“Heredity only deals the cards; environment and training plays the hand”(1). It’s possible for an athlete to improve in every phase of playing speed, whether it be maximum miles per hour, stopping and starting, feinting, faking and cutting, or multi-directional high speed acceleration with a complete “holistic” speed development plan (1). Genetically gifted athletes may be fast with little work or preparation, but they are nowhere near their genetic limitations with regards to maximum speed.

For every sport, there are certain key lifts that when performed by the athlete will tell you how well he or she will do in the sport. Once a predictor lift is improved, it will correlate with an improvement in performance.

If we all simply followed this one, there’d be better results and more time for real training. Jogging has no place in a football training program. None. Not as a warm up, not as a cool down, and definitely not as punishment

In recent years, strength and conditioning has became more and more popular among the soccer populations. The benefits have been seen in many other sports, and it’s finally showing up in soccer.

National high school signing day was February 4, 2009. After listening to all the “gurus” discuss recruiting, one thing stood out—speed.

My career as a strength and conditioning coach essentially began at the University of Washington when I interned under a great coach named Bill Gillespie back in the late 1990s.

When you watch the world’s strongest man contests on television, it should be obvious that these athletes are not only aggressive, fast, explosive, athletic, and flexible, but they have a great anaerobic threshold.

Hamstring injuries are common among sprinters. One of the biggest challenges that I face as a strength coach is helping an athlete overcome a hamstring injury and at the same time improving performance.

Hamstring injuries are common among sprinters. One of the biggest challenges that I face as a strength coach is helping an athlete overcome a hamstring injury and at the same time improving performance.

EliteFTS Spotlight is a new weekly feature here on EliteFTS.com where Q&A member The Angry Coach interviews athletes and strength and sport coaches from various disciplines in order to find out more about what they do, how they train and how they do business.

EliteFTS Spotlight is a weekly feature here on EliteFTS.com where Q&A member The Angry Coach interviews athletes and strength and sport coaches from various disciplines in order to find out more about what they do, how they train and how they do business.

It might seem like I’ve been doing many interviews lately. There’s good reason for this. A few weeks ago, I did an interview for EliteFTS, and I was asked the question, “Who do you feel is getting it done in strength and conditioning?”

It’s been a while since I’ve contributed an article to this site and so much has changed.

I’m the head Olympic strength and conditioning coach at the University of Minnesota and am currently working with eight sports. These include men’s and women’s hockey, men’s basketball, men’s track and field, men’s swimming, baseball, and men’s and women’s golf.

Have you ever grabbed one of those muscle magazines while waiting to check out at the supermarket and skimmed through it? They are filled with pictures and workouts of bodybuilders with awesome genetics who train with the primary purpose of looking good in a Speedo.

Rob “Spray” MacIntyre is a strength coach for some top level athletes. Rob, tell me a little bit about your background.

If you don’t know anything about lacrosse – if you’ve never actually seen a game – chances are you’ve bought into the almost universal, yet severely mistaken, notion that it’s a leisure class sport populated by rich preppie-types from elite private schools in the Northeast.

Many high school and college pitchers have come to me with the same question—“How can I add speed to my fastball?” First: spend less time shoulder exercises and more time on core training.

A slow athlete needs to develop speed-strength. Here is how.

Short, middle, and long-distance runners all need explosiveness.

The new wave in ice hockey strength and conditioning seems to be dominated by “functional” training, which often becomes dysfunctional. Let’s look at our goals for in-season lifting and the factors to consider in professional hockey. I’ll also present my program template for in-season hockey training, which has been used successfully in the American Hockey League (AHL).

The Fitrodyne Powerlyzer by Tendo, or Tendo unit as it’s more commonly known, is a piece of equipment used to measure the speed of the bar. This allows the coach to know several things such as whether the athlete is training what he or she is supposed to be training and whether the bar speed has started to drop. Here, I’ll discuss how to use the Tendo unit as a means of autoregulation.

With the beginning of football season, the long anticipated excitement for the early powerhouse match ups has finally arrived.

Every day someone asks me a question about training speed. So here are those questions heard most frequently as well as the answers to them.

This is the time of the season when I’m sure you’re asked the same question over and over—how do I run a faster 40? Here are the top seven tips to increase your 40-yard time dramatically without having to run a step.

In any sport, athletes need to be able to accelerate as quickly as possible to get to the ball or opponent first. As a coach, you must put your athletes in the best possible position to succeed.

“Real deference doesn’t come based on size and intimidation but on monster work capacities and real street toughness.”

When these young basketball players get older, they start searching for something to give them an advantage over their opponent. Most, if not all, think they must practice their skills more (shooting, dribbling, passing, rebounding) in order to gain an additional edge. However, once these skills have been developed to a high level through repetition and technique mechanics, what’s next?

The body doesn’t know whether you’re doing higher-faster-sports, Westside, HIT, swiss ball, kettlebell, or any other system. It only knows stimulation and recovery.

I received a call two weeks ago from a friend of mine, and he had some good news for me. About five months ago, he and I were discussing a three-day split that would accommodate his needs and time schedule. He’s an ex-football player, and competes in the 242 lbs class. Like many of you, he’s tried the standard four-day split, but because of work commitments (60+ hours a week) and a long drive time to the gym, he has trouble getting to the gym all the time.

Spend a few minutes listening to people and gurus talk about speed training nowadays and it shouldn’t be too hard to understand why the average person can leave a speed training conversation with a billion more questions then they had when they started.

What does this mean exactly?

The deadlift is the bastard child of powerlifting; it doesn’t get much love. Maybe it’s the fact that the deadlift is less impacted by equipment than are the squat and bench press, so it may require less practice.

A lot of my tips are just repeats from everyone else but I think they get overlooked while everyone is looking for the next gear craze or shortcut. Some are gear related and some are raw work.

Most periodized training programs for athletes follow a Western or linear model.

I sometimes wonder if there are any prerequisites at all to getting a job as college strength and conditioning coach.

“Strength is an essential component of all human performance and its formal development can no longer be neglected in the preparation of any athlete”

One of the first pressing, inquisitive minds who stepped on the face of this earth was Socrates.

The individual control and systematic manipulation of volumetric management is largely dependant upon the proper integration of critical training variables.

When planning a training protocol, one must take into account the value of work administered in terms of function and time.

Maybe it’s because I found out the hard way that you must vent information through a screen door in order to attain measurable improvements every training session in the real world. Maybe it’s because I have been doing research lately on American training strategies and I got a swift kick of deja vu.

The training process must include a critical and determined degree of fatigue, followed by an appropriate duration to which Reserve Strength may be elicited.

The individual control and systematic manipulation of volumetric management is largely dependant upon the proper integration of critical training variables. Specifically, these elements that must be monitored in training for sport can be generally classified into the broad category of measurement.

One of the most asked questions throughout the day was “What would you have done differently, if you knew what you know now?” And though I answered the question as best I could, I couldn’t help but rethink the question over and over.

When discussing training, there are many things to consider, such as speed work, building absolute strength, improving form, raising work capacity, recuperation, and selecting exercises and rotating them them in proper sequence to avoid adaptation.

Get fast and slam a big log up overhead. As an added bonus your bench will go up too.

This article is all about you, as a unique individual, training for your goals and based on your needs.

What do you call it when someone makes a bonehead mistake in training? I am going to muster up all of my will power and be nice this time as I liken it to the baseball player that has fallen prone to poor pitch selection- swinging at bad pitches

The other day I got off the phone with a friend of mine who coaches college football. I told him that I had recently consulted with Dave Tate about applying the Westside principles for a college football player