Speed Squats: Mike Goss on Timed Strength

Based on Episode 85 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and track and field jumps coach Mike Goss.

Speed squats are a stopwatch, a box, and a barbell, and Mike Goss has been running them since long before anyone sold a bar-speed sensor. Goss, a jumps coach of more than 25 years who runs the track club Flying Without Wings and coaches at Parkview High School in Georgia, borrowed the method from the Polish coach Tadeusz Starzynski: load a box squat, time six reps, add a little weight, and let the clock tell you when the set is done. As Joel Smith puts it, it is the original velocity-based training. This conversation covers how Goss runs it, why he thinks a timed set beats a Tendo for jumpers, and the wider philosophy behind it, that an athlete who is grinding is an athlete who has already lost the point.

Key Takeaways

• Speed squats use time as the readout. Six timed box-squat reps, small load jumps, and the set ends when the clock says quality has gone.
• Athletes often get faster as the bar gets heavier. Goss watches motor-unit recruitment show up as a quicker set, not a slower one.
• A timed set captures more than a Tendo. Bar-speed tools read the concentric; the clock also catches the eccentric, the coupling, and the relaxation.
• You can have too much strength. Maximal force takes longer to express than a foot is on the ground, so Goss calls surplus “moving van strength.”
• Make it look easy. Goss cites perceived-effort work suggesting about 80 percent produces peak power, and coaches rhythm rather than strain.

How the speed squat works

Goss credits Starzynski, whose work he considers decades ahead of its time, and he keeps the setup deliberately low-tech. There is no one-rep max involved; he picks the opening weight by feel.

We would take a box of a certain depth, and start with a poundage that was comfortable for that athlete, say 150 pounds. They would do the box squat, and I would time six butt touches. The first time the butt touched the box, the stopwatch started, and the sixth time it touched, that was the stop. I’d record it on a dry-erase board, and then they’d go up about 10 pounds.

The interesting part is what happens next, and it is the reason the method teaches athletes something a static number cannot.

As the poundages go up, they’re actually going faster. They start recruiting more motor units, and they learn to understand this.

The set ends on the drop-off. Goss’s rule of thumb is a full second of change in the six-rep series, at which point the athlete is no longer doing the thing the exercise exists for. He is explicit that this is not endurance work and not a max-strength test.

They weren’t working on strength endurance. They were working on maximal efficiency at a rapid speed, and that’s really what the speed squat is about.

He never used a one-rep max, partly for safety and partly because he did not need it: a three-rep max and perceived effort told him enough. For scale, he remembers a near-50-foot triple jumper working past 275 and even over 300 pounds on the timed squat, though at nowhere near full depth.

Why a stopwatch beats a bar-speed sensor here

Goss only learned later that he had been doing velocity-based training by hand, when he asked a Florida State strength coach about the Tendo unit and recognized his own method described back to him: watch the speed, and when it drops off, stop. Joel presses the comparison further, and the distinction is the strongest argument in the episode.

A Tendo only measures your concentric force-producing ability. But when you time a set of six, that’s contraction, relaxation, eccentric strength, coupling. For track athletes, if I was looking at jumping or speed, I’d put a lot of my money on a timed set of six.

Goss picks up the same thread in his own language, because it is what he wants his jumpers to learn in the weight room anyway.

That’s one of the things I think about in Olympic movement, especially at a moderate resistance. The athletes can learn that there is, I call it, bracing and yielding.

Joel adds the practical tell: time a set and the strained, grinding face disappears, because you cannot grind six reps that have to be fast.

“You can have too much strength”

The reason Goss cares about speed rather than load traces back to a line he heard from USATF high jump coordinator Dave Caron, which he found counterintuitive until he did the arithmetic on ground contact.

The time it takes to exert maximal force is much longer than a foot contact in track and field. When you understand that, there isn’t a reason to be squatting 700 pounds when you can’t quickly turn that into bang for your buck. I call it moving van strength.

That does not make him anti-strength. He is certified through USA Weightlifting, teaches light power snatches to 14-year-olds, and is emphatic about posterior-chain work, Nordic curls (which he calls Russian hamstring curls) and single-leg strength above all. His favorite test is not in a rack.

If you can do a pistol squat correctly, you’re an athlete. We worry about a back squat, whether we’re going to do 240 or 280, when a pistol squat affects your posture, your balance, your coordination, your range of motion.

Make it look easy

The philosophy underneath all of it, and the phrase Goss is known for, is that the best athletes look unhurried. He reaches for perceived-effort research to explain why.

In studies using force plates with punches and kicks, the athlete would be instructed to punch at 100 percent, 75, 50, and somewhere in between. It was found that an 80 percent effort, or perceived effort, was a maximal power output rather than 100 percent.

He tells athletes about the zone, the game where scoring 30 felt effortless and the baseball looked like a cantaloupe, and then he trains the thing that produces it: rhythm. He coaches a cadence into the approach, works the penultimate and last three steps, and uses tight hurdle spacings to force a quick, vertical stride rather than a reaching one. His most repeated technical rule follows from the same idea.

You push and you power through the ground for distance. You do not reach in track and field. Reaching is one of the worst things you can do as a track athlete when it comes to putting force into a sprint or a jump.

Turning plyometrics into a competition

Goss keeps plyometrics low volume and high quality, and starts athletes on skipping, hopping, galloping (which he uses to teach the penultimate) and a small “baby bound” series with the free leg held in front for hip alignment. Then he turns the whole thing into an event he calls the jumps challenge, which he first ran at Kennesaw State.

Everything was pretty much four contacts and then a landing. A standing triple, then four bounds landing in the sand, measured just like you’re in a meet. Then two hops, bound, bound, jump. You can make it as simple as needed, or as challenging.

The prizes are the part he lights up about, and they are almost comically modest: stuffed animals, homemade certificates, and T-shirts reading “flying without wings” and “make it look easy.”

They really get turned on to that. It’s very challenging, very competitive, and even at the college level it’s enjoyable. It’s one of those workouts where you’re working very hard, but you’re having fun. You’re not thinking about the labor of doing a workout.

Frequently asked questions

What are speed squats?
Speed squats are timed box squats. Goss times six reps, from the first touch of the box to the sixth, records the time, adds roughly ten pounds, and repeats. The clock, rather than a one-rep max, tells him when to stop the exercise. He learned the method from the Polish coach Tadeusz Starzynski, and it is essentially velocity-based training done with a stopwatch.

Why do athletes get faster as the weight increases?
Goss attributes it to motor-unit recruitment: the heavier bar recruits more, so the six-rep series can actually speed up over the early jumps in load. The set ends when that reverses and the time drops off, since the point is maximal efficiency at speed rather than strength endurance.

Are timed squats better than a Tendo or bar-speed sensor?
For jumpers, Joel argues yes, because a bar-speed unit reads only the concentric portion, while timing a set of six also captures the eccentric, the coupling, and the athlete’s ability to relax between reps. Goss’s method predates the sensors and measures the same drop-off principle.

Can an athlete be too strong?
Goss thinks so, citing USATF’s Dave Caron: expressing maximal force takes longer than a foot spends on the ground in track and field, so strength you cannot deploy in that window is what he calls “moving van strength.” He still trains strength hard, but favors speed, single-leg work, and posterior-chain exercises like Nordic curls and pistol squats.

How do you make plyometric training competitive?
Goss builds a “jumps challenge” from a standard construct, usually four contacts and a landing into the sand, then varies the pattern (standing triple, four bounds, hop-hop-jump) and measures every attempt like a meet. He hands out T-shirts, certificates, and small prizes, and finds athletes work far harder without experiencing it as a workout.

About the authors

Mike Goss is a track and field jumps coach with more than 25 years in the sport and 20 years as a physical education instructor. He coaches the independent track club Flying Without Wings and has coached at Parkview High School in Lilburn, Georgia, developing champions in the long, high, and triple jumps across levels from youth club athletes to Division I qualifiers, including a 12-year-old age-group world record holder in the long jump. He has written on jumps training and special strength methods for speedendurance.com.

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 Mike Goss on Just Fly Sports.