The term “game speed” has grown in popularity within the industry over recent years. Built from the foundations of general agility training, the aim to maximise transfer of training into competitive performance has resulted in more specific and contextual training. Like most things, there is a broad range of definitions dotted around the literature. I…
We, as coaches, understand the general principles of stiffness from the perspectives of physical capacity and accessing the stretch-shortening cycle. Athletes who are trained to rapidly decelerate their body and immediately transition their body in any direction generally produce greater physical outputs. Reading that sentence, our coaching minds immediately go to whole body change of…
Also contributing to this Sportsmith Six was Jean-Benoît Morin, Jurdan Mendiguchia and Kenny Guex. Many practitioners will aim for a number of “sprint exposures” per week as a protective factor against hamstring injury. What recommendations would you have for the number of exposures? First of all, let’s note that sprinting is not the only solution…
If there is one argument that has dominated social media over the last 5-10 years, its the one that compares Nordics and other strength exercises to sprinting when the aim is to reduce hamstring injuries. Despite the call, “just do both”, the argument still persists. So we spoke to Anne Delextrat, who has investigated this…
For team sport and sprinting coaches, what we see and how we communicate it are of the utmost importance. Our coaching eye combines with the dialogue we have with the athlete in front of us drive performance outcomes. The term “coaching eye” is quite common in coaching circles, but is hard to define. It is…
For most of the history of sprint or change of direction (COD) training in football, sports practitioners and scientists assumed these actions must have purely linear or rectilinear trajectories. Reality is different, though. Approximately 85% of the maximum velocity maneuvers in a professional football league consist of curvilinear sprints [1]. Sprinting during football matches is…
“The shin acts as an organic protractor with the ground to show in which direction the athlete is directing force” was a quote from Tobias Alt’s recent conceptual framework paper. To get to know more about shin roll, how we can assess it and most importantly, how we can improve the component parts which make…
Practitioners in sports performance will frequently test their athletes’ horizontal acceleration and top speed capabilities, presumably because players who can outperform their peers on these metrics should be at an advantage against their slower counterparts during competitive games. But is this necessarily true? Do acceleration and maximum speed really influence or correlate with in-game performance…
We live in an era where everyone has a video camera at their fingertips, making video analysis both affordable and available for sports coaches and athletes. Overall, this is a very positive thing. But a lack of understanding of some important fundamental principles of technique analysis has led to misuse and, more worryingly, the viral…
Speed training is the “in” thing right now. Speed training can almost have a mystical quality for some practitioners, wherein only track coaches and a select few S&C coaches can make sense of how to train it. But even for those with the coaching eye, integrating it into a wider performance plan can still be…
This Live focuses on the testing and training of deceleration ability. This area is getting more and more attention in the literature as well as in applied environments. This Live roundtable features three experts in this area, Damian Harper, Ted Rath and Mark Jamison. We will discuss – What does the research say about the…
My previous articles referred to the idea that coaches and athletes can develop similar sprint acceleration performances through different movement strategies. Shortly after those, Stuart McMillan wrote an excellent two-part series about how practitioners can gather useful information to better understand the athletes they are working with by appreciating the different strategies athletes adopt during…
This Live focuses on sprint profiling and features three experts in this area, JB Morin, Les Spellman and Ryan Grubbs . We discuss – Why it is essential to profile our athletes The various ways we can profile our athletes How we use data to inform our coaching practice Profiling large groups of athletes Profiling…
After seven years in professional rugby union, I left and found that speed development was still this mythical beast which “takes too long to develop,” “is too dangerous to train” and “can’t be coached.” Scarily, those quotes come from the world of elite, professional rugby. Hence this article. Creating maximum forces in minimal times Building…
In my last article, I addressed the confusion around describing sprinters as “pushers” or “pullers.” Coaches can understand “pushing,” but often misunderstand “pulling,” confusing it with the explicit instruction to “pull the track back.” This confusion arises from blurring the difference between a category and a label, and then is made worse by these words…