Football Speed Training With Scott Salwasser, Texas Tech

Based on Episode 69 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and Scott Salwasser, the Director of Speed and Power Development for Texas Tech Football.

Football speed training, the way Scott Salwasser runs it at Texas Tech, starts with a blunt idea: force is king, but the force that builds a 500-pound squatter is not the force that wins a 40-yard dash. Salwasser, the Director of Speed and Power Development for Texas Tech Football, spent a season force-velocity profiling his Pro Day athletes and found that nearly every one of them, big weight-room numbers and all, tested as needing more horizontal force. The fix was not a heavier squat. It was redirecting the force they already had into the ground behind them, with heavy sled work, top-end speed, and on-field practice that looks more like a game than a cone drill.

Key Takeaways

• Strong in the weight room is not the same as fast on the field. Force is specific. A great force producer can be a mediocre back squatter, so Salwasser stopped trying to turn every athlete into a 600-pound squatter and looked at how force actually shows up in a sprint.
• Force-velocity profiling finds the leak. On the MySprint app, his Pro Day group tested at roughly 50% peak ratio of force (horizontal versus vertical); elite sprinters reach about 70%. Eight weeks of targeted work pushed them into the upper 50s and low 60s.
• Load the sled, then bridge the gap. He sprints athletes at 80% of body weight, then steps the load down from heavy to light to unweighted so the potentiation carries over to a free sprint without the stumbling that follows a heavy pull.
• Football players need top-end speed. Even fast players hit top speed quickly, and the few long runs in a game often decide it, so Salwasser puts a bigger emphasis on high-velocity work for skill players.
• Transfer comes from open environments. Canned cone drills are the base of the pyramid, not the top. Salwasser builds change-of-direction transfer by making athletes respond to an unpredictable opponent, not a memorized pattern.

Force is king, but being strong is not being fast

Salwasser does not argue against strength. He calls force the king of athletic qualities. His point is narrower and more useful: producing force on the field and being a good weightlifter are two different skills, and coaches keep confusing them.

Being strong and being forceful on the field doesn’t necessarily equate to being a good weight lifter. A guy can be a great force producer and maybe not the best at a back squat or a power clean or some of the traditional measures.

His favorite example is Aaron Gordon, whom he worked with at Sparta Performance Science near the end of Gordon’s high school career. A clearly elite jumper, Gordon was a poor squatter relative to everything else he could do. Judged on the squat alone, a coach would write him off as weak and waste months chasing a number Gordon may not have been built to hit.

You put him on a trap bar deadlift and even back then, he could pull the house.

The coaching lesson is to find an athlete’s strength and let him train it heavy while you bring up the weakness on the side, rather than forcing a square peg into a round hole. Salwasser points to the sprinter Christophe Lemaitre, who reportedly lost time chasing general strength, as the cautionary version: train your weaknesses concurrently, but do not sacrifice what already makes the athlete good.

What force-velocity profiling shows about horizontal force

The tool Salwasser used to see past the barbell was force-velocity profiling with the MySprint and MyJump apps. The result that surprised him, and that opens this episode as a cold quote, was that his strongest athletes were the ones flagged as needing force.

On the MySprint, everybody tested as needing force, which a lot of people, including maybe myself at first, were surprised by. We got to remember, we’re talking about horizontal force here.

The number he watched was the ratio of force, or RF: at the start of a sprint, what percentage of the total force goes into the ground horizontally rather than vertically. His Pro Day athletes sat around 50%. Elite sprinters get up toward 70%. He did not need them to suddenly produce more total force; he needed them to point it in a more useful direction.

If I can just take what they have and redirect it more horizontally, it’s gonna have a significant impact.

Salwasser is also careful about what profiling is not. It does not replace a well-built program, and it does not mean training one quality to the exclusion of everything else. He treats it as the last 5% to 10% that separates an already good athlete from a great one.

You’re using it as a deeper insight into what the athlete needs and doesn’t need so that you can make educated guesses in your programming.

Heavy sled training, then a bridge back to free sprinting

The training intervention behind those numbers was heavy resisted sprinting, the kind of work Matt Cross, JB Morin, and Cam Joss have written about. Salwasser loads the sled to 80% of body weight and runs a deliberate progression into it.

We did 80% body weight. The progression was body weight or heavier marching early on to ingrain the feel of a deep body lean, almost like a moving wall drill, and then we progressed to sprinting shorter distances at 80% body weight on the sled, out to 20 yards.

The detail most coaches miss is what happens after the heavy pull. Going straight from a heavily loaded sprint to a free sprint feels strange, and the potentiation gets buried under bad mechanics.

If you go straight from the heavily loaded sprints, in theory you’re gonna get great potentiation, but any of us that have tried it knows what you see: guys stumble, because it feels weird.

His fix is a step-down complex: heavy, then light, then unweighted, inside the same session. Lowering the load in stages keeps the athlete coordinated while preserving the potentiation.

I would go from the 80% to the 20% to unweighted, and it was almost kind of uncanny how good it looked, because the decrease in load was just enough that proprioceptively they were able to carry out what they were trying to do without stumbling, but we still got the potentiation effect.

For a coach, the practical takeaway is that resisted sprint training is not just about the heaviest sled in the room. The drop-off back to bodyweight is where the skill transfers, and a heavy-to-light-to-unweighted ladder is a simple way to build it. As Salwasser puts it, the methods themselves are rarely the hard part.

A lot of the stuff that works is simple. What’s complex is your understanding and application of it.

Why football players need top-end speed

Many football strength coaches stop their sprint work at 10 and 20 yards. Salwasser thinks that leaves performance and durability on the table, and he leans on Ken Clark’s and Cam Joss’s work to make the case for more high-velocity running.

You run your tens and your twenties, but what happens when one of your athletes takes a handoff, breaks it, he’s heading for the house? Are you as a strength coach gonna run out there and say, no, no, no, you can’t run further than 20 yards?

His reasoning is both about the big plays and about what fast running does for everything else. Even fast football players reach top speed quickly, so time spent at those higher velocities feeds back into acceleration and into the few decisive runs in a game.

You may only have two or three plays in a game where guys are running 60, 70 yards, but more than likely, those are two or three plays that might decide the game.

The application is to keep real top-speed exposure in the plan, especially for skill players, rather than capping every sprint at 20 yards out of fear of hamstring strains. Salwasser’s point is that the athlete will run those distances in a game whether or not the coach trained for it.

Position specificity and earning advanced training

None of this means every player gets the same menu. Salwasser is emphatic that the demands of the position decide how much the weight room and the sprint profile matter for a given athlete.

You have to look at the demands of your sport, but also your position. I would be a lot more bullish about the interior linemen’s output on squat, bench, clean than I would on an outside receiver, because that’s gonna be more directly tied to the demands of their position.

Sprint profiling, he says, earns its keep most for the athletes farthest from the ball, where acceleration and top speed are closer to the job. He also limits the deep individualization to athletes who have earned it. Most of a 100-man roster is developmental, and a genetically gifted athlete with a low training age is not the same as an athlete who is truly advanced.

Just because they’re genetically blessed, you can’t let that fool you into thinking that they’re elite at training. They’re just elite at their sport through God-given gifts.

For most of the roster, the answer is a well-built, well-coached general program. Force-velocity profiling and its targeted interventions are reserved for the veterans and Pro Day athletes who already have the base and need the final few percent.

On-field transfer: past the canned cone drill

The second half of the conversation moves from the weight room to the field, where Salwasser, drawing on Sean Mishka’s work, argues that change-of-direction training has to graduate from memorized patterns to open, reactive problems. He frames it with a question about his own running back.

Why would the first time you have your running back run 60 yards be with 11 angry men chasing him and them holding the football?

Running cones in a predetermined pattern is fine as a base, he says, but it is only the base of the pyramid. Coaches already test whether a strength movement transfers to the competitive exercise; Salwasser extends the same question to the environment.

We’ll always talk about transfer of training in terms of strength movements. Does this movement transfer to the competitive exercise? Well, does the environment transfer to the competitive exercise?

His next step is to make athletes solve real problems against an unpredictable opponent, which is often Salwasser himself acting as a defender, so the movement is wired into the athlete’s subconscious instead of rehearsed.

Can we get the environment, can we get the brain, can we get the behaviors to transfer from closed environments to open, unpredictable environments? I think that’s really the next threshold.

That same philosophy makes him cautious about overcoaching. An athlete who is told exactly what to do learns to wait for the cue rather than own the movement.

They need to be able to learn the movement on their own. Early in my career, I used to overcoach, and what I found was I would improve the movement pattern that day, and then the next week they were back. They’re like a DVD player. It only works when I press play.

Case study: five tenths off a linebacker’s 40

The clearest proof of the approach was a middle linebacker who, by reputation, was a weight-room warrior and a poor mover. Salwasser pulled his MySprint data on the call.

I actually had one guy that improved by five tenths of a second.

Across roughly two months, the athlete improved on all three of the things that matter for acceleration: more force relative to body weight, more of that force directed horizontally, and the ability to hold the horizontal direction longer before going vertical.

He ran a 4.61 40 on pro day, which for a middle linebacker, there was maybe only two guys at the combine that ran faster than that.

Asked how a self-described non-athlete got that fast, Salwasser keeps the explanation simple, which is the point of the whole profiling exercise: find the few levers that matter and pull them.

More force relative to body weight, directed more horizontally, and directed horizontally over a greater period of time. And there it was.

Frequently asked questions

How do you get faster for football?
Salwasser’s answer is to train the right kind of force, not just more of it. Build general strength as a base, then use heavy sled work and top-end sprinting to direct force horizontally, and rehearse change of direction against a real, unpredictable opponent rather than a fixed cone pattern. He also keeps top-speed running in the plan for skill players, since fast players reach top speed quickly and the longest runs often decide games.

How can you improve your 40-yard dash?
In Salwasser’s Pro Day group, the gains came from force-velocity profiling plus heavy resisted sprints. Athletes who increased their force relative to body weight, raised their peak ratio of force from about 50% toward the low 60s, and learned to hold horizontal force longer cut one to two tenths off their 40, with one linebacker improving by as much as five tenths.

Do sled pushes and heavy sleds make you faster?
Salwasser uses heavy sled sprints at about 80% of body weight as a self-limiting drill: you cannot get upright and pull that load fast, so the athlete is forced into a deep lean and better acceleration mechanics. The key is to step the load down from heavy to light to unweighted in the same session so the new feel transfers to a free sprint instead of leaving the athlete stumbling.

What is force-velocity profiling?
It is a way to measure how an athlete produces force in a sprint or jump, using apps like MySprint and MyJump. For sprinting, it shows the ratio of force (how much force goes into the ground horizontally versus vertically) and how that ratio decreases as the athlete speeds up. Salwasser treats it as a diagnostic for the final few percent, not a replacement for sound general training.

Is weight-room strength the same as field speed?
No. Salwasser’s repeated theme is that force is specific. An athlete can post big squat, clean, and bench numbers and still test as needing horizontal force, because directing force into the ground behind you while sprinting is a different skill than pushing a bar vertically. That is why he profiles athletes instead of judging them on the barbell alone.

About the authors

Scott Salwasser was the Director of Speed and Power Development for Texas Tech Football at the time of this episode, and previously worked at Sparta Performance Science. A longtime private and collegiate strength coach, he was the first guest ever on the Just Fly Performance Podcast and has written for Just Fly Sports on linear and lateral training and on force-velocity profiling for the 40-yard dash. [VERIFY current role before publishing.]

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 who focuses on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Scott Salwasser on Just Fly Sports.