Can your linebackers have great acceleration without possessing top-end speed? Yes, if they learn how to accelerate before their opponents. In change-of-direction team sports, an athlete may look extremely fast when, in fact, they may only possess moderate top-end speed. If an athlete consistently separates away from an opponent within say, five or ten yards, observers might say that athlete looks “fast”. But in actuality, he is just accelerating before the opponent accelerates. Running backs, linebackers and most quarterbacks can easily fall into this category.
Let’s discuss how your linebackers can learn to accelerate earlier and quicker, and how they can be faster to “the spot.” There are several ways to accomplish this, but here is a little teaching trick I use to save time - use the same warm up drills they are familiar with, but with a very strong focus on what to move, where to move, and when to move. I recommend using high knee skips and high knee running drills to help your LBs develop the extreme acceleration needed to get to the spot first.
1. High Knee Skips
Most athletes know the high knee skip. For generating quicker acceleration, let’s adjust their thinking, focus, and purpose. When skipping, the lead knee should reach a high point at or above the hip line, for full range of motion. But many athletes have the habit of then flopping the leg and foot back to earth. Let’s change this to create a habit that is more effective and conducive to accelerating faster.
Once the leg is up to its high-end position, quickly accelerate the leg and foot down to the ground faster than the up stroke. Focus on the speed of the leg and create the proprioceptive muscle memory for accelerating the knee drive down, when compared to the knee drive up. This is similar to pushing a bike pedal down fast to gain more speed, or accelerating the knee and foot down hard and fast to crush a soda can flat on the ground (See photos 1 and 2).
The goal is for your LBs to get their foot down quicker to proceed to the next stride. I call it “The 3 Speeds” - body speed, leg up speed, and leg down speed. The basic premise is that the leg down speed must be faster than the leg up speed. If your athletes concentrate and focus on the actual speed of their legs moving up and down, then they can create the habit of how to accelerate faster. This can and should be practiced during warm ups.
2. High Knee Running
Same emphasis as in high knee skips. Focus on moving the leg, knee and foot down slightly faster than it comes up to the high position, but while running instead of skipping.
3. Incline/Hill Running
The only way to accelerate when running up a hill is to drive and push the leg down fast to propel the body up against the resistance of gravity.
These are familiar drills but with a different emphasis for generating acceleration. We want our LBs to make a decision and then accelerate fast to the spot. Given certain parameters with stride length and body balance, the sooner they can fire their foot to the ground, the sooner they can accelerate up to speed. This goal of movement, within a familiar drill, will help them remember that they need to move the foot down faster than their opponent in order to accelerate before their opponent.
Who’s Faster?
Going deeper, let’s look at the simple science of “Acceleration Physics”. If we asked two athletes to do a sprint up to 10 mph, but we asked athlete A to reach 10 mph at the 5-yard mark and asked athlete B not to reach that speed until he hit the 10 yard mark, who’s faster?
Obviously, the athlete that reaches 10 mph first would easily win, as athlete B would never be able to catch athlete A if they both ran at the constant speed of 10 mph for 100 yards. But athlete A is not faster than athlete B - they are the same.
This can easily become “the illusion of speed”. If your LBs get good at this skill, they will not only look faster, but they will get to their spots faster. They become the “sideline to sideline” backer.
Learn from “The Greats”
Any athlete can learn how to accelerate the leg and foot down faster than it rises up. One of my former teammates was the great Walter Payton. He had this ability to accelerate before any of his opponents. He was not “Olympic sprinter” fast, but his ability to accelerate first made him very difficult to catch from behind.
So, then, does it really matter who’s faster? Of course. But all things being equal, you can look like a faster athlete by just having faster acceleration. So coaches, use and teach the science and art of acceleration, and your players will not only look fast, but they’ll get to the right spot first.
About the Author: Speed specialist Ken Taylor has been actively training athletes for over 20 years. A former player at Oregon State, he was a member of the 1985 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears and later played with the San Diego Chargers. Taylor can be reached through his web site – www.speeddr.com.