t sprint but we do exercises that we have a reasonable hunch will be good for getting fast.

We want to really minimal dose it because on almost every X-factor day we have a sprint day the next day. With X-factor drills we work on bounce, snap, power, big split and hardwiring.

JUMPS, BOUND AND SKIPS

These are skills that fast guys do pretty good. So we do a lot of these things.

  • Just jump mat. If you jump 10 times as high as you can, that’s a workout. So testing becomes training, and training becomes testing. Guys that jump 38 inches will probably be the fastest guy on your team. If that’s the case, then we need to get the guys that jump 24 jumping higher. That’s X-factor.
  • Pogo jumps or straight-legged jumps. We’re working on not just jumping and power, but also a bounce. Great players are bouncy. Bouncy players jump well and are fast. They’re good athletes.
  • Bounce. Bouncing over imaginary boxes. This is much more of a tuck jump where the knees come up to the chest. We’re jumping really high. This is much more of a power drill but we also want to get off the ground. We want to land and jump at the same time. The definition of a plyometric is landing and jumping at the same time.
  • Diagonal bound and stick. We stick the landing, learning this collision that happens between your lower body and the track. This collision is really important and it helps to create strength and stiffness in the sprinter. So we do a lot of force absorption type stuff like this. We also do straight line bound and stick where we go as high and as far as we can, and then we try to stick the landing and rebalance.
  • Bounding hands high. We bound and do funky things with our hands like putting them up above our head.
  • 6 bounds. We’re going to measure bounds. Anytime you can make training more game like by measuring something, it really helps.
  • 5 x single legged bound. People that bound in powerful ways are faster than guys that bound poorly.
  • Triple broad jump. We are going to two-footed and we’re going to roll through each one. If you get somebody that can triple broad jump 31´6″, they’re probably going to be an all state jumper. They’re probably fast. If you get a guy jumping further, he is getting faster and more explosive. So that’s why we do these drills.
  • Star drill. We jump up in the air and we look like we’re making a star. There’s force absorption here. There’s power. Even if this is a worthless exercise, if you do it a couple times a month, it’s probably not going to have a major detrimental effect. So we’re really free to try things.
  • Upward bounding. If you don’t have concrete stairs like an outdoor stadium, don’t do this. If you have sturdy stairs, there’s a lot of good things you can do. You don’t try to condition on those stairs. Use those stairs for the upward explosive stuff. 
  • Standing triple jump. It´s one of the most advanced things you can do. We jump off of two feet. We’re going to land left, then we’re going to land right, and finally we’re going to land on two. If you get a guy going 29 feet on a standing triple jump, he’s probably going to go 45 feet in the real triple jump with a big run in. Guys that go 45 feet in the triple jump are pretty good athletes. They found that so many wide receivers in football in the NFL had a triple jump or long jump background in track and field. Everybody knows they’re fast, but it seems to be almost more prevalent to see horizontal jumpers that really become great wide receivers.
  • Left-left-right-right skip races. We’re going to race making skip left-left and then right-right.

BOOMS

Booms are just a rhythm thing. It’s a high knee thing. It’s a snappy thing. We’re also working on that foot being in front of the body and the toe up, that dorsiflexed toe.

  • Boom boom booms.
  • Boom booms.
  • Booms (single). Just snapping on each leg, pausing, balance, working on our hands.
  • Boom boom boom skip skip.

WICKETS

We’re big on wickets. That’s what a sprinter looks like every time he goes over one of those wickets: he is big in the front and he´s short in the back. The angle of the thighs is pretty big. A big split of the thighs and it is tilted to the front of the body. Joggers don’t look like this. This is how sprinters look. Joggers look like they have T-rex arms. A sprinter’s hand goes past his hips. Wickets have a way of teaching kids how to run.

  • Wickets 6´and 6″. We sprint in 6 inch wickets that are 6 feet apart. They’re all equal distant: 6 in tall, 6 foot spaced.
  • Wickets down (full arms). The wickets are down. Guys will still go over these wickets like they were barriers, so we sprint in. Guys are standing way down 20 yards away. That’s where they start and they sprint in. Then they’ll go over these trying to be big in the front, which means that knee up in front of the body, the foot out in front of the body, the foot dorsiflexed and then, of course, we never want to be long in the back. We want to get from toe off to knee up as quickly as possible. The whole line goes through.
  • Wickets hands high.
  • Timed wickets. If you video and time stuff, guys will go pretty hard.
  • Competition of wickets 6´.
  • Competition wickets on turf 5´. We start the goal line with very short run in. So we keep the wickets at 5 feet.

HIP MOBILITY

  • Overs and unders.
  • Over-over.
  • Agressive over-over. It’s the same as the previous exercise, but we’re like in a hurry to get through the hurdle.
  • Lateral overs with rhythm. As high as we can in the front, as high as we can in the back. We grab a little ground as we swing through, and we go until we get tired.
  • Leg swings (fast and high). You rest long enough between reps to go hard on the next one.

BIG SPLIT DRILLS

These are drills where our legs split apart because sprinter legs split apart when they run.

  • Long lunge.
  • Snappy lunge. The ability to be elastic in something like this, where you can go from back leg to front leg in like a tight rubber band, is really important just for sprinting.
  • Isometric lunge. We do these for 30 seconds. There is some crazy co-contractions going on there.
  • Isometric leg foot. You´re up on your toe. We’re just trying to get up as high as we possibly can go. If you take off your shoes, it allows you to get up on your toes a little more. If guys aren’t strong enough to do this single leg, they go double leg. We usually go two fingers on the wall just to give us a little bit of support. We don’t want the whole hand on the wall. This is hard and we try to go 30 seconds on each foot.
  • Isometric leg feet in a squat position. We’re up on our toes. This is for that ankle and foot complex. If we got a lot of shaking going on there, that’s the body co-contracting.
  • Russian lunges. We bounce-bounce-bounce and switch. When Brad Fortney´s sprinters are doing Russian lunges before a sprint, he has found they sprint faster, which means these drills might be a magical potentiator of speed.
  • Air lunge. We are jumping up and getting into a lunge position. Marshall Ellis used to do this before he’d run a sprint because it´s a potentiator of speed. He did two or three of these each way and then he get get into the blocks and run faster than he’s ever run in his life. Air lunge checks four of the X-factor drills boxes: bounce, snap, power, and big split. Slow guys can’t do this.

BLEACHER DRILLS

  • Depth jumps. We step off of like a 30 inch bleacher and then we’re jumping over a 42 inch hurdle. A lot of guys can’t jump over a 42 in hurdle. You may have to have a wicket down there or maybe nothing at all. You just try to land and jump at the same time and jump up. We also sometimes do a depth jump into a broad jump. Sometimes we put two hurdles up. You could put three or four.
  • Seated pop-ups. Sit down and pick up your feet. Then hit the ground real hard, and go up in the air.
  • Bounces. Just bouncing and we’re using that top leg to kind of get us a little bit higher. We’re just reacting to the ground and getting off the ground. If you think about, that’s what we do when we sprint. We don’t spend much time on the ground. We bounce off the ground. We like to absorb force.
  • Cat jumps. We like to absorb force. To complicate matters, you can stick a landing from a 360º or a back flip. We want the entire foot hit in the ground. We don’t want to land on the toes. We want as much balance as we can. Basically when your feet hit the ground we want the entire body to stop, that is to say, to stick the landing. A lot of people just cave in every time or they have some weird pop-up reflex where they hit and then pop-up or they fall backwards or fall forwards. We don’t care if they are bad with it. We still want to get better.

MED BALLS

  • High throws with a 14-pound ball. We want to throw the ball as high as we possibly can. We want to finish with the hips in full extension.
  • Wall busters. We call them wall busters because we’re trying to knock down the wall. This is rotational. We want to create athletes and athletes are rotationally strong. 

PUSH-PULL

This may not make us faster but when we come out in acceleration we have our brain has to accept the fact that we are diagonal. We are not straight up and down. Because if the brain doesn’t get used to this, there could be a stumble reflex where you step out in front of yourself and all of a sudden you’re not accelerating anymore. So this is really brain training as much as anything.

  • One-two-three-fours. We do it until we’re a little bit tired. We’re not trying to get in shape. We get in shape by doing this stuff but that’s not our goal. Not one time all winter do we do an aerobic focused workout. But guys are in good aerobic shape at the end going into their track season. So just because you don’t have an aerobic focus does not mean you won’t have aerobic benefits from stacking together anaerobic work.
  • Resisted acceleration.
  • Push sleds.
  • Pull sleds. Brian Kula doesn’t think that you should ever pull more than 20% body weight. Tony Holler with like McAffrey they usually do less than that even.

Tony Holler has never seen a great sprinter who was bad in acceleration that got smoked by slow guys in the first 30 meters. It just doesn’t happen. The same CNS that controls max speed, controls the muscle firing of acceleration.

MISSING SOMETHING? DO IT

If you don’t agree with this X Factor drills because you don’t see enough change the direction. Do it. The beautiful thing about X-factor is that you are free to try things. There’s never an X-factor workout ever that Tony Holler doesn’t make something up. If he likes it, he’ll video it and put it on Twitter. If he doesn’t like it, they just won’t do it again. We want to expose our guys to stuff that’s hard to do, that is to say intense, that lasts about 5 to 10 seconds, and then they recover enough that they can go hard again. We’re not trying to get them tired so that all they got to give is effort. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We are trying to build very intense high quality athletic performance. Sometimes we do 20 drills in an X-factor workout, sometimes we might do 10, sometimes we might do 40 total reps…

Remember that 90% of an X-factor workout is standing around and the main thing it should be light. Don’t burn the steak. Because the alternative to an X-factor workout is no practice, it´s go home and take a nap. So if we’re doing an X-factor workout, we want to make a profit. That profit may be a couple bucks. But if you make a profit every day, you’ll never go broke.

MEASURE WHAT MATTERS

You need to measure what matters. Not everything that we can measure is should be measured.

On a speed day Tony Holler´s athletes do 10 speed drills in 10 minutes, and then they do 3 timed sprints, (for example, 3 timed 40 yd). They always take 5 minutes rest between the timed sprints. They always record, rank and publish. Tony Holler calls this “the food of cats”. What do they do? They do 10 yard flies*, 10 meter flies, 20 yard competition flies*, 35 meter flies outside on the curve**, and 40 yard flies*** outside. They do accelerations but they never do 10 because if you start measuring the first 10 m or 10 yards out of the blocks, guys are going to rush their acceleration. They’re not going to push like they’re supposed to in a meet. They’re not going to have long strong steps. What they do is they put the Freelap cones at the first and second hurdle mark. That means the start cone is at 15 yards and the finished cone at 25. So they come out of the blocks, 3-point stance or a leaning start, and they will go 15 yard acceleration into a 10 yard fly. And then they also do dashes like 40 yards****, sometimes extended to 55 meters. So they do a lot of different things.

* One of the reasons why Tony Holler likes 20 yards and 10 yards is because men’s hurdles in the 110s are 10 yards apart, so we don’t have to measure anything.

** 35 m on the curve is the spacing of hurdles. The 300 meter hurdles are 35 m apart, so we don’t have to measure anything.

*** The best guy at the 40 yard fly is your best guy. There’s no way to cheat the 40 yard fly because it’s such a longer sprint. So it’s really important. The fastest guy in the 40 yard fly is going to be the fastest guy in the 10. The fastest guy in the 10 is going to be the fastest guy in the 35 meters on the curve. Speed is speed.

**** The 40 yards has a great connection to football.

Tony Holler loves the flies because you can change them to miles per hour. He thinks miles per hour is a just gamifies their training so much and kids relate to it.

So there’s eight metrics here. That means each guy has eight personal records or eight lifetime records, and every time they run one kids get to break their record in practice. It doesn’t happen very often because we run fast every day but it gives us eight different chances.

Speed day: 10 speed drills + 3 timed sprints

Record, rank and publish: The food of cats.

  • Flys: 10 yd, 10 m, 20 yd, 35 m, 40 yd.
  • Acceleration: 15 yd into a 10 yd fly.
  • Sprints: 40 yd, 55 m.

You really need to work at gamifying training. Make your practice more like a game. We didn’t go out for a sport because of practice. We went out to play in the games and for some reason practice has been jacked by coaches who made practices miserable and not game like. That’s why guys didn’t like practice. So we need to break practice more like the game. Things like competitions, measurements, record-rank and publish, is kind of like keeping score at practice and it’s more fun. For example, when basketball players do clock situations in practice. That is the best part of practice ever. So we just need to constantly be thinking about making practice more fun, more game like, keeping score, measuring what matters… It takes a lot of work to make like a football practice more game like but you need to try.

One of the things that really makes practices game like for Tony Holler is they hand out these wristbands:  20 mph, 21 mph, 22 mph, and 23 mph. This is obviously for a pretty good track program at a fairly big school. If you are coaching girls at a similar size school it would be: 17 mph, 18 mph, 19 mph, and 20 mph. If you’re running on turf without track spikes is probably: 19 mph, 20 mph, 21 mph, and 22 mph. Hardly anybody in an NFL game ever breaks 22 mph. And but the fact is those guys could break 24 or 25. If you’re Tyreek Hill or DK Metcalf you can probably run 25 mph spiked up on a track. You have to do to be able to run 22 mph in the game on soft turf, 12 pounds of pads and semi-fatigued.

SPRINT BASED FOOTBALL

Sprint based football is basically “Feed the Cats” football. Coaches feel reborn and feel so inspired by coaching a new way. That’s because the kids are having more fun. Not fun in a goofy way, if not fun in a winning way.

In the checklist of what “Feed the Cats” sprint-based football looks like, winning is more important than hard work, and performance is more important than effort. When kids are too tired to perform, all they can give you is effort. That is the tradition of sports in America, and for sure, football tradition in America. When you start performing in practice, you don’t practice as long, your recovery is more, and your speeds are more like game speed. “Feed the Cats” coaches do not blame losses on a lack of toughness, a lack of conditioning or they wanted it more than they did. They just wanted it in the fourth quarter. They don’t do that. They say: “We got beat because of our turnovers. We got beat because we were outmanned up front. We got beat because we just need to get better.” Sprint based football obviously prioritizes speed in and out of the season. That doesn’t mean you do sprint work more than you do football work. And that doesn’t mean either your sprint work is more than your weight room work. It just means that you prioritize speed, you care about speed. If your team’s slow, you look your yourself in the mirror and say “How I screw up? How come we’re slow?” and you start building your practice schedule and your team around speed. You let the games be the hardest thing you can do. The hardest thing you do will be the game.  If the games are so hard that you need a day off the next day, what happens if you’re practices are harder than games and you’re not taking days off? It’s a downward spiral. The road to slow. It´s all downhill. Gravity. You’re just going to be a slow team. You will not perform well. So you need to back off in practice and your total volume needs to be 50 to 60% of your game volume. The magic of the game will take care of you. Your kids will do fine in the fourth quarter. Weekends off for all players. They sleep on Saturdays and Sundays, and coaches get creative so that they don’t have to have 6-hour meetings. Reflexive-performance-reset (RPR) is a part of sprint-based football and a key competitive advantage. This type of program attracts the best athletes in the school. Garrett Mueller had 11 basketball players on his state championship football team. If football is not miserable, the cats of your school (the athletes) will want to play football. You will be near 100% injury-free. RPR is concussion prevention. It wins. And lastly, kids who love practice inspire coaches and the coaches feel reborn. Coaches reflect kids. We’re a lot better if we like the kids. If you back off, practice and stop conditioning and all that kind of stuff it just things work a lot better.

“Feed the Cats” – Sprint based football

  • Winning > Hard work
  • Performance > Effort
  • Don´t blame losses on toughness, conditioning or attitude.
  • Prioritize speed in and out of season.
  • Let games be the hardest thing you do.
  • Weekends off.
  • Reflexive-performance-reset (RPR).
  • Attract the best athletes in your school.
  • Injury-free.
  • Winning.
  • Kids inspire coaches… Coaches reborn.

WHY PRIORITIZE SPEED IN FOOTBALL?

The most extreme movement of the human body is sprinting, that is to say, max velocity in a straight line. Our central nervous system (CNS), composed of our brain and spinal cord, becomes better. We raise the ceiling of our CNS when we sprint fast.

The most extreme movement is sprinting: max velocity in a straight line.

If we train the extreme, we train the range. So by training the extreme of movement, sprinting, we train all movement: forward, backward, sideways, change in direction…, we get better at first step, at second step, at jumping… All movement will improve when we train extreme.

If you train the extreme, you train the range. Speed training is extreme.

We want lightning bolts going from our CNS to our muscles in nanoseconds that the ability to fire quickly allows us to move quicker.

Lightning bolts in nanoseconds.

HOW SPRINT AND CNS TRAINING IMPROVES ALL ATHLETES

Brian Kula trained two girl golfers. He trained these two girls like they would Christian MCaffrey: sprint fast, lift heavy, jump high, jump far, bounce… He didn’t train them like golfers. He didn’t reverse engineer golfing. They got 2 mph faster sprinting but their club speed improved 15 mph. He also trained Highlands Ranch Aquatic and he train them not as swimmers. He train them as athletes by becoming more athletic, faster, stronger, and more explosive. The result was the achievement of 48 club records in swimming.

People are always thinking that we need to reverse engineer the game. People look at a soccer players and say: “How far do they have to run in a game? 9 miles? Well, we need to run those kids to death because they need to be in shape to run 9 miles.” But then Tony Holler says: “Coach, tell me. Describe your best player”. They answer: “Fast and explosive”. Then why run? Train the players to be fast, explosive and athletic, and stop focusing on conditioning.

Soccer athletes

  • Over 9 miles per game. Train with 9-mile runs?
  • No! Fast, explosive athletes dominate the sport.

Stephen Curry runs 2.7 miles in every basketball game. There’s some people that might be think they’re smart saying: “We need to run him about 3 miles a day to prepare him for the demands of the game. Reverse engineer the game.” But if you run him 3 miles a day he won’t jump as high, he won’t run as fast, and his mind will probably be slower. Sprinting actually makes your brain quicker. There’s a cognitive improvement in your brain when you sprint. So especially as Curry ages we need to make sure that he remains fast or gets faster, jump high, jump far, lift heavy, and bounce. We let the game take care of the game, and the game will take care of his conditioning.

Average speed of Stephen Curry in games in 2023:

  • 2.71 miles / 34.5 minutes per game (0.575 hour) = 4.75 mph
  • Average speed is a 12:45 mile pace. Train by running 3 miles at 12:45 pace?

Another reason why we have to sprinting is health. Kyle Bolton´s guys train speed 3 times a week in season for health. Somehow when we have a sprint focused team, when we care about speed, when we say that speed is the barometer of a player’s health, they stay healthier. Health is the main reason why Kyle Bolton´s team train speed in season.

Speed is not just another bucket to be filled, because if you improve speed, you can improve the other five buckets: agility, acceleration, skills, strength, and capacity. Too many people can’t prioritize and they just go in every direction.

A football coach said one time to Chris Korfist: “I want you to get my players bigger, faster, and stronger”. And Korfist said: “In what order?” Because he knew there is an order that we should care about and it’s faster. Movement is key. We’re not saying don’t get bigger and don’t get stronger. We’re saying that movement is the key. So by improving the CNS, which means we improve linear speed, our ability to change directions gets better, and our ability to accelerate gets better. And how speed changes game skills? As the CNS gets primed, the game slows down for us. We see the game slower. So our skills actually get improve. The very best warmup for a strength session in the wait room is sprinting. You will become stronger as you get faster. Capacity basically means if you run 23 mph, you could run 18 mph 50 times. So the faster you are, the better your sprint capacity. So as you get faster, it’s almost like you get in better shape.

  • Football coach: “I want you to get my players bigger, faster, and stronger.”
  • Chris Korfist: “In what order?”

Buddy Morris talks about every football player needing to be exposed to max velocity. 

“We train our skilled guys like Olympic sprinters and our big guys like hammer throwers, but everyone is exposed to max velocity.”

Buddy Morris

HOW DO YOU TRAIN A CAT?

How do you train a cat?:

  • Sprint as fast as possible. Linear max speed, timed sprints, and wearing spikes.
  • Sprint as often as possible. 2 to 3 times a week.
  • Sprint staying as fresh as possible. Get your sleep. Don’t burn the steak the day before you sprint. 

There’s a lot of guys 6´4″ and 238lb, but not many of them can run 4.39. Speed amplifies power. You can be the strongest guy or the biggest guy in the game, but if you’re slow you can’t pack a punch.

Speed creates sprint capacity but sprint capacity does not improve speed. If a guy ran 100 times at 15 mph, he would probably literally get slower. He for sure does not get faster. If that guy can run 23 mph, he could run 15 all day. The biggest mistake is to focus on repeat sprints.

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

Biggest mistake: Focus on repeat sprints in absece of speed development. Must raise the cealing!

Speed creates endurance. When Marcellus Moore ran a 400 meter dash he worked probably one tenth as hard as the other athletes. Marcellus kicked their ass because he´s faster than they are. Marcellus could go out and run 19 mph for 48 seconds and the other athletes could not because he had a higher ceiling for speed. He could run 24 mph.

Speed creates endurance. Endurance negates speed.

If you train 100 mph, 80 mph probably feels pretty comfortable, but the tradition of sports in America is you practice at 60 mph and then you try to go 80 mph in a game. You condition yourself like crazy but still doesn’t help because you’re going at game speed in games and you’re not used to it.

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.

We want to build athletes in all sports. If you repeat a lot of anaerobic work, you get aerobically fit and maybe you shouldn’t be but you are. We want athletes whether they’re volleyball players, basketball players, golfers or track athletes to train like athletes. Train like an athlete and then when you get to the sport you can be as specific as you want. You want to have great reactive strength and bounce. You want to be able to absorb force, be fast…

Garrett Mueller developed the concept of “truck stick”. Momentum equals mass times velocity. You should reward the fastest guys on your team but your fastest guys will never be your biggest. They won’t be your fastest but if you get a big athlete that can run, you got a special guy. So Garrett Mueller has special truck stick stuff made up for 600, 700 or 800 Newtons. What Garrett Mueller has found is the 600 is like entry level track stick type dude, and if you’re an 800 you’re an all conference player. These dog tags are amazing.

Truck stick (Momentum)

p = mV; p = Kg x m/s

WHY NOT CONDITIONING IN FOOTBALL?

“80% of college football players never reach their genetic ceiling for speed.”

Boo Schexnayder

That’s because they care more about lifting and conditioning. They’re speed deprived. Everybody thinks the speed is just genetic, so they leave it. Or they think it’s another bucket and they leave it.

“Too often, I see coaches overemphasizing conditioning during the off season and never developing absolute capacities of strength, power, and speed. They attack repeat sprint ability when you have never truly developed speed and thus sprint ability itself.”

Josh Bonhotal

You are developing the ability to repeat sprint without ever getting fast.

“For us, it´s speed and explosion before anything else. Some strength coaches are mainly focused on getting athletes bigger. Other S&C coaches prioritize conditioning. At Princeton we want speed, we don´t want the fastest milers. We prioritize fast, explosive, and strong… in that order.”

Mark Ellis

“Conditioning needs to mimic football… violent, fast, and explosive.”

Cal Dietz

Stadium stairs are not violent, fast and explosive. Running laps are not violent, fast and explosive. Doing gassers, neither. That is not what makes football players good football players.

“If you demand explosive movements when running, blocking, tackling, and in the weight room… why would you turn your back and then run slow conditioning with poor posture? It sends a mixed message and de-trains you.”

Vince Anderson

Vince Anderson rejects all high volume work because it detrains athleticism and detrains speed.

“Speed, power, and efficiency are the key to playing fast for an entire game.”

Brian Kula

“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:

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