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AFM Magazine


Summer Speed Training - Finishing on Par

by: Dale Baskett
Football Speed Specialist
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Summer is the home stretch for football speed development. We must be sure that when we report for in-season practice that we‘re speed ready. That means we have our power, plyos and techniques in alignment for playing at a maximum level when the bell rings.
   

Hopefully, you have spent sufficient time to progressively develop the skills of mechanical execution so that you can use the summer to heat up the nervous system with fast aggressive speed work. To improve speed development, you must run at maximal or near maximal speeds and utilize longer recoveries. This allows you the opportunity to tap the nervous system properly. The summer should not be in overload mode but just the opposite. If you are training your players with high reps and limited recovery time, it will be counter-productive for the speed gains you want to achieve. 

Off-Season Training Establishes your Success for Summer 

Coaches, hopefully you have been using the proper preparation so you can enter into an intense summer speed phase. This is the final phase that puts you where you need to be when entering the season. A system is the key to everything you do both during the off-season and in-season. Part-whole training is the only way you can be assured you are processing good motor functions consistently. When training for speed, it is critical.
   

The criteria you use must always relate to the core foundation principles established for human movement. These important skills must be arranged in an order for them to have relative significance for processing motor skills successfully. When sprinting at a high level of intense speeds, your athletes will be tapping into the high twitch area of rapid muscle contraction. Limb movement takes place so rapidly that the mind cannot consciously begin to control the functions necessary to keep up with what execution demands. This is why your off-season work should have been mechanically established early enough so that the skill functions are sound.  

Summer Training Schemes

Why did we prepare for bio-mechanical motor function control in the off-season? It is because we can be ready to turn up the heat to prepare the players to reach their peak levels of speed as they enter the football season. The summer workouts should be intense speeds with high recoveries and low reps. Consistency of execution of limb movement control at high speeds is your main focus. You’re striving for quality, not quantity with all of your speed work at this point, including movement drills. The techniques should be solid and the motor functions should work as fast as possible with the focus on mechanical execution at all times. Two days per week is sufficient for your speed sessions with your athletes. Thirty-to forty-minute sessions are long enough for processing the results you desire. This is the time of the year when your recovery periods should be greater and your practices shorter, but more intense. Recovery between speed drills are also, by design, longer. The contraction rates for sprinting rely upon these higher recovery times in order to fire rapidly over the training sequences. It takes less, not more, to reach maximal speed results. 

Categorizing Your Summer Into Several Phases of Specificity

The first thing we need to realize is that sprint training alone is not properly preparing the players for the game. We must look at providing movement speed, quickness work and mixed movements at one time.

Designing full-speed intensity work with a combination of straight lineal speed and lateral speed movements with acceleration and deceleration should all be part of proper training. At the end of this article I will provide some drills for you to get an idea of how this would function. Multiplicity of fast aggressive speed changes is specific and important to your athletes. That is, practicing the way they play. Specificity is always the ticket for salvaging time and processing for the best results. 
The Real Story about Track
and Football Training 

I continue to tell parents, coaches and athletes that if you want to play fast and have your best time for the forty yard sprint, then stay clear of track training. Specificity training is the best application for football movement and, yes, the forty as well. The goal of track workouts is to build the sprinter to cover 100 meters as fast as possible. The training that is required to do that is usually nothing less than 100 meters. The shortest distance for interval work applicably is usually 100 meters and seldom shorter than that.     

The volume is greater than football needs, so specificity is not being covered with track training. Athletes who are sprinters during the track season usually improve their time in the forty. Those who are timed in the forty right after track season is over have slower forty-yard times than when track began. This is due to the longer speed work distances that track provides daily.
   

This does not work for football players. It doesn’t even address the fact that the mechanical techniques for track are 180 degrees different than football. I am constantly teaching and installing my football speed programs all over the country to coaches who want to learn the right applications. Coaches are blown away when they realize they’ve been using track techniques forever and they don’t work for football. Track techniques are designed for velocity maintenance which means that once maximum speed is reached, the key is to not lose the velocity developed.

Football is concerned with short acceleration skills, movement changes and momentum changes. The mechanical techniques are completely opposite those of track techniques. Many coaches have borrowed sub-par techniques from track as a matter of convenience. That’s all that’s being offered by every speed coach and strength coach collectively. I have a system of football speed techniques that have yet to be released. It will revolutionize speed training for football with the latest bio-mechanical techniques available. My football speed training membership site launches in July.
(www.speedtrainingforfootball.com)

Combination Drills for Summer Football

These drills are simple yet effective for athletes if you follow the guidelines: 


 
Diagram 1: Coaching Points -

  • Full out from beginning to end.
  • Never stop or slow down the limb speed on changes.
  • Make your plants on the fly.
  • Arrows on lateral indicate hip and eye positioning.


 
 
Diagram 2: Coaching Points -  

  • Same applications as Diagram 1 apply. 



      
Diagram 3: Coaching Points - 

  • Same applications as Diagram 1 apply. You can take these drills and create two more on your own as various combinations. 







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