How to Get Athletes Faster
October 13, 2010 by danny · Leave a Comment
As a strength coach and basketball coach I’ve had many parents ask me over the years; “how do I get my son/daughter faster?” More often then not, these well-intended parents/coaches figure the best way to improve speed is to have the young athletes do agility drill after agility drill. But they leave out a VERY important component to improving speed – strength training. Both Eric Cressey and Mike Boyle do a great job of addressing the importance of getting stronger in the quest to becoming faster. You can check them out here…
As Coach Boyle points out; ”The best solution to slow feet is to get stronger legs.”
If you are a parent, or a coach of a sport, and the “sciency” type of stuff that Mr. Cressey & Boyle are talking about has you a little confused, just know that the more force you are capable (by getting stronger through weight training) of putting into the ground, the faster you are going to be able to run, the quicker you are going to be able to stop, and the higher you are going to be able to jump. And I couldn’t agree more with Eric – many sport seasons go year around these days (i.e. a basketball player or volleyball player that has their regular season, then it’s off to spring league, followed by summer league, followed by fall league. And then mix in a few camps in the summer, and a number of open gyms… as you can see, it is NON-STOP!). I think it’s fair to say that these athletes are spending more than enough time working on agility. Their non-playing time would be better spent getting stronger, as opposed to going to “speed” camps in which the coaches/trainers focus on movement training – where the majority of what they do is more agility drills, with no weight training.
If you read Eric and Mike’s posts, and my thoughts from above, I’m pretty confident that you are “sold” on how important strength training is to becoming a faster athlete. But just in case you are still not buying it, think about some of the fastest athletes in the world… sprinters in track and “skill” players in football (defensive backs, running backs, receivers). These are athletes that are moving some serious weight in the weight room!
So, if you are a parent or coach to an athlete(s) and do not have access to a qualified strength coach in your area, where do you begin? The biggest advice I can give you is to keep it simple for now, work on form, and focus on big, compound movements with free weights (i.e. lunges rather than leg extensions) Here is a good place to help you get started – http://bit.ly/cj4T3v. And don’t be thrown off by the title of the article. This would be a good place to start for most young athletes. Now go get some people stronger!
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