Game Speed: Michael Zweifel on Perception and Reactivity

Based on Episode 84 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and speed and agility coach Michael Zweifel.

Michael Zweifel spends most of his time on the gap between a fast time and game speed. A former record-setting college receiver who now owns the performance center Building Better Athletes, Zweifel builds his training around ecological dynamics and the constraints-led approach, which is a technical way of saying he cares less about how an athlete moves in a straight line than about whether that speed shows up when the game is chaotic and someone is chasing them. Linear speed matters, he says, but only if you teach an athlete to use it in the context of their sport. In this conversation he lays out how.

Key Takeaways

• Linear speed only helps if it transfers. Build a baseline, then contextualize it to the game.
• A fast 40 does not make a fast player. Perception and decision-making let athletes play faster than they time.
• Train transitional speed. Accelerate out of a preceding movement, initiated by a stimulus, not a static start.
• Coach perception before technique. A technique decoupled from a stimulus rarely transfers to sport.
• Make every rep a reactive learning opportunity. Games with a win-or-lose outcome beat cueing every rep.

Does linear speed transfer to game speed?

Zweifel is not anti-track. He wants his athletes to understand acceleration and top-speed mechanics, because every sport eventually reaches linear speed. But he is clear that you cannot lift track technique wholesale into a game.

In team sport, acceleration and max-velocity patterns differ from track and field. Guys are getting chased, they might have an implement in their hand, they might take two steps and be worried about someone trying to knock their head off. So we can’t take all the same concepts from track and field and apply them into a sport setting.

That leads him to a priority most strength coaches have backwards.

Team sports should prioritize speed and agility as the main components of their training, and have the weight room as an accessory, not the other way around. That’s where the strength and conditioning field lives, and I think we need to reverse it.

Why a fast 40 does not make a fast player

Ask Zweifel about the combine and he points to the mismatch between a timed sprint and the sport it is supposed to predict. His example is a Hall of Fame receiver who was never a burner on the clock.

Jerry Rice ran a 4.8, but he played incredibly fast because he was so in tune to the perceptual and cognitive aspects of the sport. You get guys that run 4.3 and they don’t stand out on the field. What it all comes back to is integrating that speed into the context of the sport.

He suspects some fast athletes actually underperform their ability at the combine, pressed and overcoached into a mechanical model in a six-week window, then move naturally again once they are back in a game and simply reacting. As he puts it, a straight-line 40 is very different from the speed it takes to be successful in a sport that is chaotic and unknown from play to play.

Transitional speed: accelerate out of a movement

The piece Zweifel thinks coaches most neglect is transitional speed, the ability to explode into a sprint out of another movement rather than from a clean static start.

Instead of working acceleration from a static two-point start, we’ll have athletes do some movement that precedes the acceleration, and we always try to have that transition initiated by a stimulus, whether it’s another athlete or a cue from the coach.

The simplest version is a mirror drill: two athletes face each other in a slow shuffle, one on offense and one on defense, and when one turns and sprints, so does the other. The athlete gets a change of plane, from lateral to linear, and a real stimulus to react to. From there it scales into small-sided games where transitional bursts happen naturally because of how the task is set up, which he considers far more representative than repeating static starts.

Coach perception before technique

Underneath all of it is Zweifel’s strongest claim: technique cannot be trained apart from the perception that triggers it.

The technique of a movement will be dictated by when, where, why, and how an athlete perceives information. So it’s really unwise to decouple a technique from a stimulus, because the stimulus will dictate the technique.

He credits a European soccer coach with the framing that flipped it for him: teach decision-making and perception first, so that learning a technique never interferes with the perception. Coaches usually do the reverse, drilling a movement with no stimulus and hoping it holds up when a stimulus appears. On the field, he notes, it never survives, because nobody moving at full speed is thinking about foot angles.

You’re not going 100 miles per hour in a sport thinking, “My coach said I’ve got to have my foot at a 90-degree angle, my nose over my toes.” The sport moves so fast that everything is reacting, so we always have to have that stimulus present.

Every rep is a learning opportunity

Because he cannot cue athletes through chaos, Zweifel designs environments that teach on their own. A game with a clear winner and loser gives every repetition a built-in outcome.

We put athletes in an environment where there’s a winner and a loser, and every rep is a learning opportunity. On the field, in the game, we can’t be there holding their hand, so it’s for the athlete to self-organize and make adjustments on the fly.

He leans on a motor-learning distinction to keep his own mouth shut at the right times.

In the research they call it knowledge of results versus knowledge of performance. If you’re doing flying tens, giving athletes just their time, rather than throwing a hundred cues at them, lets them know whether what they were working on was productive. That’s been shown to be more productive than us coaching every single rep.

He does like to ask an athlete what they were thinking after a great rep, because a self-generated cue (“I thought about running on hot coals”) can be handed back to them later under pressure. But he is careful not to dig so deep that he makes them self-conscious, the surest way to paralyze a golfer or a shooter by analysis.

Bring competition into practice, even on the track

Stress, Zweifel argues, reveals how an athlete actually moves, so he manufactures it rather than saving it for game day.

The worst thing you can do as a coach is have competition be the first time an athlete experiences that task or environment. That’s when they choke. So we apply the principles of competition within practice.

Even his track athletes race each other and go live on a clap or a gun instead of starting on their own free will, because that is the context specific to the event. He adds a small trick to keep it from backfiring: everyone starts their blocks set back a couple of yards, so an athlete who is behind is chasing rather than defending a lead, which lowers the anxiety while keeping the competition real.

Make the warm-up reactive

Zweifel has rebuilt his warm-up around the same idea, turning it from a box-checking routine into skill practice. Familiar drills, shuffles, crossovers, drop lunges, now get dictated by a partner, so athletes are reading a body and reacting from the first minute of the session. He points to research to justify treating it as more than tissue prep.

The warm-up for high-level athletes needs to be seen as a chance to recalibrate fine motor skills, rather than just raising body temperature and preparing tissues. So I use it to calibrate our athletes into their perceptions and specific motor qualities.

The feedback he trusts most came from an athlete who finished one of these sessions and called it a “brain warm-up,” because he actually had to think and be present. Engagement went up, the athletes stopped going through the motions, and, Zweifel says, they come out of it ready to move rather than merely warm.

Frequently asked questions

Does linear speed transfer to game speed?
Partly. Zweifel says a baseline of linear speed and sound acceleration mechanics matters in every sport, but track technique does not transfer wholesale, because game movement is reactive and constrained. The transfer comes from training speed in the context of the sport, not just in a straight line.

Why doesn’t a fast 40 make a fast football player?
Because a timed straight-line sprint leaves out perception and decision-making, which is where game speed actually lives. Zweifel points to players who ran modest 40s but played fast because they read the game, and fast-40 athletes who never stood out on the field.

What is transitional speed?
It is accelerating into a sprint out of another movement, a jog, shuffle, or backpedal, rather than from a clean static start, and having that transition triggered by a stimulus. Because that is how speed shows up in sport, Zweifel trains it directly instead of repeating static starts.

Should you teach agility technique or let athletes react?
Zweifel teaches perception and decision-making first, then lets technique form in response to a stimulus, because a technique drilled without a stimulus rarely transfers. He argues you cannot decouple movement technique from the perception that triggers it.

How do you make a warm-up reactive?
Take the drills you already use, shuffles, crossovers, drop lunges, and have them dictated by a partner the athlete has to read and mirror. Zweifel treats the warm-up as a chance to recalibrate fine motor skills and add reactive repetitions, not just raise body temperature.

About the authors

Michael Zweifel is the owner of Building Better Athletes (BBA Performance) in Dubuque, Iowa, and a former record-setting college wide receiver. He is known for applying ecological dynamics, the constraints-led approach, and motor-learning principles to speed and agility, training athletes to perceive, decide, and react rather than just move in a straight line.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach focused on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Michael Zweifel on Just Fly Sports.