The Need for Speed Having change-of-direction speed is critical for skill position players.
Individual success in football is determined by technique and physical skill. Two of the components of physical skill are linear speed and change-of-direction (COD) speed. The degree to which a player possesses speed is partly dependent on the amount of strength, especially lower body strength, and flexibility that he has. Strength and speed combine to create explosive force, which may be even more important to football than speed itself. These components aren’t very useful without the proper mechanics that are required to carry them over from the drills or exercises to the game itself.
NFL coaches and scouts during the late 1960s and early 1970s began to see that the team with the most speed usually won the game. The trickle-down effect brought that understanding of a need for speed down to every level of the sport. Like all other college football programs, we recruit for speed and we train for speed.
At one point, coaches felt that a sprinter from the track team that had recorded good times in his events could be taught to carry or catch a football and have success as a football player. We now realize that football speed is mostly about acceleration and track sprinters don’t get to full speed until 30-40 meters down the track. Football players need to be at full speed at about 10 yards down the field. A track sprinter can maintain maximum speed for 50 or more meters while a football player doesn’t have to because of the change-of-direction involved in the game. This is why you see so much emphasis placed on 10-yard sprint times when training acceleration to football players.
Within our speed development program, we understand that telling an athlete to run faster doesn’t do much good without showing him how to run faster, so we spend a lot of our drill time teaching proper mechanics to get the results that we are looking for. Keep in mind that our focus when training our athletes is to develop football players, not just in achieving a great test score. We start our work to develop speed in our players just like we start the effort to develop other physical skills, and that is with testing. As a linear speed test, we time the 40-yard dash for all positions except the offensive line. With them, we time the 20-yard dash. This is done on grass, because we play on grass, and timed by hand. We use the pro shuttle, or 5-10-5, as a COD speed test for all positions. We test all of the players that are new to our program in January each year to get baseline data to give us an idea of where we are starting with each player. We test the entire team again before we start spring training to evaluate their individual progress.
Base of Strength
Speed and power production is dependent on force production. An athlete’s ability to create greater force when applying his foot to the ground is going to result in faster speed times and higher jumps. We use a basic periodization model to develop a base of strength and power in the weight room. The exercises that we use include back squats and front squats for strength, power cleans and hang cleans for power, and glute/ham raises and reverse hypers for development of the posterior chain. We use RDLs, clean pulls, and various other assistive lifts as part of our teaching progression for our hang clean and power clean.
When we get further along in our progression we will have our athletes jerk, split jerk, snatch squat, and hang snatch. We put a lot of emphasis on being consistent in using an armpit to shoulder-width foot position with our squats, cleans, jumps, and stances in our movement drills to try to gain carryover from the weight room to the field and then to the game. We also consistently talk about force application to the ground as part of our coaching points to the players. Lunges, lateral lunges, box step-ups, lateral box step-ups, crossover step-ups, and Bulgarian split squats are supplemental exercises that we use. Box jumps and other plyometric moves are incorporated into both our lifting sessions and our speed workouts.
Each workout usually consists of about two Olympic moves, two strength moves, and two supplemental moves with recovery time between sets appropriate to the phase within our periodization cycle. This strength program is accomplished over a four-day split with two of those days being primarily upper body exercises with explosive exercises that include the bench press or incline bench, and supplemental upper body exercises. The other two days focus on the lower body. There are both weighted and un-weighted abdominal/core exercises in our workout every day. We use a similar set-up in the weight room for the summer program as we do for the spring.
Our in-season strength program consists of total body workouts two days per week for our travel team and three days per week for our scout team. The only changes that we have in season from the exercises that we use in the summer is that we don’t power clean very often in season, we take out most of the plyos, and we don’t take the bar overhead during the season. Our workout volume is not as great in season for our players but we try to push our scouts a little bit harder.
Linear Speed and Conditioning for Football
In the spring, we train speed/movement two days per week while in the summer we train movement four days per week. Most of our speed development work is done in the spring and we don’t do anaerobic conditioning in the spring. In the summer, most of the speed training gives way to anaerobic conditioning by the middle of June. We don’t believe that it is possible to effectively train for speed while training for anaerobic conditioning because we need more recovery time when training for speed than is allowable when we’re training for anaerobic conditioning. At the pace that the game is played today, we’re always working on movement mechanics regardless of the time of year. We say that “to be fast, you have to train fast” and to train fast you need a lot of recovery time. Football coaches are sometimes uncomfortable when watching speed workouts because of the pace of the workout. They like the full speed drills but hate the long recovery time.
When working on linear speed, we progress into acceleration up to the 10-yard distance, putting great emphasis on force application into the ground on each step. We then work on the transition to the maximum speed phase and finally focus on the maximum speed phase. Within the maximum speed phase we use the phrase “knee up, heel up, toe up” in an effort to describe part of the cycling action of lower body mechanics that we want the athlete to follow. We also spend a lot of time looking at upper body posture and foot strike location. But, within a speed workout, we allocate our time based on the percentage of time within a game that we are going to be involved in that type of movement. More time is spent on acceleration than max speed and, in general, more time is spent on COD speed than linear speed.
Our sprint distances for the spring linear speed training are 10, 20, 40, and 45 yards. In the summer, we do anaerobic conditioning at distances of 10, 20, 40, 60, and 110 yards. We work at a 1 to 4 work/rest ratio during conditioning sessions. In training camp and in season we condition three days per week at distances of 15, 30, and 80 yards with both visual and audible starts. We also use full, ¾, ½, ¼, and COD gassers as conditioning in camp and in the early part of the season. We are coaching speed mechanics in season during our dynamic warm-up and during conditioning.
COD Speed and Conditioning for Football
Our approach to COD speed training is the same as linear speed as it relates to recovery time and the need to teach mechanics. We put a lot of emphasis on stepping with the near foot first and putting the player in position to be able to see. COD speed is usually executed in situations where the ability to see a stimulus is very important. As we progress through teaching drills our most advanced stages have the drill ending with a reaction to
One of our additions to a standard dynamic warm-up is hurdle drills. We have a series of drills that we go through over standard hurdles that are designed to create better flexibility in the hip extensors, flexors, abductors, and adductors. Better hip flexibility is an important key to better COD speed.
The pro shuttle is both a test and a training drill for us. We break it down into ½ shuttles and full shuttles and we also have players compete against each other while running it. The 60-yard shuttle is a COD conditioning drill that we use and the L drill is good for technique training and competition. Our other COD drills include the 9-cone drill, mini hurdle step-over drills, and ladder drills.
There are far more similarities in what we do to train each position group in the weight room and in speed workouts than differences, but the one area where we do have a difference is in drills that we do as COD conditioning in the summer called “Pattern Running.” These drills are designed with the assistance of position coaches, using the same coaching points that the position coach would use. A group of 10 position-specific movements are executed with a 20-30 second rest interval between the completion of one repetition and the start of the next. Each repetition is started from the player’s playing stance and requires a jog from the end of the repetition back to the starting line. Each movement should take 5-8 seconds to complete. At the end of the 10 repetitions, the player is given a three-minute break before the next set is started. This simulates possessions during a game and we build up from two sets to as many as eight sets within a workout by the end of the summer. Again, good speed mechanics is stressed at all times during Pattern Running Drills.
Summary
It is hard to discuss our speed program without a discussion of almost all of the parts of our strength and conditioning program. We want everything in our program to interrelate in the hope that we get greater carry over to the game. This program is what works for us and we’re always modifying it to try to make it better.
About the Author: Reese Bridgman is in his sixth year as Norfolk State’s strength and conditioning coach. With over 30 years of coaching experience, Bridgman previously served as both an assistant coach and the strength and conditioning coach at Newport News Apprentice School (2005-2007). He also coached at the University of Central Florida and for two seasons in the Arena Football League. Bridgman began his coaching career at Hattiesburg High School (MS) in 1983.