Growing up we played sports to develop our fitness and athleticism. We weren't aware of LTAD, the risks of early specialization and the benefits of being a multi-sport athlete. We played football at school, swam competitively, rode our bikes in the summer and skied in the winter. And for the most part this worked pretty well based on the fact we pl...

If there was one quality I would always choose as a coach it would be speed. You can have big players and strong players. You can have fit players and smart players. But the truth is that speed kills. Period. So knowing the importance of speed how do we get faster? Unfortunately many still believe this is the way to develop speed.  And while 'speed' ladders might be useful for working on different footwork patterns, coordination or simply to help an athlete warm-up they don't do much in terms of speed development. Below are four ways to improve your speed and dominate your game. Speed Tip #1 - Increase Your Stride RateThere is formula that gets passed around coaching circles that speed = stride rate x stride length. While there is some truth to this there is more than be done than simply working on these two qualities. When we talk about stride rate we are referring the the turnover of the legs. How quickly can an athlete take a given number of steps when sprinting. And primarily what we are concerned with here is training the relevant muscles to fire quickly. And to do so is not so much a questions of strength or fitness as it of nervous system development. There have to be elements in the training program where the athlete is performing movements at high speed with sub-maximal loads. Speed Tip #2 - Increase Your Stride LengthHave you ever seen an athlete whose arms and legs are moving really fast? But the weird thing is they aren't moving faster than any of the other athletes in the game. Some coaches get fooled into thinking some of their athletes that move like this are really fast. But when you test them they aren't fast. And in games they...

'Train slow - Best slow' Have you heard this saying before? I want to give credit to legendary strength & conditioning coach Al Vermeil as he's been known to have a number of original saying related to training. Another one I know for sure Al said was related to plyos where he said 'the bigger the athlete the smaller the hurdle' (or box). But back to the original statement this has to do with the specificity of training. If you are an athlete that requires speed it is important to use movement, drills and exercises that develop the capacity of the athlete to move and perform at a high velocity. And typically what happens is people watch YouTube videos of people performing insanely high box jumps or their favourite athlete is featured in a commercial doing something explosive. All of a sudden everyone wants to start there. Day 1 and they want to do max height box jumps, plyos, Olympic lifts and anything else that is worthy of a facebook post. Let's face it there aren't too many 'likes' for someone being able to hold a proper plank for 60 seconds. So do we really have to 'go big or go home'? Is there value to slowing things down a bit? Can you still achieve your potential without going all out all the time? The answer to all of these is No-Yes-Yes. In particular there are a couple of times when slower is better. In particular when you are performing stability or balance drills there is more benefit to slowing things down. Consider the following couple of scenarios. Slowing Down Plyometrics An athlete could be performing Heidens, bounding from one leg to the other. This is a great drill to develop power in the frontal plane. When this drill is performed with...