We increase sprint speeds by producing more force into the ground more efficiently.
“If you want to enhance your sprint speed, you have to be strong enough to EARN increased levels of the quality.
You can chop, shuffle, & move your feet quickly all you want, but you’ll never go anywhere fast without increasing your ability to produce more force.
Strength wins.”
-Ray Zingler on X
Whoever says, “you can’t coach speed” is full of it.
It’d be no different than saying you can’t coach strength, or you can’t coach tennis.
You can absolutely coach speed.
The reason many people assume that you can’t, is because they don’t understand the speed equation.
They don’t understand that to run faster you must produce more force into the ground more efficiently.
Think of strength training in the context of “acquiring more usable force”.
It’s not to say that strength training is the be all end all or that there is no value in practicing the skill of sprinting (trust me there are people on that extreme end of the spectrum, too), but we cannot ignore the fact that in order to run faster we must have the ability to produce and display more force.
This is precisely why “speed & agility” as we know it does not sustainably work.
We can do all the choppy feet drills, we can change every direction, and we can hop and shift until the cows come home, but if we’re not increasing our ability to produce more force, we’re not truly increasing our speed or agility.
I use the car analogy all the time.
If the objective is to increase the cars speed, you do so by enhancing the motors output.
You do not do it by changing the paint color of the car.
Speed & Agility without strength training is like changing the paint color of a car and assuming it will help you win a drag race.
“Yeah, but many kids are strong enough.”
I still hear that argument come from time to time and I find it comical because not only is it (wildly) untrue, how would it be that any athlete couldn’t benefit from access to more force?
I’ll wholeheartedly admit, once an experienced STRONG athlete has a solid base of strength, he/she still must regularly strength train, but does not need to chase higher 1rm’s.
Their time will be better spent working on the speed/strength end of the curve, but trust me when I say the vast majority of kids aren’t here.
Most of our kids must prioritize strength training if they want to get faster and improve in their sports.
Remember, force wins.
