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As in all walks of life, mistakes are fairly common in sports: a wide receiver drops a catch, a soccer player misses a penalty, or an athlete makes a small technical error. Generally, these errors aren’t catastrophic and death or serious injury in sports are, fortunately, extremely rare events.

However, mistakes can have a huge effect on performance outcomes. Many knockout matches in soccer are decided by a penalty shootout, which continues until a player misses. The 1994 World Cup was settled by such a method, with Roberto Baggio, that year’s runner-up in the Ballon d’Or (the award given to the world’s best player), missing the decisive kick. Mistakes can also happen outside of competition. A coach might make a programming error, for example, which can lead to underperformance or injury having a major negative effect on an athlete’s career.

The Person Approach

How we view errors can have a significant impact on how we go about preventing them. Traditionally—and even today—we most often take a person approach.

Here, errors are viewed as being driven by the person making the mistake: through inattention, carelessness, recklessness, lack of ability, lack of knowledge, or any other perceived moral or personal weakness. When using the person approach, we blame the person who made the mistake, view it as their problem, and move on.

In the case of Roberto Baggio, he got the blame for missing the penalty. In a 4x100m relay, the athlete who causes a botched changeover gets blamed—something I know from experience.

The person approach is problematic. As a competitor at the Olympic Games with a very strong chance of winning a medal, I was highly motivated to not make an error. And yet, I still did. Roberto Baggio needed to score his penalty and absolutely did not want to miss. And yet, he did. People who make errors typically don’t want to make the error, and yet we view these errors as often being due to a fault in, or by, that person.

Blaming the error on the person also prevents lessons from being learned. We criticize the person for being flawed in some way and move on, only to make the same mistake again on a team or program level. In my relay example, a person was blamed, the team moved on, and then was either disqualified or did not finish in the 2010 European Championships, the 2011 and 2013 World Championships, and the 2012 Olympic Games. Clearly, the required learning—what was needed to prevent errors from happening in the future—did not happen.

Similarly, Italy’s football coaches could—and did—blame Roberto Baggio for missing his World Cup Final penalty. But they were destined to have players miss penalties in the future—as happened at the 1998 World Cup (where Baggio, in a storyline of redemption, actually scored his penalty try).

It’s easy to blame the person, but as discussed in Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, such an approach actually prevents adaptation; meaning, we are destined to make the same mistake time and time again.

The System Approach

In contrast to the person approach, we have the system approach. Here, humans are viewed as being fallible, with mistakes and errors almost being expected. In this approach, the context of why the mistake happened is analyzed and understood, taking into account broader, systemic factors. So, when a player misses a penalty in a shootout, a person utilizing the system approach would explore why this happened by asking questions such as:

• Had the player practiced penalties under conditions simulating competition?
• Were they able to regulate their emotions?
• Did they have a set routine?

In the case of my relay, I was running last leg for only the second time in my life and had been regularly leaving early in training sessions—an error that was uncorrected prior to the competition. By taking a systems approach to the relay, we can build out some important lessons: relay teams need to have plenty of competitive practice, athletes need to be confident and experienced in running their leg, and errors in training need to be noticed, highlighted, and fixed.

This approach, viewing the error of the person as a symptom of problems in the system, prevents those systems—relay teams, soccer teams, etc.—from being doomed to make the same mistakes time after time. Essentially, instead of asking who made the mistake, we need to ask why the mistake occurred.

Essentially, instead of asking who made the mistake, we need to ask why the mistake occurred, says @craig100m. Share on X

This in turn has a knock-on effect. If we use mistakes as a learning experience—which we can in this scenario because we’re not scared of being blamed or motivated to blame someone else—we’re able to take steps to avoid the error in the future.

When a relay team is disqualified, athletes are very quick to distance themselves from being identified as the cause of the mistake, because they know they will be blamed for it—something that is even more common and unpleasant in the social media age. If, instead, the relay coach and team took a system approach—with no individual blame being apportioned—they could be open and honest about why the mistake occurred, reducing the chances of it happening in future.

Reducing the shame, embarrassment, or punishment associated with making a mistake is a crucial step in being able to avoid the same mistake later on, as it allows a more open and honest discussion around why it happened. If the same mistakes occur repeatedly—e.g. a relay team that is repeatedly disqualified—it’s likely not an issue with the people, but the system itself.

Avec Fromage

What does this have to do with cheese?

A leading error researcher (yes, that is a thing) James Reason developed the “Swiss cheese model of system accidents” as a method of explaining and examining error. This model holds that any system has a set of barriers that prevent accidents and errors from occurring, which are represented as slices of cheese. In the case of a nuclear power plant, these defense systems would include sensors to detect when something was awry, alarms to notify human controllers, and automatic shutdowns to prevent catastrophe chain reaction events from occurring.

From a sports coaching perspective, a common accident is a training injury, which is a complex event with many feed-in causative factors. If we view injuries (somewhat simplistically) as an interaction between load (both acute and chronic) and tissue tolerance, then there are a number of defense barriers that can prevent the accident from occurring. These include building tissue tolerance, identifying when tissue tolerance is insufficient or compromised, understanding acute load, and monitoring chronic load.

Ideally, all of these defensive layers are intact and resistant to errors, strength imbalances are identified through effective and validated methods, and load is fully understood and quantified. However, as Reason writes, each defense layer is instead full of varying holes—much like a slice of Swiss cheese. However, unlike Swiss cheese—in which the holes are permanent and stable—in the Swiss cheese model, the holes are fluid, opening and closing in line with environmental, person-based, and systematic variations.

An important part of this model is that any single hole in the cheese does not cause a bad outcome, because the subsequent defense layer (or slice of cheese) offers protection. In extreme circumstances, however, the holes in the cheese align in such a way that an error or accident occurs. As a result, to avoid errors, we need to:

1. Develop sufficient layers of protection.
2. Ensure these layers are resilient enough to not fail—or develop holes—in the same place or time.

Holes in the cheese can arise for two main reasons: active failures and latent conditions. An active failure is an erroneous (or, in the original model, an unsafe) act committed by people within the system: a missed scoring opportunity or leaving too early in the relay. Importantly, active failures have a short-lived, highly acute impact on the resistance of the system to error.

Leaving early in a relay is an active failure, but it’s also “savable”—the incoming runner can call for the outgoing runner’s hand earlier, or the outgoing runner can slow down slightly. Active failures are typically the obvious mistakes that are identified as the reason the larger scale error occurred—but, as detailed above, they are often a symptom of underlying issues as opposed to the direct cause.

By focusing on active failures as the direct cause, we are doomed to continue to make the same mistakes in the future. Instead, we need to focus on the second of the two common causes of holes: latent conditions.

Reason refers to latent conditions as “resident pathogens”: problems in the system that increase the downstream chances of error. Any decision in “design”—which, within a sporting context, includes both the training program and individual training session design—can have downstream, unintended consequences, which are often both hard to predict in advance and challenging to identify after the fact.

Latent conditions can serve to increase the size of the hole, the time the hole is open, or both, as well as create conditions which increase the risk of a mistake being made. Returning to the sprint relay example, latent conditions might include a lack of funding from the governing body to conduct sufficient relay practices to mitigate the risk of a mistake, or a lack of speedy feedback to the athlete when a mistake is made, preventing rapid corrections from being made and practiced.

To reduce the risk of errors, and the magnitude of the consequence of these errors, we therefore need to be able to:

1. Reduce and limit the occurrence of errors.
2. Build tolerance within our system, such that errors are easily identified and better tolerated to reduce the risk of a catastrophic failure.

Again, the example of a sprint relay comes to mind: by exposing the relay team to high-level competitions before the major Championships—along with developing realistic training sessions—we can expose the athletes to a variety of scenarios from which they can learn, adapt, and make the correct response when under pressure.

Relay exchanges rarely go exactly to plan; there is often some combination of the outgoing athletes leaving early or late, or their hand being in not quite the right position, or interference or pressure from competing teams. The athletes involved in the changeover—the incoming athlete in particular—need to actively manage the changeover, making rapid decisions under pressure to allow the change to happen.

Practicing changeovers in non-competitive conditions allows for the basics to be learned, but does not expose the athletes to these pressures and decisions, reducing tolerance in the system—in this scenario, the relay exchange. Exposure to relay changeovers under competitive conditions increases the library of potential scenarios—and the means of successfully executing a changeover in these scenarios—that the athletes have access to, building tolerance to error within the system.

Towards Fondue

Expanding further on the Swiss cheese model, in 2014 Yunqiu Li and Harold Thimbleby developed the hot cheese model. This is a more active model than the original, with its purpose being to highlight the interaction between defense layers.

In the original model, the defense layers—represented by the slices of cheese—are discrete and separate. In the hot cheese model, the layers of cheese are visualized as slowly melting, dripping down onto—and therefore affecting—the next layer down. If an error slips through a previous defense layer, it exerts a force on the subsequent slice of cheese, increasing possibility of a hole developing.

In the sprint relay example, realistic training sessions make athletes better able to complete a changeover under pressure. As a result, implementing realistic training is, in the case of the model, akin to inserting a slice of cheese.

During the realistic training sessions, however, if the athletes make errors that are either not identified or corrected—for example, being inconsistent around leaving on the checkmark—then this puts pressure on the newly inserted slice of cheese, increasing the risk of a hole or a drip developing.

Conversely, introducing this new layer of cheese in the form of competitive practice may introduce a new risk to the system—perhaps the athletes become overconfident in their abilities to complete a changeover based on their limited success in training so they don’t take an upcoming competition seriously enough.

A Process (Not Processed)

These cheese models can teach us how to support athlete performance. We must be able to detect errors by actively searching for them and replicating the scenarios under which they might occur.

Much like a fire drill can detect how efficiently a group of people can evacuate a building, regular tests of athletes can allow us to understand how they are progressing. However, anyone who has taken part in a fire drill will recall that, in almost all scenarios, they don’t actually believe there is a fire; consequently, their behavior might not mimic what they would do in an actual fire.

Much like a fire drill can detect how efficiently a group of people can evacuate a building, regular tests of athletes can allow us to understand how they are progressing, says @craig100m. Share on X

While we probably can’t start setting fire to buildings, in sports we can expose athletes to much more realistic training scenarios, either by utilizing representative design principles, or by exposing athletes to lower level “practice” competitions prior to a major championship, which would allow them to better identify any errors in their preparation. If the error we’re seeking to avoid is injury, then early identification of risk and detection of issues is important.

Secondly, it’s important to keep in mind that errors are learning opportunities. By having a blame culture in place, learning will be limited since people will seek to cover their backs and avoid taking ownership of mistakes.

By framing mistakes as errors within the system—latent conditions—as opposed to individual mistakes, we can better reduce the chances of this happening in the future. If a mistake is made by an individual, asking, “Why did the person make that mistake?” is far more useful than thinking, “That person made a mistake, and is therefore inept.”

It’s important to keep in mind that errors are learning opportunities, says @craig100m. Share on X

We must also develop defensive barriers—slices of cheese—to reduce the risk of future errors. Crucially though, these barriers must not unnecessarily constrain athlete performance. The easiest way to never miss a penalty kick in soccer is to not take one…but this isn’t an option. Instead, using training and other methods, we must increase the capacity of athletes to be resistant to making an error—perhaps by making them better able to perform under pressure, or having a wider library of potential solutions that they can call upon to solve any given problem.

Finally, and in line with the hot cheese model, we need to be wary that whenever we introduce an additional defense barrier there can be unexpected downstream effects.

For example, by implementing an increased number of relay practices, we potentially reduce the risk of errors made in competition; conversely, we also increase the exposure of athletes to high speed running which, if they’re not resilient enough to handle it, increases their risk of injury. Often, we can’t predict these downstream effects, so a period of heightened alert after making a change is often required to detect any potential issues.

There is a well-worn saying that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” The Swiss and hot cheese models of error are imperfect yet important models which allow us to better understand why mistakes are made in sports, and how we can do a much better job of reducing their incidence in the future.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

I have previously decried the current narrative that exists around training for surfing performance: a type of quasi-preparation with methods plagued by futility and driven by surf websites (and even the coaches of elite surfers). The approach is typical of what we would refer to in our own circles as Mickey Mouse S&C—a bit of a joke. My criticisms are not an effort to fun-sponge and restrain surfing’s essential, free-spirited culture. Rather, my point is to clarify that evidenced-based methods of preparation are what work and provide the potential for surfers to actually have more fun by fueling progression, keeping them in the water and allowing them to have even greater confidence in their abilities.

Due to their low training ages and high surfing frequencies, the development of whole body strength and power would be the appropriate first step in a performance model for surfers. Nevertheless, considering the sport’s intermittent nature and requirement for high levels of speed and fitness, the training of the appropriate energy systems is another critical element.

Typical approaches to this training for surfers range from things that look really naughty, hard, and fast like your classic battle ropes, prowler pushing, and sand sprints, to things that look boring and tragic like swimming endless lengths in the pool with the OAPs (old-age pensioners). Simply, these approaches do very little for replicating the unique demands of the sport. They are void of specificity.

Get creative in trying to make these approaches for speed and fitness development for surfers as fun as surfing. Share on X

What follows are approaches that work. My challenge to you as the coach is to read this, get out surfing yourself, direct your beaten body in the direction of the shower, and then sit down to get creative in trying to make these approaches for speed and fitness development as fun as what you just experienced.

Speed in Surfing

What’s Happening Here?

Speed (alactic capacity) in this context does not refer to the speed of riding a wave—this is too dependent on a myriad of uncontrollable factors, such as the location’s bathymetry, type of break (beach, reef, point, etc.), and size of the wave. Instead, in this context speed refers to a surfer’s maximal sprint paddling (MSP) speed, ability to change direction (COD), and agility in the water. We know surfing involves a lot of paddling, but much of it is submaximal. All-out MSP efforts account for only approximately 5% of total time in a surf session¹, yet they provide a platform for the whole purpose of surfing: riding waves.

Higher levels of MSP and COD allow a surfer to:²

• Catch steeper waves or take off on a more critical area of the wave.
• Have a faster entry into waves, enhancing initial momentum and number of potential maneuvers.
• Reposition, gain a positional advantage over other surfers in the lineup, and better negotiate the ocean.
• Have less chance of potentially getting “caught inside” and taking a beating.

For recreational surfers, the benefits of the above are obvious. For competitive surfers, all of these will maximize the following judging criteria in competitions:

• Evidence of commitment/degree of difficulty
• Combination, variety, and innovation of maneuvers
• Display of speed, power, and flow

How Do We Improve It?

Speed and agility, as in most sports, are central in surfing to both excelling and entertaining. Thus, they should be sought insatiably. Paddling velocity itself is a function of stroke length (meters per stroke cycle) and stroke rate (strokes per minute), and improving either of these technical parameters independently has been found to result in improved speed.³ COD has yet to be studied in surfing, but we know from the research that it is underpinned by MSP and that their mechanical determinants are similar. Thus, to enhance MSP and COD, a combination of typical approaches that are also used on land should be employed with surf athletes:

1. Improve the related underlying capacities in the gym.

For most surf athletes, neural adaptations to strength training should be sought while minimizing hypertrophic adaptations. This is due to a) relative strength being found to be more influential than absolute strength with high force-to-mass ratios desired and b) neural adaptations appearing to be primarily responsible for increases in swimming performance.³ You must take the surfer’s needs into account, but all else being equal, the more propulsive force a surfer can apply in a stroke, the faster their MSP will be. When the upper body (UB) strength standards are in sight, employing exercises across the load-velocity spectrum will ensure the development of other key capacities such as RFD and power.

2. Practice moving fast and changing direction at high speed.

Introducing max effort sprint paddling efforts with long rest periods (with and without changes of direction) over both accelerative (~5-10 meters) and max velocity distances (~15-20 meters) will provide a stimulus absent from most surfers’ regimens and provide novelty to the body in the form of recruitment of fast twitch type II fibers.³ Pitching athletes against each other for a total volume of ~100-125 meters in paired or group “racing” efforts will provide competition and ensure 100% effort. Coupled with improving the underlying capacities, both of these approaches should be the coach’s first port of call.

3. Impact paddling technique.

This could take many coaches down a rabbit hole, but it doesn’t have to. The whole goal is to reduce horizontal and lateral drag in the water.³ You should address bad habits like head rolling (side to side) and slumped posture. A high chest through thoracic extension (“banana” shape) optimizes stroke length and allows a more vertical elbow on entry, providing a more powerful stroke. You should also examine turning efficiency from 45 degrees (repositioning/redirecting) to 180 degrees (turning to then paddle for a wave). Consistently reinforcing technique through simple cues will show gradual improvements in these skills.

4. “Transfer bridge” the underlying capacities through resisted paddling work.

This is a novel method that, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be researched in surfers. However, it has been shown to have significant effects on performance in swimmers.³ It has also been proven to provide a transfer bridge between newly established capacities developed in the gym and the target task.⁴ For example, resisted paddling may provide the opportunity to apply newfound UB strength in the relevant intermuscular pattern of recruitment when paddling.

You could add resistance using a band or bungee (you can hold it or attach it to a diving block to the waist of the surfer) or chute (attached to the waist of the surfer). Another option is MSP and COD efforts using very low volume boards (~20-25 liters), slightly increasing resistance and energy cost due to a higher drag across the surface of the water, which may lead to potential improvements in speed on the surfer’s usual board.⁵ Not dissimilar to resisted sprinting on land, a stimulus of both higher resistance (e.g., using a chute over accelerative distances) and lower resistance (e.g., using lighter resistance band over max velocity distances) could be effective.

5. Reduce fat mass.

Shifting some “nonfunctional” mass is a tried and tested way to aid speed development by reducing resistive forces in the water and increasing force-to-mass ratios. A no-brainer.

Overall, you should implement a combination of these five approaches. Surfers should be reminded of MSP’s importance as a discriminator between different levels of surfers, and that surfers achieving better competition results have been shown to be faster. Dr. Jeremy Sheppard, formerly of the Hurley Performance Centre in Australia, recommends competitive surfers shoot for an MSP over 2.0 m/s.⁶

You should ideally train and test surf athletes for speed on their board in a standard 25-meter indoor or outdoor pool to eliminate the effects of wind and currents that might disturb training sessions in the ocean. Suggested acceleration (5-meter sprint) and max velocity (15-meter sprint) standards are outlined below, with suitable COD tests yet to be established.

Aerobic and Anaerobic Fitness in Surfing

What’s Happening Here?

The influence of speed on the sport is undeniable, but what use is it if a surfer isn’t fit enough to recover and repeat-sprint continuously throughout a one- to five-hour session? Waves pass unridden (or other surfers take them), they wipeout and get an unnecessary hold-down, they get caught inside by a rogue set, or they can’t complete their maneuvers when on the wave itself. For competitive surfers, the ultimate cost of this is reflected in lower scores and rankings; for recreational surfers, it’s unnecessary disappointment. Consequently, in a sport characterized by repeated high-intensity intermittent paddling efforts combined with multiple continuous endurance bouts, surfers need to have well-developed aerobic and anaerobic capacities.⁷

The influence of speed on surfing is undeniable, but what use is it if a surfer isn’t fit enough to recover and repeat-sprint continuously throughout a 1- to 5-hour session? Share on X

As discussed, MSP occurs predominantly when paddling into waves and paddling for the outside when a big set rolls through. However, surfers also paddle at moderately high intensities when paddling against currents, wind, and advancing waves or to reposition themselves in the lineup. Low-intensity paddling takes place across longer distances, when paddling out to the “peak” or takeoff zone (where the waves begin to break).

Mean paddling bouts have been found to be ~20-30 seconds, with the majority (~60%) between 1 and 10 seconds.² Yet, this does not conclude the demands on fitness qualities for surfing. Paddling efforts are interspersed with duck diving oncoming waves and breath holding in wave hold-downs after getting caught inside or wiping out. Coupled with paddling, both of these place immense demands on the surfer’s aerobic and anaerobic abilities due to their hypoxic nature, as well as the potential element of danger. It must be noted that the conditions and type of break will always dictate the intensity and duration of any efforts performed in a given session. Swell size, swell period, wind speed/direction, tides, and currents all determine the work required: Mother Nature calls the shots.

Tynemouth is my home break here in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, and most days it is a breeze to paddle out and duck dive my way to the peak—seven duck dives and a couple of minutes’ work. In contrast, on my last trip to Dominical in Costa Rica, I watched a surfer take just shy of 40 duck dives to get outside and well over 10 minutes to reach the peak. Nearly 40 duck dives is obscene; most surfers would whip their board around and get themselves right back to the beach to try again another day.

As for breath holds when getting caught inside or after wipeouts, these are usually of a short duration (~2-4 seconds) and can be successive. This would be bearable when calm and with a peaceful resting heart rate, but throw in big surf, adrenaline, lots of paddling, a boatload of duck dives, and long session durations, and you can have some severely taxing work taking place.

Recovery periods can vary hugely from session to session, again heavily dictated by the conditions. In some sessions, the surfer can spend up to 55% of total time just sitting on their board waiting for lulls to pass and the waves to surge back in.² More than half of a session spent sitting stationary can seem like a lot, but keep in mind that typical surf session durations can be outrageous. In other sessions, recovery periods can be very short, and surfers must have the ability to recover rapidly (64% of recovery periods are between one second and 10 seconds).¹

It also appears that there are significantly higher work-to-rest ratios at beach breaks compared to point breaks due to the different bathymetry. Further, point breaks involve more low-intensity continuous durations of paddling due to longer rides, whereas beach breaks can see more frequent but shorter high- and moderate-intensity paddle efforts.⁸

Clearly, from the demands outlined, surfing strongly stresses all energy systems. Share on X

The strenuous actions of paddling, repetitive duck diving, breath holding, and then waveriding provides a melting pot of effects: moderate (140 b·pm^-1) to high (190 b·pm^-1) heart rates, 6.8 to 8 mmol·l^-1 in peak blood lactate, and a total paddling distance covered of 1-2 kilometers in sessions.⁹ Surfers have also been recorded as having VO_2peak values of 44 to 50 (mL·kg·min^-1), comparable to swimming.⁷ This is significant, given the fact that VO_2peak tests of the UB are around 30% lower than LB tests (running, cycling, etc.) due to peripheral factors, such as earlier onset of lactate threshold in the lesser muscle mass of the UB, rather than central cardiovascular limitations.³ Clearly, from the demands outlined, surfing strongly stresses all energy systems.

How Do We Improve It?

Before implementing fitness sessions, there are two issues you must consider:

• With access to consistent waves, both competitive and recreational surfers can accumulate some serious paddling volume and fatigue.
• Competitive surfers can often have an intense and unpredictable competition and travel schedule that leaves little opportunity for capacity development.

The physical development of surfers in wave-rich areas can prove much more difficult than those in less consistent areas. These surfers can rack up typical surfing lows of 12 hours per week and highs of 25 hours. This is 8-12 hours of paddling per week. If the waves are firing and the conditions are perfect, 40 hours of surfing per week has been recorded.¹⁰ This is roughly 20 hours of paddling in a week!

This is all good fun for a surfer, and the desire to get some decent waves can mask the sheer volume of work. These surfers already perform a lot of specific fitness work. The addition of extra paddling sessions during or following a spike of favorable and consistent surf would be counterproductive and would risk overuse/repetitive injuries by adding unnecessary training load to a surfer already under the grips of fatigue.

The addition of extra paddling sessions during or following a spike of favorable surf would be counterproductive and risk overuse/repetitive injuries by adding unnecessary training load. Share on X

Consequently, you must carefully plan specific fitness sessions by chatting with the surfer and tracking surf forecasts. If the area’s waves are firing, surfing will take priority. However, no matter where you are based, there are often distinct seasonal flat spells. In the U.K., summer is often flat on and off for weeks on end—autumn into winter is when the beaches and reefs emerge from their slumber and begin to light up. Summer is then our down season and our primary window of opportunity for the development of physical capacities. Even during surf season, however, there can be times when the waves turn mediocre or even flat and the surfer will spend less time in the water. These lower-volume weeks are the secondary window of opportunity to integrate fitness sessions.

In these windows of opportunity, a lower volume/load and time-efficient approach to improving fitness is practical. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) would meet these requirements, while also replicating surfing’s repeated high-intensity paddle efforts with short rest periods. Buchheit & Laursen have discussed at length the different protocols that you can apply here:¹¹

• Short intervals (SI) have been shown to improve aerobic capacity (endurance paddling) and moderately improve repeat sprint ability.
• Sprint interval training (SIT) (and likely repeat sprint training (RST)) significantly improves repeat sprint ability but does not appear to improve aerobic capacity.¹² At first, this is surprising, as you would expect both types of training to more strongly assist one another; but it appears that they provide different physiological adaptations, and this reinforces the need for the implementation of a mixed methods approach.
• Repeat high-intensity effort ability (RHIE), pioneered by Gabbett in the team sport context, should also be considered.¹³ RHIE may present a highly specific method of improving surf fitness through the inclusion of a combination of key actions (MSP, submax paddling, duck diving, breath holding, waveriding, etc.) with short rest periods, precisely meeting the demands we want. Given that surfers are commonly engaged in such bouts, it is likely to be beneficial.⁸ However, quite understandably, a RHIE test is yet to be established for surfing.

Coaches can implement the protocols in table 2 with only modest increases in paddling volumes, limiting the training load on a surfer. I would recommend 2-3 times per week in the down season and 1-2 times per week during small/mediocre swells or in transition phases between competitions.

During these transition phases, the selection of an appropriate protocol would be useful. For example, if a surfer’s upcoming competition is at a point break, you could use SIs to prepare them for the longer durations of continuous paddling. For a beach break and small surf conditions, the emphasis could switch to RST or SIT to emphasize shorter, more high-intensity efforts.⁸ RHIE could act as a tool to prepare for competitions with big waves and the chaotic nature of these conditions (wave hold-downs, crazy wipeouts, and lots of duck diving). Finally, various types of breath-hold work are also a necessity throughout; both when calm and in more taxing situations, e.g., successive duck diving without a breath, resisted swimming underwater, and underwater boxing. All protocols have their place if thoughtfully planned.

Like speed training, surfers should perform both training (table 2 above) and testing (table 3 below) for fitness on their board (and in a pool) to retain specificity. It is tempting to just use swimming for these protocols, but this does not replicate the UB specificity, appropriate body positions, and paddling demands of the sport closely enough. Swimming has its place, but you should consider it more of a method of cross-training for surfing along with classic paddleboarding (alternating arms and double arm), ski erg (seated or standing), and burpee work (into a surf stance), applying the same protocols in table 2.

Swimming has its place, but you should consider it more of a method of cross-training for surfing, along with classic paddleboarding, ski erg, and burpee work. Share on X

Suggested standards for aerobic and anaerobic fitness are outlined below. For the 400-meter endurance paddle, place two buoys 2.5 meters in from each end to provide a 20-meter distance. The surfer would paddle 10 laps (up and back), turning 180 degrees each time at the buoys. Record the total time, and you can then calculate MAS.

The repeated sprint paddling test (RSPT) would involve 10 x 15-meter maximal sprint efforts, going every 40 seconds. The RSPT would determine the surfer’s total time for the 10 efforts along with the decrement (fatigue index) between efforts (first 15-meter effort minus the slowest effort). A decrease in either of these would provide potential evidence of improved RSA. Unfortunately, however, RSPT standards haven’t been established, as there’s little data in the research.

Make It Fun

Throughout this series, I have tried to sidestep the fluffy BS that permeates surf training and build a performance model based on the available evidence. I have attempted to summarize this model by addressing the big qualities: first strength and power; now speed and fitness.

S&C coaches working with surfers are challenged to not just utilize effective methods of physical preparation, but also convince surfers of a method’s benefits and achieve engagement by making enjoyment the chief objective of sessions. As coaches, we hope that every athlete we work with will be diligent, curious, self-reliant, and coachable. The reality is that most surfers probably don’t like to train. They like to play.

Surfing is the ultimate form of play—and they do loads of it. Waveriding accounts for only ~4-8% of total time in a surf session.³ Yet, if the conditions and waves are right, these could be the sweetest combined seconds of a surfer’s month, year, or even their life.

Exciting and competitive training sessions within a novel program of development can help maximize surfing’s peak experiences. Share on X

As coaches, we aim to maximize these peak experiences. Exciting and competitive training sessions within a novel program of development can facilitate this. If we do this and deliver results, we will contribute to a change in the narrative around surf training.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

References

1. Tran, T.T., Lundgren, L., Secomb, J., et al. “Comparison of Physical Capacities Between Non-Selected and Selected Elite Male Competitive Surfers for the National Junior Team.” International Journal of Sports Physiology & Performance. 2014;10(2):178-182.

2. Farley, O.R.L., Harris, N.K., and Kilding, A.E. “Physiological Demands of Competitive Surfing.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2011;26(7):1887-1896.

3. Crowley, E., Harrison, A., and Lyons, M. “The Impact of Resistance Training on Swimming Performance: A Systematic Review.” Sports Medicine. 2017;47(3).

4. Brearley, S. and Bishop, C. “Transfer of Training: How Specific Should We Be?” NSCA Strength & Conditioning Journal. 2018;41(3):97-109.

5. Ekmecic, V., Ning, J., Cleveland, T.G. et al. “Increasing surfboard volume reduces energy expenditure during paddling.” Ergonomics. 2016;60(9):1-20.

6. Sheppard, J. “Masters & servants: How the preparation framework serves the performance model.” UKSCA Conference Presentation. 2017.

7. Farley, O.R.L., Harris, N.K., and Kilding, A. “Anaerobic and Aerobic Fitness Profiling of Competitive Surfers.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2011;26(8):2243-2248.

8. Farley, O.R.L. “Assessment of Competitive Requirements, Repeated Sprint Paddle Ability and Trainability of Paddling Performance in Surfers.” Edith Cowan University Ph.D. Thesis. 2016.

9. Farley, O.R.L., Abbiss, C.R., and Sheppard, J.M. “Testing Protocols for Profiling of Surfers’ Anaerobic and Aerobic Fitness: A Review. NSCA Strength and Conditioning Journal. 2016;38(5):52-65.

10. Sheppard, J. “HIITing the lip in professional surfing.” HIITscience.com. 2018.

11. Buchheit, M. and Laursen, P.B. “High-intensity interval training, solutions to the programming puzzle: Part I: cardiopulmonary emphasis.” Sports Medicine. 2013;43(5):313-338.

12. Farley, O.R.L., Secomb, J.L., Parsonage, J., and Lundgren, L.E. “Five Weeks of Sprint and High-Intensity Interval Training Improves Paddling Performance in Adolescent Surfers. The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.2016;30(9).

13. Austin, D.J., Gabbett, T.J., and Jenkins, D.J. “Repeated high-intensity exercise in professional rugby league. The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2011;25(7):1898-1904.

What links crows, dolphins, otters, mongooses, and octopuses? No, this is not the setup to a bad joke. These guys appear to be the only members of the animal kingdom to creatively use tools outside of the great apes, the animal family that we humans belong to. The apparent reasons for belonging to such an exclusive club can be saved for another discussion on another day, but what is clear is that animals have consistently figured out that applying knowledge to objects can get them more of what they want.

At its heart, this is what links all technologies—to save time, money, or effort per unit of productivity. Despite being wildly different in their application, the great technological leaps of human evolution, from agriculture to metallurgy to industrialization to digital technologies like computing and the internet, share this common trait. And today I’ll make the case that, for these reasons, in sport we still have much to learn when it comes to our use of technology.

In sport we still have much to learn when it comes to our use of technology, says @RUGBY_STR_COACH. Share on X

In 2018, the global market size of sport technology exceeded $9 billion a year and was expected to grow by another 20%. At the time of writing, Catapult—one of the biggest brands in the business—has a market capitalization over $400 million on the Australian Stock Exchange. If you’ve worked for a big institution or sports organization, you’ll know that deciding to partner with one provider or another is often a six-figure decision with multi-year agreements.

As professionalization of sport at all levels continues to propagate, the ubiquity and consequence of sport technology cannot be overstated. Speed timing gates, motion capture systems, force plates, velocity-based training tools, athlete management systems, online programming platforms, and injury screening devices are just a few examples of the potential solutions that coaches must filter on a daily basis.

Despite the potential implications of these technologies on operational budgets, work habits, and ultimately the productivity of their staff, too many coaches and teams enter into the process blindly, squandering money and putting technological square pegs into round holes. In this article, I will explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of sports technology, with a view to developing a decision-making filter through which you may pass your next tech-buying decision. I hope that it saves you much time, money, and frustration along the way.

The Good

Gaining Time

In a time-poor profession like strength and conditioning, where there is an inherent need to free oneself to work on the system and not in it, time-saving technologies are a must. This can be as simple as reducing the time taken to complete repetitive tasks. It sounds trite, but even basic purchases like more effective cleaning technologies, particularly in the era of coronavirus, can save many hours per person, per month.

The overarching goal of technology should be to automate wherever possible and without dilution of human judgement, says @RUGBY_STR_COACH. Share on X

Likewise, the outsourcing of human tasks to digital tools can greatly reduce staffing costs for simple daily processes. A Google form, an email or text reminder, and a prod to the less-compliant members of the team are a lot more streamlined than one intern asking the same set of questions hundreds of times after every session.

The overarching goal should be to automate wherever possible and without dilution of human judgement. If there is an optimal solution to the task without need for interpretation or decision-making, it is a simple decision to spend a little time now to save a lot of time later.

Data collection, processing, and visualization scripts for software solutions like Excel, R, or Python are one such example, particularly in data sets where several hundred thousand data points per year are collected. Excel can also be useful in the prescription of training loads and in formatting, delivering, and adjusting programming. However, in my experience, platforms such as Teambuildr, Train Heroic, and Bridge Athletic are more user-friendly and offer greater integration and functionality.

Gaining Money 

As I’ve alluded to in previous articles, most problems in institutionalized sport are money problems in disguise. The pursuit of a higher mission is extremely difficult when losing money hand over fist, and ultimately becomes impossible when the organization spends itself out of existence. Conversely, an abundance of money tends to forgive all other sins and is a self-perpetuating cycle, from talent ID and recruitment, to staff development and retention, to marketing and sponsorships.

Specific to physical preparation, the biggest financial drain on professional sports teams are wages and productivity lost to injury. In the most lucrative sports leagues in the world, millions per year are spent on injured athletes. The etiology of sporting injury is multifactorial, and of course, a non-zero number of injuries per year is inevitable. But what is clear is that soft tissue and non-contact injuries are inherently more controllable than traumatic ones, and training stress balance is a major risk factor. I personally liken managing injuries without accurate load or stress response measurement to driving a Ferrari with the dashboard covered up. You can do it, but it’s not advisable!

Thus, any technology that can more accurately measure training activity or the response of the athlete to that training offers valuable insight. In field-based sports, accelerometry, GPS, and cardiac monitoring are commonly used and validated tools to assess the input side of this equation. On the output side, a similarly broad array of options is available, including hormone assays, heart rate variability, cortical potential, and neuromuscular monitoring tools such as Nordbord and GroinBar.

The correct blend of technologies you use will depend on your sport, the problems you are trying to solve, and your available budget, says @RUGBY_STR_COACH. Share on X

Note that due to the multifaceted nature of both training load and the stress response, no one solution can act as a cover-all. The correct blend of technologies you use will depend on your sport, the problems you are trying to solve, and your available budget. But when median salaries exceed several hundred thousand dollars per week, spending $100,000 per year on sports technology can return many times that sum in increased availability or more consistent or productive training. Even in the world of college sport where labor is free, keeping star players on the court or field in the pursuit of a tournament or championship run can have multimillion-dollar implications.

Gaining Insight

At its worst, the physical testing of athletes can be a waste of time. Collecting data to say “See, look! The program works. Please can I have a contract extension?” serves the coach more than the athlete. Call me cynical, but it’s supposed to work! Putting aside the politics of justifying one’s own existence to decision-makers, testing can often just confirm what we already instinctively know from training.

We know where athletes lie in comparison to their peers, and it is relatively easy to gauge from the training itself whether the programming is working or not. (The weights are getting heavier or moving faster!) Dedicating an entire day or week to testing to find out what you already knew isn’t the best use of a coach’s time. Likewise, expecting an athlete to “peak” for testing day simply doesn’t tally with the experience of even the most accomplished coaches, and judging a program on one day of data is like trying to guess the plot of a novel from one page.

I would argue the true value of testing is twofold:

1. 1. To detect long-term trends or changes in physical performance.

 

1. 1. To derive new information or insight that informs subsequent decision-making.

 

The former, which Mladen Jovanovic has termed “embedded testing,” relies on the use of technology to consistently gather data as the program is implemented without significant interruption to training itself or the generation of unnecessary fatigue. This is invaluable to an iterative process like training, where assumptions must be questioned and updated on a daily basis.

Tracking bar speed with devices like GymAware, Tendo Unit, or Rep One, timing sprints with devices like Freelap, or simply measuring heart rate response to a given workload within systems like Polar or First Beat are all good examples of how coaches can “test without testing” and make informed decisions earlier and more frequently with no additional time or fatigue cost.

The latter, which Dr. Bryan Mann has termed “diagnostic testing,” is concerned not just with what the athlete did, but how they did it. The measurement of absolute outputs like vertical jump or maximal sprinting speed are valuable in their own right. But different athletes may achieve identical outputs via different strategies, for example via leaning on more force or more time in the instance of jumping, or faster stride frequencies versus longer stride lengths in sprinting.

As training age rises, the likelihood that a specific training intervention is required to address the rate-limiting factor within the system increases. Using technologies to infer which course of action is most appropriate can greatly increase the productivity of training. Force plate systems like Hawkin Dynamics and Force Decks are popular solutions in jumping-intensive sports, whereas sprint-based tools like Ergotest and 1080 Sprint may have more application in running-based sports with deep pockets.

The Bad

Increases Time

As valuable as technologies can be to sport performance, we have to remember a simple fact: It’s supposed to make life easier! Bad technologies or bad utilization of technologies forget this simple maxim and create more work than they save. Even in professional teams (certainly in college and high school teams), when organizations go shopping for GPS systems, the expectation is that an existing, already overworked member of staff will be tasked with its oversight. The end result is a net increase in time spent in the system for the unfortunate individual.

Data and graphs are informative but toothless if they cannot persuade a reluctant sport coach to modify practice loads, says @RUGBY_STR_COACH. Share on X

Similarly, GPS data is only as useful as the coaching behavior that it influences. Data and graphs are informative but toothless if they cannot persuade a reluctant sport coach to modify practice loads. The political capital and time required to help key decision-makers understand such data, care about it, want to use it, and then have the technical ability to see it through to completion should not be underestimated. Overall, this scenario represents a net time cost for not much concrete gain.

Buying a Hammer, Then Looking for Nails

To reiterate, technology is the application of knowledge to things to give us more of what we want for a given input of time, effort, or money. Phrased another way, technology simply helps us to better solve our problems. To steal a quote from Judea Pearl, “You cannot answer a question that has not been asked.”

It should therefore follow that good sport technology decision-making begins with the identification of a problem. The next step is to understand the nature of the problem. Based on the understanding of the problem, the coach will then consult the various offerings within the marketplace (whereas engineers will simply create one). They are evaluated on their merits and suitability to answer the questions posed by the problem, then a buying decision is made, and the technology is implemented.

Good sport technology decision-making begins with the identification of a problem, says @RUGBY_STR_COACH. Share on X

For example:

• • “We’ve experienced a spike in hamstring injuries.”

 

• • “Research appears to indicate low relative eccentric strength is a predisposing factor to non-contact hamstring injuries.”

 

• • “Nordbord is a commercially available tool for tracking various force metrics of the hamstrings.”

 

• • “Based on our budget, staffing, and last year’s wage losses due to non-contact hamstring injuries, if we can reduce our incidence by 20%, any intervention costing up to $20,000 per year will represent a positive return on investment.”

 

• “OK, let’s invest in Nordbord.”

Bad technology decisions tend to flip the process on its head, begin with a buying decision, and go from there:

• • “OK, let’s invest in Nordbord.”

 

• • “Measure all the guys, let’s see who has weak hamstrings.”

 

• • “Take a look at the hamstring guys, were they lower than everyone else?”

 

• • “What are the key metrics we need to look at anyway?”

 

• • “Is Nordbord the best tool to track this stuff? I hope so, because we signed a three-year deal!”

 

In short, beginning with the problem first, asking questions, and following them to their logical conclusions can save you a lot of time and money. Do not succumb to the sales and marketing pressure to buy a $10,000 hammer, then go looking for nails that might not even exist.

Decentralized Technology Purchasing

In traditional performance models, each sport coach is an island. They have their own (largely unqualified) philosophies and beliefs with regard to physical training, they have their favorite conditioning methods and assessments, and unless they have to share, they tend to hire their own strength and conditioning coach, who the university merely rubber stamps after a background check.

Importantly, they also make their own technology decisions. They are courted by technology companies in the marketplace, swayed by trends within their sport, counseled by members of their professional network, and ultimately, they make a buying decision. The new piece of equipment is promptly delivered to the strength coach, who is told: “Here is what we’re using now. Figure it out.”

So far, not too bad. But now multiply this scenario by the number of sports a strength and conditioning coach is responsible for. What happens when lacrosse uses Catapult, but soccer uses Kitman Labs? Baseball wants to use Tendo for their VBT because X team uses that in their weight room, and we need to get kickers from football on the GroinBar. This is an extreme example, but I’ve seen it happen. Every new piece of equipment from competing companies is another platform to learn and integrate with the AMS; another sales rep to deal with.

If nothing more, centralizing technology-buying decisions with the school harnesses economies of scale while greatly decreasing the time needed to upskill, use, and maintain sports technology equipment, and places the buying decision in the hands of a qualified high-performance manager/team. The price per unit for a given technology drops precipitously when you’re buying for a few hundred athletes versus a few dozen, and the positive PR of landing a school-wide deal can be leveraged.

Not only this, but centralized technology and data more easily facilitates comparisons between data sets. It prevents allegiances being switched to another brand following coaching changes, minimizing the potential loss of data. And it allows for shared skills amongst all members of the high-performance staff so coaches can be quickly and easily reassigned to different sports with no need for upskilling on “our” technology. Notch up another win for the high-performance model.

The Ugly

Virtue Signaling

As I highlighted previously, most sport coaches make the decision to invest in a piece of technology because another coach for a bigger, more winning team swears by it. They can’t handle the fear of missing out, they want the success of bigger teams, and they want the respect of their peers for being so forward-thinking. The purchase is usually swiftly followed by a media release by the organization about how the team is using the same technology as X team. Twelve months later, the coach’s work habits are the same as before, and the tech is gathering dust. Personal experience: I was almost a year into my time in Tokyo when my assistant informed me that we had “one of those GymAware things in the cupboard.”

We strength coaches are not immune. The rise of social media over the last two decades has coincided neatly with the uptick of tech in sport, and the various platforms today are awash with coaches showing off their toys. We eagerly post up kinograms, R outputs, bar charts, Dartfish comparisons—you name it. We get a pat on the head from our followers, then immediately go back to implementing the same program we were going to do anyway.

Flexing on social media is a part of the game, but there are cheaper ways to do it. The Running Man Challenge is free, a weight room full of VBT tools is not, says @RUGBY_STR_COACH. Share on X

The next time you see a fellow coach post on social media about their use of a particular technology, ask yourself: “Is this actually being used to make decisions or uniquely answer questions in the program? Is this changing how they work? Will it still be used a few months from now?” The answer is no, more than we care to admit.

Flexing on social media is part of the game, but there are cheaper ways to do it. The Running Man Challenge is free, a weight room full of VBT tools is not.

Technology as a Recruiting Tool

I’ve argued in previous articles that most weight rooms suffer from being showrooms in disguise, designed more by equipment manufacturers and administrators than the coaches who end up using them. For most institutions, weight rooms are, unfortunately, for recruiting first and training second. Expensive technologies are the expensive cherry on top, and many tools are purchased that don’t need to be there, get purchased in excessive numbers, or don’t get used once the shine has worn off.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: If we win with people, those people will probably feel more valued if you don’t tell them the cupboard is bare out of one side of your mouth, while demanding they upskill themselves on a new (and unnecessary) platform that costs $10,000 per license. Ten grand is a lot of staff appreciation lunches, it’s books and clothes for the interns, and it’s a comfy couch and a coat of paint in the staff locker room. The recruits won’t notice the tech missing from the weight room, but your staff will notice the extra attention, and it’ll pay far higher dividends for morale and productivity.

A Stick to Beat People With

The case for regular data collection is a simple one. The higher the sample size, the larger the pool of data, the more easily and accurately potential trends can be identified. The declining size and price of technologies have greatly opened up the market for wearable tech such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, Fatigue Science, and Whoop. Now we are able to collect data 24/7 without the athletes even realizing. But we have to label this for what it is: an invasion of the athlete’s privacy. It may be with consent, but it is an invasion, nonetheless.

Pre wearables, when athletes left the facility, their work stayed. However, post wearables, work follows the athlete home, and the coach is granted ever-growing insight into the athlete’s habits and behavior outside of work, which is ripe for abuse. Anecdotally, the abilities to infer sexual activity during nighttime hours, to see who was really sleeping and who snuck out to the club, and even who partook in drink and drugs are all possible with commercially available wearable technologies.

With some wearable technology, there is a clear need for the establishment of agreed-upon rules, informed consent, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to opt out, says @RUGBY_STR_COACH. Share on X

To say this is a moral minefield is an understatement, and as this becomes the norm, there is a clear need for the establishment of agreed-upon rules, informed consent, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to opt out.

The Ideal Technology

Great technology is groundbreaking. It integrates so seamlessly into our daily lives and offers such time efficiency and such drastic increases in productivity or ease of use that you forget how you ever lived before it came along. In just my lifetime: broadband internet, smart phones, Uber, and electric vehicles like Tesla are just a few technologies that have changed how we live. This is the same ideal that sport technology should strive toward.

Conversely, when I was 12, Tamagotchis were extremely popular. They harnessed advancing computer technology that made it possible to shrink down a basic computer program for a digital pet into the palm of your hand. They sold by the tens of millions, but as far as I can figure out, the pet did absolutely nothing. It was such a trivial technology that it was rewarded with an Ig Nobel Prize (the parody version of the Nobel) for economics. Two decades later, they’re an entertaining memory and nothing more. Food for thought…

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Perhaps no drill is more overlooked for speed development than the drum drill, a timeless exercise used by coaches for decades to help develop frequency. The problem with the drum drill is its popularity never really got off the ground (pun intended), as it required a lot of homework from the coach. In the past, the drill was not convenient to do without a combination of timing and film. Today, the drum drill is now practical thanks to technology and perhaps more valuable than ever, as it fosters more than frequency.

Perhaps no drill is more overlooked for speed development than the drum drill, a timeless exercise used by coaches for decades to help develop frequency, says @spikesonly. Share on X

The drum drill isn’t for everyone, as it does need a lot of skill to perform and a coach who can teach it. In this blog post, I cover everything you need to know to get started and present just enough science to satisfy skeptics. The drum drill is a special exercise—perhaps even more useful than wickets and other similar routines.

What Is the Drum Drill?

The drum drill is exactly what it sounds like: a sprint exercise that requires the runner to cut off their stride slightly to emphasize rapid frequency. In theory, reducing the stride length parameters should slightly increase frequency, and this is where much of the science and mathematics can get tricky. With all of the attention strangely on wickets, the drum has surprisingly been disregarded and ignored. Intuitively, wickets seem more useful, since many athletes look good running over them at first glance, as posture and other qualities show up almost immediately. The drum is not as obvious to the coach, despite having a clear purpose.

The drum drill is simply a flying sprint with an expectation that the athlete will run at full frequency capacity (five strides a second) at 10 m/s. In theory, reduced stride length with high frequency would then be extended as the athlete becomes more sophisticated and skilled, thus improving general speed qualities for the future. This outcome is something I have failed to see in high-speed film, and I have spent years struggling to replicate the promises of its proponents with my own athletes.

Video 1. Brendan Thompson uses modified drums to throttle frequency up and down for nervous system development. The goal in training is to use frequency drills for long term development, not as a quick fix or similar. You can use markings or keep the track or field naked, depending on your own training philosophy.

The drum drill requires the coach to know the trochanter or leg length of the athlete and be able to cue the athlete in such a way that they don’t artificially score well in the repetition and falsely appear fast due to carrying momentum. An athlete can fake frequency for 10 meters, but they will not be able to carry speed and frequency over 20 meters or more. In fact, I have only seen an athlete hold an unnaturally higher frequency and high velocity for 30 meters once in 20+ years. Keep in mind that I have seen hundreds of athletes on video, many of them medalists and national champions. Legendary coaches such as Gary Wickler and Tony Wells are famous for using the exercise, and Cliff Rovelto has been a proponent as well.

How the Drum Drill Works

The drum drill is an advanced exercise, and young athletes who are growing into their stride should not use it. You can use modified versions with youth athletes as a way to sharpen their nervous system, but when you work with an adult athlete, make sure they can perform quality flying sprints before they start adding complicated versions such as this exercise. Having an athlete who isn’t polished or skilled employ the drum drill may cause them to regress or even learn bad habits.

Having an athlete who isn’t polished or skilled employ the drum drill may cause them to regress or even learn bad habits, says @spikesonly. Share on X

The drum drill isn’t just for advanced athletes; only master coaches should use it. Drills, as I mentioned before, work on their own and are not always perfect. Some drills have a knack for doing much of the heavy lifting with form or technique development, but coaches must be vigilant to ensure drill’s intentions are instilled in the session they are part of. I believe that extensive experience with floating sprints can make the leap to the drum drill far easier, but the nuances of acutely modifying stride frequency and contact times make it hard, especially as athletes develop their speed near their genetic ceilings.

When the athlete performs the drill, the expectation is that they cut—they use a stride movement strategy that doesn’t disrupt the sacred contact time, stride length, and contact length balance. I have mentioned the importance of knowing contact length and being able to measure ground contact time. Frequency often improves when contact times decrease, while stride length rarely increases at the same rate.

Each athlete will have different development patterns. Some athletes are frequency heavy when they are young and may grow their length as they become more powerful, but usually both stride frequency and stride length will mature at the same rate until athletes hit a genetic ceiling. Then, based on my observations, they will need to reduce ground contact time in order to continue to improve. Thus, many coaches gravitate to the drum drill because they know that it takes a long time to improve contact times and rapid turnover.

Why the Drum Drill Can Fail

Frankly, if you don’t tell others what can go wrong with a drill or exercise, you do them a disservice. The drum drill can be magical, but as with any tool, it does come with its own unique challenges. First, many athletes find the drum to be difficult to perform since it only works if you can keep velocity nearly identical to your top speed. Some coaches feel that you should run and hit five steps per second, and this may be very foreign to a long strider who is tall or has low frequency. Such an abrupt jump is very awkward and unnatural; thus, I prefer a slowly saturated frequency if possible.

Athletes can find the drum drill difficult to perform since it only works if you can keep velocity nearly identical to your top speed, says @spikesonly. Share on X

An easy way to determine frequency is to use the ground contact times and air times of a flying sprint and divide the sum into 1,000. I don’t use a chronometer and video anymore, as the process is time-consuming, but you can do so if you are pressed for a budget and don’t have MuscleLab equipment.

Many athletes try to run faster by either putting more force into the ground or shutting off power, thus extending ground contact times or tightening up. The irony is that trying to improve speed or even a component of speed may cause the reverse to happen, where an athlete either slows down or decreases their frequency slightly. Higher-frequency athletes tend to struggle with enhancing something that is already there, and athletes who have low frequency can become slower in efforts to increase velocity.

Athletes with long strides that are artificially proportional to their leg length tend to need frequency drills to improve their strike points (Hunter 2020), and this will solve excessive air times that come with long striders. Those who are “reachers” tend to have a problem decelerating knee extension and/or fail to push down actively during the backswing. Frequency drills such as the drum drill can clean up that small error, and this often results in fewer hamstring injuries. The knee lift, specifically the hip flexion angle at takeoff or later, should not be dramatically disrupted, or the athlete will tamper with the braking and propulsion balance of their foot strike.

March to the Beat of Your Own Drum

The drum drill is just one option in stride frequency development. Most of the time, the drum drill can be seen as just a rhythm drill that allows an athlete to relax and experiment with the right range of motion and bounce. A solid background in floating drills and developing reactivity should help athletes mold their stride into a balanced motion that maximizes their speed.

I have used frequency drills for years and now understand the nature of stride development mainly from shaping the stride parameters we all have known about for a long time. The drum drill is a special exercise that can make a great change in athletes who are receptive to improving and with a coach who is worth their salt in instruction. The drum drill is just one option for improving an athlete, and it’s more than fine to use any method you see fit that helps improve stride frequency.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

I wrote this blog post for SimpliFaster to provide an assessment of the various wearable technologies on the market focused on the smart shoe and smart insole. I provide a review of Plantiga below, present unpublished results of initial validation studies, and discuss the direction the company is taking.

It seems like the smart insole and smart shoe space is beginning to take off. The technology, including pressure mapping, has advanced rapidly. As you will see below, Plantiga places an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in an insole, but in addition to reporting what an IMU actually measures (acceleration, position, orientation), they use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide performance and health insights based on how we move.

In addition to reporting what an IMU actually measures (acceleration, position, orientation), Plantiga uses AI to provide performance & health insights based on how we move. Share on X

Why Measuring What Matters, Matters, and How Wearables can Help

I have been working in elite sport for more than 20 years. The early part of my career was hampered by technology. More specifically, I wanted to take a scientific approach to training, but measuring most of the physical strength capacities was largely out of reach (e.g., rate of force development (RFD)).

The second part of my career was underpinned by a desire to get better at quantifying the impact of my programming on the performance and musculoskeletal health of the athletes I worked with. It’s hard to measure the impact of coaching, but it’s important, and just because something is hard to do, it doesn’t justify not doing it.

After the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 and spending time working closely with Derek Hansen and our speed skating program, I picked up a cohort of female alpine skiers.

Injuries are common in skiing, especially knee injuries. I found that measuring things that matter, like interlimb asymmetries, was helpful for me in terms of quantifying functional recovery after injury. I was interested in identifying trainable deficits that I couldn’t see with my eye, so that I could write more targeted and individualized training programs.

In my experience, if we don’t measure, we might miss important physical deficits. And it’s important for us to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the “real world,” which really just means on the turf, grass, court, snow, or ice.

The Gap

The gap between what we do in a laboratory and on the field of play is vast. I’ve written on the problems with injury prediction from baseline testing.

How can a test conducted in September accurately predict an injury six months down the road?

How do we know that what we measure in the lab isn’t impacted by the Hawthorne Effect, where the simple act of taking a measurement changes the behavior of the system of interest?

Enter wearable technology.

Wearable technology allows us to take measurements on the field of play, where they matter most, says @JordanStrength. Share on X

Wearable technology allows us to take measurements on the field of play, where they matter most.

Where Is the Smart Shoe?

How is that we don’t have a wearable in our shoes or a smart shoe that can measure our movements and tell us about our health and performance?

I think the answer is that it is incredibly hard to measure movement with a wearable technology that is durable, can fit in a shoe, and can then provide relevant insights to the end user.

About Plantiga

Plantiga approached me in 2016 when I was just about to wrap up my Ph.D. I had been using dual force plates to measure interlimb asymmetries in jumping to identify deficits in athletes recovering from knee injuries.

At this point, I had limited experience with instrumented insoles. I had used the PEDAR system, and I had seen other types of insoles. But the problem was always the same—the technology was either too obtrusive or just too difficult to use to make it valuable.

We had done projects with our speed skaters and skiers using pressure mapping, but we never got past the first few data collection sessions. The athletes hated the insoles, and we couldn’t make sense of how to use the data in practical terms to change what we were doing.

I was interested in functional asymmetries at the time, especially for tracking recovery after injury, and the science suggested that sensors placed remotely on the body did a poor job of detecting asymmetries during running and jumping.¹

There were companies that had placed wearables on the shanks or torso to measure lower-body movements, but there are distinct advantages to having the sensor in the shoe.^2,3 The signal is cleaner and far less noisy, making event detection that much better.

When Plantiga contacted me in 2016, they were (to the best of my knowledge) one of the first companies trying to tackle the problem of a smart insole. What intrigued me was the ability to measure functional asymmetries outside of my laboratory.

About the Plantiga Technology

I was keen on Plantiga because it addressed the gaps mentioned above. Plantiga uses an IMU measuring 16 g’s per axis placed underneath the mid foot. The IMU is fixed into a small cavity of a thin and flexible insole. The IMU has another slot to expand to a second accelerometer so higher magnitude accelerations can be measured. This is in the product pipeline.

The mass of the IMU is 0.0175 grams per pod, and it measures 3.25 x 42 x 46 mm.

The IMU samples at 400 Hz, providing the type of high-fidelity data needed to derive short time frame biomechanical measures like ground contact time. Consequently, an inordinate amount of data comes in from a walk or run, and the original goal of a Bluetooth device did not give sufficient stability or reliability for transmitting data out in the field. Wireless data transmission was even more finicky.

The solution was to have onboard data storage, requiring the user to dock the IMUs after usage. But inside a single data collection or recording, the user can flag events of interest and run smaller test segments, allowing for better granularity in the post-testing analysis. I really like the tagging system, actually, because I can seamlessly flag different events of interest inside one single long-duration recording without having to stop the session.

The extra step of flagging events and activities of interest and then docking to upload data was key to bringing Plantiga up to the standard of a laboratory-grade measurement device. The bigger vision was to first tackle how to make Plantiga a research-grade tool, with the goal of scaling to the masses as a second step.

Additional considerations for the research-minded practitioner are that Plantiga allows the user to view and download the raw data and has a flagging and notification system for hardware failures. A much-improved web interface has just been released that includes a dashboard for reviewing data and generating PDF reports.

Plantiga lets a user make “teams” for data collection so they can run activities and tests on a large number of participants at the same time, says @JordanStrength. Share on X

In terms of Plantiga’s usability in individual and group settings, Plantiga lets a user make teams for data collection so they can run activities and tests on a large number of participants at the same time. Data can be collected concurrently throughout a session and then uploaded after training through a docking station. The new docking station in development does not require a computer connection.

Early Days with Plantiga

In the early days, Plantiga used analytical algorithms for event detection and reported the accelerations at the foot as a measure of mechanical workload. There were no major issues with this approach, as a lot of work went into sensor calibration and time synchronization. The acceleration at the foot measured with the Plantiga insoles provided a clean signal and lots of relevant information for the practitioner, like the interlimb acceleration asymmetry. A validation project examining the mechanical workload during running obtained with Plantiga showed a strong correlation with the internal workload measured through the sessional RPE method and heart rate.

Analytical algorithms are tricky for measuring movements, though, because they rarely account for the complexity that arises outside of a controlled laboratory environment. There are too many exceptions to the rules we devise on how people move. It also can’t drive the types of insights most practitioners would want to see for tracking either performance or recovery after injury.

While Plantiga started out with the goal of being a load monitoring device for team sports, it dovetailed quickly into the world of gait analytics and, importantly, as a tool to help practitioners monitor the recovery of their patients after sport injury using AI.

Plantiga’s Transition to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Company

Under the guidance of Chief Technology Officer Sean Ross-Ross, Plantiga migrated quickly from analytical algorithms and workload monitoring to a data science company that uses a form of machine learning called “deep learning” to extract insights from the complex signal collected by the insole. Workload monitoring is still an important application of Plantiga, and I find this to be one of the most practical use cases of the system. The sensors are low-profile, can be worn in all types of footwear, and allow the user to track workload in a whole range of environments.

Workload monitoring is still an important application of Plantiga, and I find this to be one of the most practical use cases of the system, says @JordanStrength. Share on X

However, I was very interested in the complexity coming from the Plantiga system. I was first made aware of the complexity of the signal through movement maps. A movement map paints a picture of the left limb versus the right limb during walking, running, and jumping (figure 1).

With his background in computer science and working at industry leaders like Tableau, Sean noticed right away that the complexity of the signal needed the type of deep learning that Google uses to distinguish a cat from a lion. These deep learning neural networks, called convolutional and recurrent neural networks, are adept at extracting features from complex images and data structures. Sean quickly pivoted Plantiga from a hardware company to a data science company focused on growing a human movement database that could be used to drive insights around health and performance.

This is not a trivial pursuit. Just like a human baby who enters the world dependent on its parents before it becomes a completely autonomous adult, a considerable amount of time and development is needed to grow an effective AI algorithm.

But then one day, a computer beats a human in chess, wins Jeopardy (rest in peace, Mr. Alex Trebek), and learns to drive a car. While there are well-known problems with AI—like bias, agnosticism, absence of morality, and inability to read context—it is well-suited for extracting insights from the type of movement data collected with the Plantiga insole system.

The combination of research-grade hardware and AI is what differentiates Plantiga’s trajectory from many of the other companies I have seen.

Plantiga Today

Today, Plantiga is a health and performance self-monitoring system. It measures Baseline Profiles and Recovery Profiles during walking, running, and jumping. It also allows the user to collect data in an Open Activity mode that is unrestricted. It can automatically detect walking, running, and jumping using a mode called Human Activity Recognition or HAR.

Users can perform bilateral jump tests, single-leg jump tests for height and distance, walk tests, and run tests, which output a suite of gait and jump metrics. AI drives the metrics coming from these tests. One of the algorithms, called GRIN (ground interaction), predicts when the foot is on and off the ground. This may seem easy, but I can assure you it is a lot harder than you would think.

Here is how the system has been validated. (Disclosure: There is still more work to be done here).

Participants (n=30) wore the Plantiga insole system and performed a series of vertical jumps on a dual force plate system (AMTI Accupower Force Plates, sampling at 1500 Hz). Running sprints were also performed on a Mondo track and on a treadmill at two different speeds.

In the first version of the GRIN algorithm, the data from the force plates was used as the gold standard to train the machine learning algorithm for measuring when the foot was on and off the ground. In the most recent version of the algorithm, the team at Plantiga has now progressed to using an additional reference point, including a generalized likelihood ratio test that predicts events of interest around the timing of the foot hitting and leaving the ground.

They have painstakingly gone through the training data set to ensure that the various features line up properly (i.e., a human has verified that in the training data set, things are as they should be). The second pass has greatly improved the accuracy of GRIN, and like all AI algorithms, the expectation is that GRIN will become increasingly more accurate with larger data sets.

The accuracy of Plantiga for detecting foot-ground interaction using GRIN is shown below in figure 3. This figure shows the reactive strength index (RSI) obtained from five consecutive countermovement jumps (CMJ).

The RSI can be assessed different ways, but it is typically reported as the vertical jump height to ground contact time ratio or the flight time to ground contact time ratio. RSI is most often measured in the vertical drop jump, and when the RSI is measured in the CMJ, it is referred to as the modified RSI.

Shown below in figure 3 is the percent measurement error for the first GRIN algorithm (left panel) compared to the second GRIN algorithm (right panel) for RSI measured as the flight time to ground contact time ratio in the consecutive CMJ test. Participants performed a series of consecutive CMJs with a variety of techniques and effort levels to help train and test the model.

As you can see, the percent error in RSI measured with Plantiga compared to the gold standard force plate improved from 4.81% with the first algorithm to 1.09% with the most recent version. Notably, there are fewer outliers in the newest version. This speaks to the bench cases that GRIN had trouble figuring out initially, but with refinement were identified and corrected, leading to a substantial reduction in outlying values. This is the promise of AI and Plantiga—it gets better with time.

This is the promise of artificial intelligence and Plantiga—it gets better with time, says @JordanStrength. Share on X

Figure 4 shows a strong correlation between RSI measured with Plantiga and RSI measured with a force plate alongside an improvement in the most recent version of GRIN (R² = 0.99) compared to the first version of GRIN (R² = 0.97).

Table 1 shows the absolute difference in milliseconds of the predicted versus actual timepoint for takeoff/landing in the vertical jump and push-off/touchdown in walking and running. Notably, the mean measurement error ranged from 3.47 milliseconds in the vertical jump landing to 6.61 milliseconds in the vertical jump takeoff. The absolute measurement error for push-off and touchdown in walking and running were 4.35 milliseconds and 4.95 milliseconds, respectively.

Users may also be interested in the measurement error for ground contact time (GCT) in running. With the second version of GRIN, the absolute measurement error for GCT is 5.60 ± 5.80 milliseconds and the percent error is 1.95 ±2.10%.

However, an important limitation at the present time is that the data set used to train the running model did not include very fast runners or very slow runners. Also, GRIN has never seen world-class sprinters.

This is a critical future step for Plantiga. The database needs to grow to include very fast and very slow humans so that it can make accurate predictions across a broad range of scenarios. Just like the AI in a driverless car that may not be able to differentiate a green hexagon that says free cucumbers from a stop sign, the GRIN algorithm needs refinement for bench cases. This is part of the technology road map.

Nevertheless, today Plantiga’s AI approach solves lots of unique problems, including providing increasingly more accurate biomechanical gait measures and external load prediction (i.e., how much load someone carries on their body—like a heavy rucksack), and as you will see below, they are predicting the presence of movement patterns associated with injuries.

Today, Plantiga’s AI approach solves lots of unique problems, including providing increasingly more accurate biomechanical gait measures & external load prediction, says @JordanStrength. Share on X

Preliminary speed validation appears promising (figure 5). Using the flying 30s performed by roughly 30 athletes and ex-athletes on a Mondo track measured with a Brower timing system, the average speed over 25- to 30-meter splits was obtained. The subsequent speed from the Plantiga system over the same time intervals was then obtained.

As shown below in figure 5, the mean percent error was 0.72% using the first version of GRIN and 0.58% with the newest version. It should be noted that a Brower timing system is not considered a gold standard measure of running speed, and average speed through a 5-meter split may not address all use cases, but it gives an indication of the accuracy of Plantiga’s speed algorithm.

However, as stated above, Plantiga needs to expand their training data set to include very fast runners to improve the accuracy of the speed algorithm with future iterations of GRIN. As we have seen with RSI, GRIN does have the potential to become more accurate as the database grows, and Plantiga has been amenable to working with their partners to improve functionality in specific ways.

Future Steps

In addition to the future plans to improve GRIN, here are a few areas that Plantiga is looking to address in 2021 and beyond:

• Improve the web interface to enhance the user experience.
• Provide user alerts that are based on an n=1 approach—basically, this means alerting the user when something has changed according to a baseline profile.
• Improve hardware stability including extending battery life.
• New technology that eliminates the need for docking.
• Partnership with orthotic and insole companies so that users can purchase customized insoles.
• Designing smaller and lighter sensors.

However, I am most excited about how Plantiga will use AI to help with primary and secondary injury prevention—this is the Plantiga Baseline and Recovery Profile.

The Recovery Profile is in development and will be used for post-injury management to help guide return to health, return to sport, and return to performance. Here, GRIN allows the user to obtain interlimb asymmetries in a variety of time and spatial gait parameters. Asymmetries of interest include stride length, stride time, ground contact time, limb speed, and flight time. Measures like limb speed and stride length require validation, and they are a beta release.

But a really novel and exciting algorithm in development is called the Plantiga Injury Score. Plantiga is developing a machine learning model that can predict whether our movement patterns look like someone who is injured. This can complement the various biomechanical measures coming from GRIN to allow a practitioner to gain insight on an athlete or group of athletes to determine who might have a hidden functional deficit.

Plantiga is developing a machine learning model that can predict whether our movement patterns look like someone who is injured, says @JordanStrength. Share on X

To me, interesting applications of the Plantiga Injury Score include:

• Remote monitoring of patients and athletes.
• Movement assessments for those of us who provide online programming.
• Monitoring an injured athlete in their hometown as they work with their own performance team.
• Monitoring in harsh environments like during military training.
• Self-monitoring for the active individual who wants to optimize their health and avoid injury.
• Identifying functional deficits in a cohort of athletes who are being evaluated for the first time.

Using Plantiga to track my own personal training—including running, heavy bag workouts, and tempo run sessions—has been great because, at least on an anecdotal basis, changes in my gait metrics and asymmetry profile such as the left versus right workload asymmetry have lined up with the occurrence of few overuse injuries and my overall effort level.

I have had the occasional hardware issue, but these have mostly been a result of a pod not fully charging. It’s been great to get a call from Plantiga after a session when there has been a hardware error to let me know how to troubleshoot. I also find the new web app to be a massive improvement over the previous version. I use Plantiga more often because I can easily record activities and find what I need.

I have used other apps to measure my run distance and speed, and so far, Plantiga appears highly consistent with these measures. I find it valuable to track my running and outdoor workouts in a more detailed manner. Not only can I track my speed and distance but also my biomechanics. I have even used the occurrence of an aberrant asymmetry score to modify a planned training session and introduce more mobility and tendon strengthening in a proactive manner. (I suffer from the occasional bout of Achilles tendinopathy.) Feedback from Plantiga is changing my behavior.

In closing, Plantiga is an AI company that measures how we move to drive insights on our health and performance. Plantiga measures performance in running, walking, and jumping through a suite of biomechanical metrics. Plantiga also provides interlimb asymmetries across all their measures that can be used to identify functional deficits, and they are working on an AI algorithm that can predict the presence of a movement pattern associated with an injury. Validation is under way, and while there is more work to be done, Plantiga appears to hold a lot of promise to measure what matters in the real world, where it matters most.

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References

1. Kenneally-Dabrowski, C.J.B., Serpell, B.G., and Spratford, W. “Are accelerometers a valid tool for measuring overground sprinting symmetry?” International Journal of Sport Science & Coaching. 2017;13(2):1-8.

2. An, W.W., Au, I.P.H., Cheung, R.T.H., et al. “Shoe-mounted accelerometers should be used with caution in gait retraining.” Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. 2019;29(2).

3. Zrenner, M. Küderle, A., Roth, N., Jensen, U., Dümler, B., and Eskofier, B.M. “Does the position of foot-mounted imu sensors influence the accuracy of spatio-temporal parameters in endurance running?” Sensors (Switzerland). 2020;20(19):1-21.

Blending and bleeding are two similar approaches to training and teaching movement. Analogous to “a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square,” clear definitions are needed so coaches can exchange experiences with more precise language. Bleeding is transitioning from one activity to another, while blending is more abstract and can mean merging two motions or slowly changing one activity into another from instruction and/or training. There are no concrete rules, but for the most part, bleeding is a task during a single repetition and blending occurs over time from subtle influences like program design and patient, low-density coaching.

There are many reasons to utilize these two strategies, and coaches must decide what an athlete is ready for, as well as where it fits with purpose into a training week. Chief among the reasons for their inclusion in a training program is that blending and bleeding drills are low-cost ways to train additional rhythm and motor learning concepts.

Chief among the reasons for their inclusion in a training program is that blending & bleeding drills are low-cost ways to train additional rhythm and motor learning concepts, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

In this article I want to highlight the items that I utilize most frequently and the differences between them. Although blending and bleeding drills often have an exciting and novel appearance, I think it is important to note the purpose at the heart of each one rather than just aiming to do “stuff.”

Blending to Teach

Blending and bleeding drills are not for the extremely novice athlete, and I think they may be unnecessary if the athlete isn’t able to do remedial drills. I would urge coaches to think about what their athletes can currently do and build from there.

Here are a few blends I often use as an introduction to connect some easier items to some key drills and movements.

Rockette to A-Skip

An A-skip is a timeless and fairly simple drill; however, it is harder to do well than people care to admit. Enter the “Rockette,” which starts the transition from general movement to traditional sprint drills.

A Rockette is a straight-leg kick that utilizes a double hop on one leg before alternating into a kick on the other leg. The name comes from the actual Rockette dancers who have a much higher leg kick than I ask my athletes to perform. It is easier to place the emphasis on rhythm with low kicks and then add amplitude later.

After they establish a Rockette rhythm, I ask the athletes to bring their “knees up, toes up.” The only thing left to do is keep a slight forward lean with the chest over the middle of the feet and aim for where the back row of spikes would be. That way the foot has time to get dead center under the hips and deliver a decent strike to the ground.

Karate Kid to A-Switch

This one is coined after Daniel LaRusso’s iconic training snippet with Mr. Miyagi. I have seen this used as a hurdle drill, but I think it cleans up the A-switch drill quite nicely.

Many athletes have trouble with A-switches because they drop the non-support leg (strike leg) before they remove the stance leg. When this drill is done correctly, there should be a simultaneous stance leg removal and swing leg strike. This has been referred to as “remove and replace.” If an athlete cannot do this well, then they will also have trouble when speed is added. Doing this drill incorrectly is of no help at all, especially if the intent to do it correctly is not present.

The benefit of starting with the “Karate Kid” is that the athlete is more likely to switch their thighs correctly because of the exaggerated, artificial air time. It is then easier to cue them into just being sharper and to strike the ground hard by adding a forward lean and sprinter arms that move up and down free of tension. A double contact is still used, and this allows enough time for a “reset” to load the Achilles and thus strike the ground better.

Fence Single-Leg Rockette to Single-Leg A-Skip

This is like the Rockette to A-Skip, but we shift to isolating one leg. I have written about the value of prancing before, and I think single-leg A-skips are in the same realm as prances when looking at the coordinative and rhythmic demands. Lots of athletes are unable to do this from a contract and relax standpoint. I find slowing it down to add context to the movement helps.

I think single-leg A-skips are in the same realm as prances when looking at the coordinative and rhythmic demands, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

I have my athletes start on a fence and then perform a low, single-leg Rockette with the leg farthest from the fence. This gives them some support and allows them to focus on building the rhythm through the Rockette, then drawing the leg into an A-skip position. Finally, they remove their arm from the fence and add locomotion from the prior movement.

Blending and Bleeding Jumps

Jump testing is dependent just as much on the skill as it is on improvements in power. Broad jumps, standing triple broad jumps, and various bound tests come to mind.

A broad jump is a “single-jump” test that has shown some correlation to initial and early acceleration ability. Novices often seem uncomfortable projecting at an incline during broad jump tests and likewise during start drills.

Developmental athletes also tend to work against their body when jumping. If you are like me, you have seen an array of arm errors, including athletes throwing their arms in the opposite direction during these exercises.

The main issues are that single jumps do not allow much flow or learning since there is only one repetition at a time, and there is no bridge between these types of jumps and multi jumps. In-place jumps such as squat jumps, lunge jumps, or extensive plyos allow for more repetitions, but horizontal power jumps are a different breed.

I think bleeding and blending jumps allow more time for learning to improve both ends of the spectrum from a single broad jump all the way up to a 10-bound test.

Bunny Hop Broad Jump

A bunny hop, as I teach it, utilizes a bit of a hinge position with a long spine. This allows an athlete to be more in control of their falling hop forward through control with the glutes.

Key cues I use are to try to match the torso and shin angles at the onset of the jump and to retain that posture with each successive hop. Arms are relaxed and hands may almost be “flappy’” to ensure that they contribute to the forward propulsion that happens much more quickly than in multi jumps. Taking the emphasis off of jumping maximally and putting it on moving forward with timing and rhythm through extensive repetitions is the main goal here.

Combining these smaller jumps with a broad jump is useful, since the athlete has experienced good syncing of the limbs prior to a max effort broad jump into the sand. I have also done these on the turf with athletes alternating back and forth between bunny hops and a broad jump that is about 80-90% of their perceived capability once they show improvements in a single rep.

L-L-R-R Baby Bounds to Alternating Bounds

Bounding is also often rushed. I would rather spend time teaching than just testing 3-, 5-, or 10-bound capabilities. This bleed is an excellent way to see who has the motor skills to shift from a low-level item into something resembling a true bound. I love left-left-right-right bounds since they are easy to establish a rhythm on because of the double hop before alternating legs.

I have used a 5-yard zone to start with the L-L-R-R before the athlete drives the knee up and out into a traditional alternating bound. The prior arm action and foot strike success on the lower-level bound gives them information about how to transfer it to the higher-level bound.

Taking a page from Rob Assise’s bound work, I have progressed an athlete through a bounding bleed series as a sprint day item:

• LLRR bound to baby bound
• LLRR bound to toddler bound
• LLRR bound to teenager bound

The goal is to set up the limb timing and then use it to go further with confidence.

Blending Sprint Drills

There are many drills I like to combine and blend depending on the athlete and focus of the day. Most of them are about the flow and new challenges, and I tend to test them out myself before unveiling them with an athlete.

With the many drills I like to combine and blend, most are about the flow and new challenges, and I tend to test them out myself before unveiling them with an athlete, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

Below are several blends I absolutely love. It is imperative that the athletes can do the drills well by themselves. The combinations are fun and motivating and push them further along in their motor skill development. This is not a complete list, and I have a lot of other items that are a work in progress.

Without adequate levels of rhythm, timing, and decision-making within the reps, these may be near impossible to do. It is easy enough to scale things back and necessary because, while tough challenges are okay occasionally, most of the time we want to meet athletes right at or just below their current abilities.

A-Series Blend (March, Skip, Run)

This is a simple concept, but harder than it looks. When performing marches, lots of athletes tend to put the focus on covering ground rather than nearly marching in place and aiming for a good foot strike. I find keeping the pinky toe pulled up when marching helps the lower leg muscles stay active and allows more time for the foot to slot under the hip.

I think it is easy to pull out of the march that sets the tone into an A-skip that is also predicated on ground strike.

I keep the zones appropriately spaced and have done a 5-yard march into a 5-yard A-skip and finished with a 10-yard high-knee A-run. It is important to instruct the athlete to bleed into the A-run when the knee is at the apex during the A-skip. This allows for a natural switching of the thighs. If they start the A-run when the knee is below the apex, then the transition is abrupt and clunky.

Single-Leg A-Skip/Single-Leg Prance

I have enjoyed using this one with hurdlers, as it seems to help teach good lead leg position through leading with the knee up high and staying dorsiflexed. The single-leg variations of both of these drills are much more challenging than the bilateral version. It is a good screen to see who is able to contract and relax effectively as well as take advantage of reflexes in the foot.

With all blends, we look for the drill to change without any abrupt stoppage, just like good acceleration patiently becomes good upright running. The coach must instruct the athlete to stay relaxed during the single-leg A-skip and then gradually lift into a single-leg prance. They need to be ready for the ground by landing in a double-leg position that utilizes the stretch-shortening cycle and a simultaneous thigh drive.

Alternating Relaxed Prance/A-Run

I usually prefer to start with four 5-yard zones, and I enjoy this one because it feels a lot like Vince Anderson’s “Ins and Outs.” As he says, “The outs inform the in.”

The first 5 yards (In) is done much like the “strike drill” that I will explain in more depth later in this article. After the first 5 yards, the athlete will relax into a prance (Out) in which they maintain posture and front-side emphasis, but ground strikes are not as forceful. It has been helpful to use Vince’s analogy of a boxer on a speed bag when describing Ins and Outs. Tweaking it slightly, I usually use similar sounds to get the desired effect.

1st 5 yards in – BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM

2nd 5 yards out – bop bop bop bop bop

3rd 5 yards in – BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM

Repeat for the desired length.

The athlete’s head position and posture should stay the same across both drills. This is a very nice blend to practice “In and Out” style work and begin learning how to maintain key sprint qualities even when relaxing.

Bleeding Sprint Drills

Bleeding is less a combination of drills and more a gradual increase of intensity within a repetition. It has always felt to me that the lowest intensity of the bleed sets up the highest intensity. If the lower intensity has errors, then the highest will have them too. We can’t expect smooth movement to grow out of a dysfunctional beginning.

We can’t expect smooth movement to grow out of a dysfunctional beginning, says @grahamsprints. Share on X

A block start requires a good transition from initial steps to late acceleration and finally to maximum velocity. The changes in posture and rhythm during acceleration increase quickly, but also gradually and smoothly so that no energy is wasted. Nothing is rushed or abrupt. Bleeds are an excellent way to train this quality somewhat indirectly and generally.

Gallop to Buildup Sprint

In the past, I have used a “skip and switch” fly, but after doing the gallops, the skip and switch looked clunky, and I have put it to the side with most of my athletes. Skipping for distance tends to be a little more violent and “grabby,” whereas the gallop just seems to be more rhythmic and lends itself to a nicer transition into the sprint. The recovery of the swing leg during a gallop is higher to the hamstring and cycles through, allowing the athlete more time than a skip to get the foot slotted under the hip and seamlessly come out into a sprint without any delay.

I do not have my athletes gallop maximally but instruct them to build from a quick gallop into the biggest gallop they can in a 10-yard buildup zone. When they land at or near the 10-yard mark, they should break into a pretty-looking sprint. I usually have them go about 20-30 yards or so.

I like this because the athlete must make a decision about how much gallop speed is too much and what isn’t enough. It takes some good timing and awareness to be in a strong position for the sprint. I look for good posture that does not change much or too quickly in both the gallop and sprint. The gallop usually has a little less forward lean than the sprint does.

Strike Drill to High-Knee Run

This starts with a high-knee run in place that gradually increases in both frequency and ground force. Carl Valle has described it as a quick transition from an 800-meter runner high-knee pace to a 100-meter runner strike in place. The knees should not be artificially high, and the forward lean should begin more upright at the lower frequency and shift subtly forward so the chest is over the midfoot.

Once the athlete feels the peak of the high-knee drill, they should begin to move forward using the prior ground strikes to inform the rest of the buildup run. Often when an athlete first does this drill, they are not comfortable enough with the timing to bleed in without it looking like two separate things. A bleed has to climb the intensity scale nearly imperceptibly, and each climb has to build on the prior rungs.

This is a drill that will be extremely valuable for a while as a rehearsal and as a teaching tool. It is instantly clear to a coach which athletes have it and which ones don’t.

Wickets to Flying Sprint

This is probably one coaches are more familiar with, but it’s worth including here. Unfortunately, it does necessitate that wickets are not arbitrarily thrown out there. This means if an athlete runs a rack of wickets spaced at 5 feet, and the coach asks them to sprint out of it into a fly, the 5-foot spacing has likely inhibited stride length. I would imagine that the resulting fly transition would not be clean, since stride length would be abruptly lengthened.

Reduced spaced wickets like Gary Winckler’s “shorter than” drill have helped extremely loopy runners, but I would still have some sort of a distance progression within a wicket line. The first step would be to figure out an athlete’s current stride length. I have ballparked athletes’ current max velocity stride lengths in two ways:

1. 1. Throw down 10 meters’ worth of bulletin board paper and tape it to the track. Have the athlete sprint over the paper during the fly. Measure the distance from spike mark to spike mark. This is not suitable for large groups.

 

1. 1. Use Freelap to get a fly time and convert it to velocity (m/s) by dividing the fly distance by the time. Then, use Dartfish to figure out the stride frequency of the rep by timing five full sprint strides (six touchdowns) with the full support stance as the guide. Then divide five by that time to get stride frequency. Divide the fly velocity by the frequency and you have the stride length.

 

Curtis Taylor has a nice chart in a Freelap article that shows if an athlete’s stride frequency is too low or too high, and wickets can be used in conjunction with Vince Anderson’s spacing to build them to a desired spacing.

If the progression of the wickets is fairly appropriate, and the athlete runs the wickets and six-step run-in with a purpose in their contacts rather than just feigning a “front-side look,” then the resultant fly sprint should not instantly revert to a loopy sprint.

Ankle Bounce/Straight-Leg Shuffle/Straight-Leg Bound

Straight-leg bounds often look awkward when postures are off and athletes place the effort on having a high leg frequency rather than pushing powerfully away from the ground. If their posture reclines back too far, then it seems to become hard for the ankle to stay neutral and slot adequately under the hips. This makes it hard for the ankle to support the body weight, so the hips drop, and the scissor action of the thighs looks mistimed and hurried.

I have found this bleed useful to set up a good foot contact and upright posture at the onset and then slowly add speed to the lower limbs and then finally power. An advanced athlete could further blend the straight-legged bound into an A-run.

Skip/Gallop/Prance Buildup Bleed

I won’t break each of these down by themselves because they are so similar in execution.

The general rule of thumb with this bleed is that the exercises change from low to high, quick to powerful, or short to long. This is similar to how a dribble bleed retains the same movement of “stepping over” while just changing the amplitude of the concentric circles made by the foot (ankle, calf, knee height).

I think the benefit here is that they prepare athletes for actual sprint buildups and add some movement variability, which creates better athletes and avoids movement “pace lock.” It is interesting to see which athletes seemingly know how to use their feet to go quick and light and subtly progress to being more reactive or creating more pressure and power with the lower body.

Place the emphasis on a smooth transition, where each prance, skip, or gallop changes ever so slightly until it is soon maximal.

Hammer the Basics, Then Add Spice Later

Bleeding and blending can serve as a teaching tool or as a way to advance athletes in their movement skills. Coaches can be creative as long as they follow a good progression or regression model, and there is no point blending drills that aren’t good by themselves.

The main thing to get across with bleeding & blending is that the transitions need to be seamless & smooth. If an athlete can’t do this, it tells you something about their current abilities. Share on X

Bleeds that change without any abrupt movements are fantastic to teach rhythm and relaxation that can carry over to improvements in longer flies and speed endurance work. Although some of these items can be fun to see, it is important to place things on days and in ways that support the main session of the day. The main thing to get across is that the transitions need to be seamless and smooth. If an athlete cannot do this, it tells you something about their current abilities.

This is in no way a complete list of options, and there are more blends and bleeds I am working on that I am excited to experiment with and unveil in the coming months.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Speed kills. Sprint training will enhance body composition, build explosive power, and increase an athlete’s ability to make a game-defining impact on their game. I designed The Blue Program to introduce sprint newbies to speed development without blowing a hamstring in week one, so athletes can make long-term gains and become more effective all season long.

Research consistently demonstrates that faster athletes make more big-time plays¹, appear better conditioned, and even make more money². There is no denying that to be the best, your athletes must address sprint speed. Some will argue it’s all genetic, but my experience working with various athletes at all levels has shown me that speed is a trainable quality. And while I can’t turn the weekend warrior into Usain Bolt, everyone can get faster and improve their ability to make a bigger impact on game day.

Intricate technical drills and confusion regarding efficiency and effectiveness of body positions and postures leaves many athletes intimidated and unsure of how and where to begin. Share on X

Because the importance and trainability of speed is becoming more well known, I have noticed an increasing number of questions from parents, coaches, and athletes coming my way. They know they need to be sprinting, but intricate technical drills and confusion regarding efficiency and effectiveness of body positions and postures leaves many intimidated and unsure of how and where to begin. That’s why I created The Blue Program for building game-breaking speed.

Foundations

This program is an amalgamation of the various speed development programs I’ve rolled out with basketball, rugby, soccer, and cricket athletes over the last five years and mostly closely resembles how I prepare my academy Cricket New South Wales athletes today. I designed this program to establish a foundation of general physical preparation for team sport athletes who want to begin regularly sprinting, and it sets the scene for more individualized approaches with technical coaches down the line. This program is most appropriate for uninjured, active athletes 16 years of age and above, but you can also use it following a return to running program for reconditioning from injury.

Before we get into the program, let’s establish a few key things:

1. Technique is critical.
   
   • To begin with, focus on a tall, proud, and relaxed posture when sprinting.
   • Work the hands from the lip, back past the hip, and let the elbow flex and extend between the front and backswing. Arms should be smooth and relaxed, not robotic or mechanical. Drive the arm action at the shoulder.
   • Initiate the foot strike through the ball of the foot and aim directly beneath the hip—do not “run on your toes.”
   • Use a front-side dominant lower limb action—get the legs working in front of the body as much as possible by driving the knee high. Avoid a big, long kick out the back after toe-off.

2. Fatigue is the enemy.

• A proper speed development program requires plenty of intra-set and inter-rep recovery. For some, this may feel like dead time. But as the legendary sprint coach Charlie Francis famously taught, anything under 95% of top speed is just conditioning. If we fatigue as the workout progresses, our outputs will diminish, and before long we’ll have stopped making progress with the goal in mind. While this program isn’t always about max effort sprinting, when longer rests are prescribed, it is critical they are adhered to.

3. Sprint training is a risky business.

• For team sport athletes who have never followed a speed training program, this is the program with the greatest injury risk they’ll ever complete. Running at top speed exposes muscles and tendons to movement velocities that can never be replicated in the gym. This is why this program is so important to follow before going headlong into a full-blooded speed development program.
• This program aims to build tissue tolerance and condition the body to handle top speeds, so that once completed, the athlete can push the limits and get maximal gains. Follow The Blue Program to the letter before individualizing programs later down the line.

The program consists of two main blocks. Block one is an accumulation phase, with two extensive tempo sessions each week and one speed development day. In the second block, an intensification phase commences, and the script is flipped to one extensive tempo day and two speed development sessions each week. I designed this program to be completed in the off-season; however, by eliminating one set from each tempo session and halving the reps on speed development days, athletes who just can’t wait to get started can also safely and effectively complete it during the pre-season or in-season.

Warm-Up

Because sprinting exposes the body, particularly the feet, calves, quads, and hamstrings, to such large magnitudes and rates of force, a proper warm-up is critical. The warm-up for this program consists of two components. Component one is the general dynamic warm-up and component two is the sprint-specific priming and potentiation exercises.

Because sprinting exposes the body, particularly the feet, calves, quads, and hamstrings, to such large magnitudes and rates of force, a proper warm-up is critical, says @nathankiely_. Share on X

General dynamic warm-up—perform each for 10 meters walking.

1. Hamstring ground sweeps
2. Lunge with overhead reach
3. Toe walks
4. Arabesque
5. Quad stretch
6. High kicks with a straight leg

Video 1. I have carefully selected these bang-for-your-buck exercises to increase range of motion and also strengthen and activate specific muscle sites of common injury seen in high-speed running.

Sprint-specific priming and potentiation.

1. Dribble build-up: 2 x 30m with walk back recovery
   • Fast feet with knee drive, actively dorsiflex the ankle at all times, focus on landing on the ball of the foot.
   • Perform first 10m small cycles, middle 10m medium cycles, and final 10m big cycles with intent to snap up and into the glute with the heel.
2. Triple exchange: 2 x 10m with walk back recovery
   • 1-2-3 stick and hold.
   • Emphasize vertical displacement—this should feel bouncy up and down, not rushed like you’re tripping over yourself while moving forward.
3. A-skip with switch in the air: 2 x 10m with walk back recovery
   • 1-2 jump and switch.
   • Focus on limb exchange during flight phase.
4. Straight-leg scissor bound build-up: 2 x 30m with walk back recovery
   • Keep knee extended at all times by flexing quad; initiate ground contacts by pulling back and down through the glute and hamstring.
   • Perform first 10m short strides, middle 10m medium strides, and final 10m long powerful strides with intent to cover as much ground as possible with each stride.
5. Stride-throughs with walk back recovery
   • 1 x 10m @ 75%
   • 1 x 20m @ 85%
   • 1 x 30m @ 95%

Rest for three minutes following the warm-up prior to commencing the day’s training session. 

Video 2. The four exercises in this video target ankle stiffness, hip lock, extension reflex, and posterior chain-driven paw-back to facilitate improved self-organization and performance while mitigating injury risk. Take your time to explain, demonstrate, and provide feedback to athletes on their technique in these exercises, as they can take some time to learn.

Phase One – Accumulation

The accumulation phase, as the name implies, is all about building work capacity. Each week progresses in volume and intensity to create a broader base of high-speed running conditioning. These volumes and intensities are initially inspired by guidelines and programs from great coaches like Keir Wenham-Flatt, Graeme Morris, and Mike Young. However, I have modified these to complement all elements and the context of this specific program.

You should use hills, sleds, or prowler sprints immediately prior to completing the main exercise on each speed development session to provide a neuromuscular priming effect and reinforce effective and efficient application of ground reaction forces. A hill of an approximately 20- to 30-degree incline is usually best, but other hill inclines can work just as well. If you’ve got access to a sled or prowler, this can be an even more effective tool for overloading specific acceleration qualities.

Contemporary research shows lighter sleds may not be as effective as first thought and sled loads up to 130% of body weight can be highly effective for improving sprint performance. Share on X

For sled or prowler sprints, based on research by Cross et al.³, a load of 75% of body weight should be used for resistance to optimize peak power output. Some coaches believe this is far too heavy, as it changes technique; however, contemporary research shows lighter sleds may not be as effective as first thought⁴ and that sled loads up to 130% of body weight can be highly effective for improving sprint performance⁵.

Video 3. Athletes can perform resisted sprints up a hill, using a prowler, or with a sled like the SKLZ SpeedSac.

The extensive tempo sessions are used to build tissue robustness and improve conditioning to handle repeated exposures to high contractile velocities. Each of these tempo sessions is a simple every minute on the minute (EMOM) workout. This is where the athlete keeps a rolling clock and commences each new repetition as the clock ticks over the minute.

In this type of training, the recovery time is dictated by the speed at which the work is completed. For example, if the athlete completes their 100m in 18 seconds, they get the remaining 42 seconds in the minute as their rest period. Take a full three minutes to rejuvenate between sets in the tempo sessions.

A heart rate monitor may be useful when completing extensive tempo training. The goal is to avoid excessive lactate and glycolytic metabolite accumulation by staying in a predominantly aerobic state. To do this, a helpful guide is to keep the heart rate below 80% of maximum at all times (estimated HR max = 220 – age in years). If the athlete’s heart rate climbs progressively throughout the set, you should decrease velocity to allow for the retention of an aerobic state.

A typical male high school athlete should start by aiming to complete all tempo 100s in under 20 seconds. A well-trained adult male team sport athlete should aim to complete tempo 100s in 16-17 seconds. The tempo session should feel easy, and they should execute the last repetition with the same level of rhythm, relaxation, and technique as the first—err on the side of too slow if you’re unsure. Remember, in speed development, lactate is the enemy—avoid it at all costs.

Phase Two – Intensification

The intensification block changes tack from phase one and begins to emphasize exposure to high-speed running, leaning heavily on inspiration from Mike Young’s speed development guidelines for team sport athletes. Two entry criteria must be met before commencing phase two: the athlete is injury-free and there is no excessive overreaching (consider regular assessments of neuromuscular fatigue via jump testing). This phase uses intensity to drive adaptation and development—while plateauing the volume of work capacity sessions—so recover just as hard as you train during this block.

Phase two begins to emphasize maximal velocity sprinting, and the mini-hurdle wickets drill is an especially useful exercise for improving this aspect of technique. Use wicket runs to practice a strong knee drive, maximal hip height, and vertically orientated foot strikes immediately prior to all-out sprinting on the speed development days. During phase two, tempo 100s should be completed around one second faster than they were in phase one.

Video 4. In this clip I explain the purpose, benefits, and application of the mini-hurdle wicket drills, as well as the correct spacing and setup for seamless delivery in your training sessions.

Once athletes complete this eight-week program, you can bet your bottom dollar they will be better conditioned, have improved body composition, be faster and more explosive on the field, court, or pitch, and be ready to make game-breaking plays week in and week out.

A Word on Strength Training

Yes, you can and should be completing strength training at the same time as this program. Many roads lead to Rome when it comes to getting strong, and I’m not about to tell you which of the many great programs you must follow in conjunction with The Blue Program—besides, that’s outside the scope of this article. However, you should make a few key considerations to optimize training adaptations and mitigate injury risk.

You should prescribe heavy lower-body strength training—particularly targeting the posterior chain—with care. Consider prescribing lifting after sprint training on the same day. This may compromise your outputs in the weight room, but no one ever won a match with a game-defining deadlift, so just suck it up.

This will allow for improved recovery—do not train lower body on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays (the day before Blue Program sessions)—and create greater windows for adaptation. I also recommend incorporating exercises specifically designed to address sites and mechanisms responsible for injury during sprinting, such as Alex Natera’s run-specific isometrics, Nordic hamstring curls, and unilateral strength movements such as split squats and step-ups.

Be Ambitious

Most speed programs I’ve read on the internet aim too low, treating athletes and coaches as if they cannot handle complexity, or they use sprinting as a general training tool for the average Joe. This means they fail to adequately consider the nuance of physical preparation in athletic populations—promising all the rewards, but conveniently ignoring the risks. That’s why I felt The Blue Program was so dearly needed: A program aimed at smart coaches and athletes who want a starting point for getting fast without blowing a hamstring two weeks in.

Most speed programs I’ve read on the internet aim too low, treating athletes and coaches as if they cannot handle complexity, says @nathankiely_. Share on X

I’ve used similar periodization and progression in my speed programs over the last five years and consistently see improved sprint times, greater impact on game-defining plays, and greater levels of robustness and injury resilience. This program is the synthesis of my learning, practice, mistakes, and coaching triumphs during this time period.

A strength coach once told me: “Getting strong is easy. It’s like falling out of a boat and hitting water—anyone can do it.” Speed development, on the other hand, is a tough task and takes years of refined coaching and work to build. Speed grows like a tree from a seedling, slowly gaining height over the years. But with The Blue Program, there’s no longer an excuse not to start the quest for getting fast. By following The Blue Program, you plant the seeds today that can be reaped tomorrow.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

References

1. Faude, O., Koch, T., and Meyer, T. “Straight sprinting is the most frequent action in goal situations in professional football.” Journal of Sports Sciences. 2012;30(7):625-631.

2. Treme, J. and Allen, S.K. “Widely received: Payoffs to player attributes in the NFL.” Economics Bulletin. 2009;29(3):1631-1643.

3. Cross, M.R., Brughelli, M., Samozino, P., Brown, S.R., and Morin, J.-B. “Optimal loading for maximizing power during sled-resisted sprinting.” International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. 2017;12(8):1069-1077.

4. Clark, K.P., Stearne, D.J., Walts, C.T., and Miller, A.D. “The longitudinal effects of resisted sprint training using weighted sleds vs. weighted vests.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2010;24(12):3287-3295.

5. Cahill, M.J., Oliver, J.L., Cronin, J.B., Clark, K.P., Cross, M.R., and Lloyd, R.S. “Sled-push load-velocity profiling and implications for sprint training prescription in young athletes.” The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2019.

Many trainers offer younger clients the same types of exercises and advice they do with elite athletes. The only difference is they shrink it down to size. Lift lighter weight. Go shorter distance. Aim lower. They’re treated like miniature adults.

But are beginner athletes being shortchanged with this approach?

Without baseline strength, coordination, and skills, many exercises aren’t helpful for younger athletes. Some may even be injury risks. Let’s dig into what I’ve seen and what would be better for athletes just starting out.

Bear Crawl Races

Let me preface by saying that bear crawls are not dumb. In fact, I use them with all my athletes. Bear crawls have many variations that can develop a number of important athletic qualities. The problem? Some coaches program them in ways that are dumb.

These coaches use bear crawls in ways that can cause injury, especially to the upper body. They believe that more, longer, and faster is better—all of which, when it comes to crawling, are bad ideas.

If you are looking to injure a wrist, elbow, or shoulder, then look no further than bear crawl races. Nothing like taking an exercise that should be slow and controlled to a still-developing young athlete whose upper body is most likely weak and unstable, and asking them to crawl as fast as possible without regard for form or technique.

If you are looking to injure a wrist, elbow, or shoulder, then look no further than bear crawl races, says @JeremyFrisch. Share on X

Let’s remember we are human beings and our preferred method of locomotion is walking upright. Our lower bodies are specifically made to handle the forces of the ground when moving. Our upper bodies, especially as children, are not.

Bear crawling shifts a significant amount of body weight onto the upper body. When athletes bear crawl as fast as possible, they are repeatedly slamming the hand into the ground. The small bones of the wrist are not made for this type of high-load, high-speed stress.

Ask any high-level linebacker or offensive lineman how their wrists feel after a season of smashing their hands into opposing players. These players go to great lengths in training to sensibly strengthen this area—most athletes asked to bear crawl at high speeds do not.

Another dumb way coaches use bear crawls is as a form of punishment disguised as mental toughness training. I once watched a youth football coach make his 6th grade players bear crawl up and down a hill at the end of practice. As the players fatigued and their form deteriorated, the coach droned on about how poorly they played their last game, how they needed to be mentally tough, and how this particular activity would make them “not quit” in the 4th quarter.

About two minutes into the bear crawls, most kids were already quitting because they simply couldn’t do the exercise anymore and they certainly were not listening to their coach’s inspiring words of encouragement.

So what is bear crawling good for and how do you use them? Bear crawls are great for developing:

• Shoulder and core stability
• Cross lateral coordination
• Systemic strength
• Spatial awareness
• Hand/wrist strength and mobility

Crawling should be used in very small doses, though. Typically I use them in distances of 10-12 yards during the warmup period of our training sessions. The idea is to be slow and controlled in perfect position.

As the athletes get better at the exercise, instead of adding distance we simply add reps or change the surface the athlete is crawling on. For example, we use soft foam blocking pads to increase the balance demand, or planks to decrease the surface width and add incline and decline. This serves as a great way to improve upper body strength as well as stability.

Elevated Handle Trap Bars

Way back in 1995, I bought my first trap bar. I loved using the handles on the side rather than bending over to pick up a traditional barbell. I worked hard and long at that exercise and after some time and sweat equity, I was finally able to handle some decent weight and had some of the nice muscular gains that come with lifting heavy loads.

Today you see everyone and their mother on Instagram smashing heavy loads with a trap bar. But there is one major difference between ‘95 and now. Unlike today’s trap bars, my original trap bar had no elevated handle. In order to pick it up you had to have good hip mobility and sink fairly deep to pick up the weight, which ultimately limited how much weight I could lift.

Today’s trap bars with elevated handles make for a very short range of motion. The elevated handles make a lift that was once the perfect hybrid between a deadlift and a back squat more like a quarter squat.

Today’s trap bars with elevated handles make for a very short range of motion, says @JeremyFrisch. Share on X

Somewhere along the way, someone thought it was a good idea to introduce the elevated trap bar deadlift to 10- and 11-year-olds who were yet to even hit a growth spurt. By combining the elevated handles with a body that is short in stature, we get an exercise that is all show and no go. The end result is that you have a movement with very little range of motion, and nearly zero benefit.

With very little hip flexion and knee flexion, athletes are not really learning anything in terms of movement skill. They are not really squatting or deadlifting. It’s a crappy hybrid that does not appear to carry over to the field or to more complicated lifts. At least a walking lunge or goblet squat really focuses on developing strength through a full range.

With such a small range of motion, what comes next should have many parents concerned: the belief that the kid is actually strong. Next, the coach start piling on weight. We know that young spines are growing rapidly and rapidly growing spines will have weak spots. Believing that a young athlete can handle high loads just because he can lift through a small range of motion is a sucker’s bet and the results can be catastrophic.

Before teaching young athletes how to lift weights, we need to teach basic movements through their full range, under control with moderate loads. Young athletes need to focus on building complexity rather than loading. The loading part can come later when the athlete has mastered a number of different movements and has a solid movement skill set.

Age-appropriate exercises are safe, carry over to the field, and lead to learning more complex lifts in the weight room. For my money I choose the kettlebell sumo deadlift. It’s a legitimate hip hinge that’s easy to set up, choose a load, teach. Best of all it allows for a full range of motion. We can teach it in bilateral stance, single leg, and staggered stance. Once an athlete masters the kettlebell sumo deadlift, they’re ready for its more dynamic cousin: the kettlebell swing.

Battle Ropes

Once upon a time, there was a professional athlete who was swinging some ropes around. Then someone put it on YouTube and before you know it the trickle-down effect began. College athletes started using them, then high school, and before you know it, every personal trainer or CrossFit across the country was swinging ropes around for internet fitness stardom.

Before I go any further let me just say I don’t hate battle ropes, but for young athletes they are a waste of time. They can obviously be used in many more ways than swinging them around and can be beneficial when used for certain cases. For example, I once used them for some basic conditioning for a football player who broke his foot and for an obese client who couldn’t run.

But when I see videos of young athletes swinging battle ropes, I cringe. Clearly this is another case of adults thinking that adult training ideas are good for young athletes.

I’ve heard that kids think they are fun to do, but I don’t buy that. Obstacle courses are fun, playing tag is fun, and relay races are fun, but swinging a rope around for 30 seconds while some coach yells at you is not very fun.

Then comes the argument that they are great for endurance. The problem is, the last thing we need to develop in young athletes is endurance capabilities. Endurance takes little time to develop and most kids get enough of it at sport practice or playing outside. What young athletes really need to develop are things like strength, power, sprinting ability, coordination, technique, and decision-making skills—all of which take years to develop.

What young athletes really need to develop are things like strength, power, sprinting ability, coordination, technique, and decision-making skills—all of which take years to develop, says @JeremyFrisch. Share on X

In the small amount of time I have to work with young athletes each week, there are so many other activities I could be doing that battle ropes work isn’t even on my radar. Sprint work and reactive games like tag, learning strength training exercises, tumbling, movement skill work, and obstacle courses work/gymnastic/parkour all hold much more potential than standing in place swinging ropes.

But if you are the creative type, a battle rope can hold some value. Here are three alternative battle rope activities that I find useful when working with young athletes:

• Various hops over rope
• Tug of war
• Sled pull relay

Weighted Carries

Another complete waste of time for young athletes is weighted carries.

Again, let me preface this by saying that weighted carries and its variations are not necessarily bad exercises. Many of my much bigger and older athletes employ carries in their training cycles. It’s a hybrid exercise that trains multiple athletic qualities, mainly grip and core strength along with a nice conditioning kick at longer distances. Older athletes get a lot out of weighted carries.

But young athletes don’t.

First off, weighted carries for young athletes are just plain boring. Training young athletes has to be engaging and fun. Nothing is less engaging for an energetic young kid than walking around with weights in their hands.

Training young athletes has to be engaging and fun, says @JeremyFrisch. Share on X

My other problem is that it’s an exercise that promotes very little range of motion. As a coach I look for exercises that train the entire body through a complete range of motion.

All young athletes should be doing some form of hanging, swinging, or climbing. For example, climbing across monkey bars challenges the entire upper body, creates a rhythmic awareness, and improves hand-eye coordination. Not to mention, it is challenging and kids always love a challenge. We have many of our young athletes develop upper body strength by climbing across a training rig. It is my belief that if kids did more of this at a young age, we would see fewer arm injuries down the line when kids get into competitive baseball.

Pro-Style “Showcase” Events

That leads me to a problem in youth baseball, as well as in other sports: showcases.

Every summer as a kid, I would attend a football camp at one of the local colleges. Around 6th or 7th grade, I was introduced to another formidable camper by the name of “Horsepower.” As you can imagine, Horsepower was big, fast, and fairly athletic for his age group. He pretty much dominated the majority of campers in the 40-yard dash and agility drills. On the field I made it a point to stay out of his way.

The next year we crossed paths once again—but this time something was different. I’d grown and he hadn’t; I was faster, he was the same. The kid was still a good player, but Mother Nature had evened the score between us.

This story plays itself out over and over in youth sports year after year. The early developer dominates the youth sports scene only to become an average player later on. Look at the Little League World Series: how many of those players play baseball in college?

It doesn’t matter, though, because all across the country, parents are ready to spend money on their kids’ athletic future. Big or small, slow or fast, young athletes line up in droves in the hopes of getting scouted or discovered for a future scholarship. And savvy businessmen will set up scouting combines and showcases to lure in these young athletes and their parents.

As a youth football coach I see “youth football combines” pop up all over the place.

Pay us $100 and we will time your son in the 40-yard dash and pro agility drills. Afterwards, we’ll tell them how slow they are compared to the professional athletes.

Or:

Come to our skills clinic and in one day we will teach you how to….[fill in the blank: hit, shoot, block, kick, hit, etc.]

Name the sport and somewhere there is a “clinic” to turn your son or daughter into the next superstar. Or test them and compare them to adults. But why are we testing youth athletes who are still in the process of developing all-around athletic skills?

Asking the Most Important Question

Younger athletes need to develop things like basic strength, hand-eye coordination, and reaction ability. Their 40-yard dash times don’t matter and neither does their ability to do static drills while bored half to death.

When training younger athletes, it’s easy to get swept up in style over substance and do what the adults—and the pros—do. We see so many exercises on the internet, especially on social media, and as the years go by it can be difficult to remember what we needed as young athletes just starting out.

Trainers who work with younger athletes need to think seriously about what they’re teaching and why. If something seems beneficial, they need to first see through the glamour and ask themselves exactly how it would be helpful for an athlete.

Then they need to ask: how about for a kid?

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

When I was an athlete, at the end of each season I used to have my own mini review. I asked (what I thought were) probing questions: Did I meet my goals? Where could I improve? What was my goal for the following season? What performance was required to achieve those goals?

On the surface, this sounds like a useful exercise—an athlete taking ownership of their performance—and research demonstrates that realistic performance reviews are a crucial part of developing an elite athlete’s psychological toolbox. However, the mistake I made was that I generally didn’t forge a strong enough link between my performance review and the changes I needed to make to my preparation the following year.

The mistake I made was that I generally didn’t forge a strong enough link between my performance review and the changes I needed to make to my preparation the following year, says @craig100m. Share on X

For example, after the 2006 season, in which I struggled to perform at my best, my goal was to go to the World University Games in the 100m and challenge for a medal. To do this, I believed I had to be able to run around 10.25 seconds. My approach to this was, essentially, to train harder—I pushed myself in my key sessions, lost some body fat, and nailed down my sleep and nutrition habits.

In 2007, I had the best season of my life, running my personal bests of 6.55 seconds for the 60m and 10.14 seconds for the 100m. I made the semi-final of the World Championships in the 100m, won a bronze medal in the 4x100m, and won a silver medal at the European Indoors over 60m. My goal for the 2008 season was to make the Olympic final—I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that my approach to this was to do the same things I did for 2007, only better.

The Strategy Book

I don’t think my approach is uncommon; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some athletes, and perhaps even some coaches, don’t even bother with a post-season review. My problem was in linking what had happened before with what I wanted to happen in the future via a coherent, planned, and systematic method of performance improvement.

After retiring from sport, I worked for a sports technology start-up; now I work for a national sporting organization. These companies have exposed me to different models and methods of doing business. A word often used in these settings is “strategy.”  As someone without a strong foundation in business, I’ve had to spend some time getting up to speed with what a strategy is, what creating one entails, and how it can be useful.

One of the first books I read in this area was The Strategy Book by Max McKeown. As I made my way through its chapters, I started to see clear parallels between how businesses develop strategies and how athletes and coaches might use this information to better inform their planning process. The line between sport and business is continually blurred—and if you follow any sports coaches on social media, you’ll perhaps think it’s very overdone—but I remain convinced that The Strategy Book holds some useful lessons for us all when it comes to enhancing performance in sport.

When reading The Strategy Book, I saw clear parallels between how businesses develop strategies and how athletes & coaches might use this information to better inform their planning process. Share on X

McKeown says strategy is “…about moving from where you are to where you are to where you want to be … strategy is as much about deciding what to do, where to go, why, when and how as about choosing what not to do … Planning backwards for a better future.” A crucial aspect to keep in mind is that, as a starting point, strategy is not specifically about the detail (often that comes in an operational plan).

As Henry Mintzberg is quoted as saying, “strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.” Strategy informs our planning, but then relies on individual actions and behaviors to deliver what is required—indeed, strategy execution is often considered far more challenging than actual strategy development and is where the best-laid plans often come undone.

Strategy, according to McKeown, is both analytical and creative. We have to understand where we are, where we want to get to, and what our competitors are doing—each of these requires some level of detailed analysis. We then need to be creative in our approach; what are some of the methods we can use to get from where we are to where we want to be? Finally, we return to analysis: How do we know if we were successful in achieving our strategic vision?

“The Strategic Self”

The first major section of McKeown’s book is dedicated to the strategist—in this case, that is you, the coach. Being able to develop a useful, comprehensive approach requires strategic thinking, which means we need to think before we plan. Specifically, McKeown provides four prompting questions:

• What do we want to do?
• What do we think is possible?
• What do we need to do to achieve our goals?
• When and how should we react to new opportunities and adapt our plans?

An additional large part of the planning process involves what McKeown terms “looking over your shoulder”—in business, this is understanding your competitors and markets. In sport, this is getting a better understanding of:

1. Who your competitors are.
2. What they do well—why are they successful? Commonalities between competitors may suggest that this trait underpins success.
3. What do they do badly? What could we exploit to drive our own success? During my career, I ran against a couple of athletes who I knew couldn’t handle pressure at the end of a race; their game plan was to have an electric start and hold on. As a result, my strategy for these races was to put myself in a position where I could exert pressure on them from 60 meters onward, and then relax to move past them. Where are your opportunities?
4. What do the best coaches and sporting systems in the world do? Or, perhaps more importantly, what don’t they do?

Let’s look at this through the prism of the coach of a promising 100m runner. That athlete has had some success at the junior level, making the World Under-20 Championships final and running 10.25. A crucial part of any strategy development is understanding what is required for success; in the 100m, this could broadly be defined as the interaction between stride length and stride frequency, and the underlying physiological and mechanical traits that contribute to both of these variables. Alongside this, we have to layer on psychological and broader physiological traits, such as the physiological resilience to tolerate the required volumes and intensities of training, and from a psychological perspective, compete well under pressure.

A crucial part of any strategy development is understanding what is required for success, says @craig100m. Share on X

An understanding of the required performance to achieve a specific outcome (such as a World Championships medal, final placing, semi-final placing, etc.) can assist in setting goals. From there, an evaluation of where the athlete is now—from a physiological, psychological, tactical, and technical standpoint—compared to what is required for these performance levels will guide planning.

“Strategic Innovation”

As I mentioned earlier, part of the strategic process requires thinking creatively. In sport, I’d argue that we don’t do this enough; we typically have set ways of doing things, and we unquestionably and uncritically accept them as valid. However, the veneer of many strongly embedded beliefs within sport is starting to crack. As an example, John Kiely has critically analyzed and appraised the research base on periodization theory. Periodization theory is a foundational bedrock of training theory, and yet some critical thinking suggests it is not as well proven as we initially believed.

Along this vein, McKeown has some prompting questions, which I’ve added to, for us to consider and reflect on—and which may drive our own thinking and planning innovations:

• Why don’t we change the rules?
• Why do we do what we do—do we know it works, or do we think it works?
• How do we know what we do works?
• Are we happy with the status quo?
• What would happen if we did something different?
• Why might we fail in our plan?

That last prompt is, to me, a really useful question, and is similar to the concept of a pre-mortem, popularized by Gary Klein. Here, we move ourselves into the future and ask, “Why did we fail?” By listing the various reasons, we can then take steps to mitigate the chances of those reasons for failure occurring.

Additionally, it is crucial to avoid developmental inertia, and a key quote from McKeown sums this up really nicely: “Success from doing what you are doing stops you from seeing what you should do next.” Similarly, a popular quote I’ve seen shared a number of times (not from McKeown) is “The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘we’ve always done it this way.’” An important theoretical concept here is “what got you here won’t get you there”—but that’s another book entirely.

Again, let’s return to a sprints coach: Their athlete has a goal of running 10.10 for 2021, and qualifying for the Olympic Games in a quota spot (i.e., not an automatic qualifier). How might they fail in this? Here are some quick ideas:

• Three athletes from their nation run faster and qualify ahead of them.
• The athlete is injured and either can’t compete or can’t complete sufficient training sessions to perform at their best.
• The athlete cannot psychologically handle the pressure of competition and so does not perform at their best.
• The athlete doesn’t accumulate sufficient World Athletics points to qualify.
• A global pandemic limits international travel, meaning the athlete cannot travel to their planned competitions.

We can then consider some solutions to these, which can feed back into both the setting of strategic priorities and the development of a plan of action:

Know What You Can Do Best

Many companies know what they’re good at and aim to become market leaders within that niche. Google’s goal is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Obviously, Google started off as a search engine—a good way to make information accessible—but through being guided by this strategic goal, Google now owns YouTube (allowing them to make video accessible and useful) and has developed Google Books, Google Scholar, Google image search, and a plethora of other products to make information easier to come by.

Google even organizes our personal information through Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. By having a clear goal, Google developed a strategy that enabled them to be the best at what they do.

In sport, the end goal is more or less fixed: if we want to win the gold medal, we generally know what performance is required to achieve that. An important part of building your strategy is developing the process for achieving that performance. Once you understand the required performance and its constituent parts, you can then shift to better understanding:

1. What is your relative strength?
2. What can you do better than your competitors?
3. Can you manufacture situations in competition to suit your strengths and expose your competitors’ weaknesses?
4. How do you go from where you are now to where you want to be?
5. Is it better to work on your relative weaknesses or focus on maximizing your strengths?
6. How much of a threat are your weaknesses to your performance?

Don’t Just Plan—React!

It’s tempting to think that, once we have a plan in place, we need to stick to it. This is the wrong approach, writes McKeown. Instead, we should view our training strategy as an initial framework to guide us toward our goal; something we use to inform our plan. In this process, we continually need to update our plan with new information as it comes in:

• What’s working and what isn’t?
• How is the athlete responding to the plan?
• Do you need to spend more time on a given area?
• Can you recognize new opportunities that present themselves?

It’s tempting to think that, once we have a plan in place, we need to stick to it. According to McKeown, this is the wrong approach, says @craig100m. Share on X

By accepting that we need to respond and adapt—daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly—we can be flexible in our response to this new information, while simultaneously, through our strategic plan, moving in the general direction of our end goal.

Making Decisions

Once you have an understanding of the general path you need to take to be successful, you must make some decisions, in the form of putting together a (flexible and adaptable) training plan. The decisions here are, essentially, what to put in and what to take or keep out. Through your analysis, you should know what the constituent components of performance are and, as a general rule, how good you/your athletes are at them at present.

The next step is to set priorities—what do you need to allocate the most time to work on?—and develop an understanding of how best to improve on them. Using this, you can create your training program, but you also need to consider:

1. How will you know if what you’re doing is working?
2. How will you know when to make a change?
3. If something isn’t working, what changes will you make?

In this way, we enter the planàdoàreview cycle, with different cycles occurring on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.

Do–>Review

An important part of the strategic process within businesses is to manage the ongoing delivery of the strategy, check for progress, and make changes. This process is so important that some companies have a chief strategy officer. Utilizing strategic thinking and principles within the athlete development process need not be any different; regular check-ins to ensure the training strategy is progressing as planned, and making any refinements, are crucial.

There can be different levels to this, ranging from quick trackside conversations to full-blown review meetings. An important part of regular review meetings is that everyone within the performance team should be able to have their say and provide ideas, giving a true 360-degree perspective on how things are progressing and ensuring new and innovative ideas are being brought to the table.

Danger Before Failure

In sport, it’s likely that your key strategic goal can occur only once a year (e.g., qualify for the World Championships), or perhaps even less frequently, such as winning a medal at the Olympic Games. Often, this means that there can be a lot of time between planning and knowing whether success has happened.

An important process…is recognizing danger signs that suggest you may be at risk of failing to meet your big goal, says @craig100m. Share on X

An important process during this time is recognizing danger signs that suggest you might be at risk of failing to meet your big goal. Part of the strategy process is understanding what systems you have to have in place to recognize that danger; it might be training load monitoring to identify periods of increased risk of injury, physiological testing of key traits, or stress testing the athlete in specific competition scenarios.

Each of these tests has the potential to identify risks to achieving the strategic goal and, crucially, buys you time to make any changes that may be required to get you back on track. Here, the key question is: “How will you know if you’re at risk of not meeting your goal?” The sooner you can recognize any potential danger, the more time you have to prevent failure.

“Strategic Tools”

The last section of the book is a collection of various strategy tools that may prove useful when developing your own strategy as a coach. One of these is the five basic strategy questions developed by McKeown, which should provide a starting point for much of your planning:

1. Where are you now?
2. Where do you want to go?
3. What changes have to be made?
4. How should changes be made?
5. How shall you measure progress?

Other tools include:

• A SWOT Analysis—helping you identify strengths, weaknesses, and threats to performance.
• The 7-S Framework—allowing you to understand the strategy enablers you can use to deliver your training strategy.
• Kim & Mauborgne’s Four Actions—important in identifying what to keep, what to lose, and where to innovate.
• Kotter’s Eight Step Model of Change—often, part of delivering on a strategy requires managing a process of change, perhaps within yourself or with the athletes you coach. This model describes a process of working through that change.

Each of these tools may prove useful in developing a training and performance strategy, and so they are well worth looking at more closely.

Strategy Reminders

Strategic thinking can be complex and challenging, which is why the best strategic thinkers are highly prized by businesses. But I think McKeown’s book gives us some insight to develop our own framework to think strategically about how we develop athletes:

1. Understand the event: In terms of performance, what does it take to be successful? How will this change over time—are performances stable or trending upward (or even downward)? Is the overall depth in the sport/event changing? How might any proposed rule changes or innovations affect this? How might the venue of future championships affect the required performance (e.g., heat, humidity, altitude)?
2. Understand the constituent pieces: For a given performance (identified in point 1), what are the individual building blocks required for success (e.g., physiological, technical, tactical, psychological, social, etc.)?
3. Understand where you or your athletes are now.
4. Understand how to get from where you are now to where you want to be: What are the different methods that you can use to develop your key identified capacities?
5. Think innovatively and question your assumptions: The more established the process, the more you should question it.
6. Set priorities: Which area do you most need to improve in to achieve your goal?
7. Understand what could go wrong, mitigate the key risks, and have a plan in place for responding to others.
8. Set a plan.
9. Understand how best to measure progress across different time points.
10. Continually refine the plan, mixing short-terms goals and appraisals with a long-term vision.

This book is a crucial read for coaches. It sets out a framework for developing an effective long-term plan to drive performance success, which will greatly assist in guiding you forward. Share on X

Overall, this book is a crucial read for coaches. It sets out a framework for developing an effective long-term plan to drive performance success, which—when combined with other tools specific to your sport such as periodization and training theory (both of which you must critically analyze!)—will greatly assist in guiding you forward. I also think you need to give this book time: It’s a lot to take in on the first read, but rarely have I read a book that has had me highlighting sections so frequently.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

I was raised with three older brothers who were all athletes by parents who were highly educated and loved us very much. My parents taught and modeled for us that “Emotions negatively impact your life, so avoid being emotional. Think rationally.” As I grew older and experienced more of life—and after coaching and teaching thousands of athletes over a 30-year period—I realized that my well-meaning parents had it wrong. Humans are NOT rational beings who allow their emotions to occasionally get in the way. Instead, I have firmly come to conclude that humans ARE completely emotional beings who occasionally have rational thoughts.

As a tenured professor in the kinesiology department at Whitworth University for the past 25 years, I have taught sports psychology courses to a wide variety of college students and student-athletes. In addition to that academic background and experience, I have served as the head track and field and cross-country coach for 25 years, with approximately 100 men and women on the rosters each season. Fifty years ago, if you asked an athlete, student, or coach how much of an impact they thought someone’s mind had on their performance, you would have gotten an answer ranging from “none” to “some.”

There is likely full agreement that a problem exists within most athletes that their mind negatively impacts their performance…How do we solve the problem? Share on X

Now, the answers are more informed and may range from “some” to “all.” There are several ways to look at sports psychology, or the mental aspects of sport. However, there isn’t much of an argument on whether or not our brain impacts our athletic performance; in addition, there is likely full agreement that there exists a problem within most athletes that their mind negatively impacts their performance. However, the big question also exists: How do we solve the problem?

To solve any problem, we need to first understand exactly what the problem is.

If you are a coach who looks at your athlete as a collection of mechanical movements that you are attempting to maximize efficiently, you will struggle with the mental aspects of coaching. However, if you view your athletes as breathing humans who are full of all kinds of competing emotions, thoughts, and feelings, then you will be in a better position to help your athletes manage their emotions.

I used to think that the only option I had to help some of my athletes to resolve their mental barriers was to cut their heads off. That excessive detachment would allow them to reach their full athletic potential. They were fast and strong and prepared, but their brains got in the way of all of their athletic potential and training. Now I see my athletes as flawed humans with hormones, doubts, fears, low self-confidence, and a myriad of other psychological complexities, and they require tools to help manage their emotions.

From Problem Recognition to Problem Solving

Once we have properly identified who we are working with, we must take the next step to properly define the issues that athletes are dealing with. How often do you hear an athlete say “I am stressed out” when they walk in the door? The answer is quite often. How many times have you responded, “That is great!” The answer is never.

Our society views stress as bad or negative. However, we all know that stress is neither bad nor good: Stress is defined as “a demand placed on something.” We lift weights (a demand) to get stronger. We put demands on our muscles in a variety of ways when we train. We don’t see that demand as negative or bad—it may hurt, but it has benefits, and that is why we subject ourselves to it. We run to put demands on our heart and lungs for conditioning. Athletes see it as negative, but the truth is that we all agree it is beneficial, and that is why we do it.

Stress is not inherently bad. Stress is…stress. Therefore, when an athlete says that they are “stressed out,” we know what they mean; unfortunately, they don’t. And because they don’t properly identify what is going on, they can’t efficiently find a solution. The question to ask them is “What is the demand on you?” It is usually something that is overwhelming them.

Distress is defined as “a demand that causes harm.” Too much of a demand (being overwhelmed) can cause mental harm. School is difficult. Life challenges. Change. Relationship issues. Financial problems. Unmet expectations. One or two or three of those things can give an athlete a sense of harmful stress.

Throughout the season, I witness athletes struggling in practice. The struggle is not simply fatigue or physical distress. When I ask the athlete “How are you doing?,” responses may range from a shrug to a laundry list of issues that they feel are out of their control (two common examples are a relationship that is coming to an end and/or a set of academic classes that are beyond the student-athlete’s perceived capabilities). Most of the time, simply verbalizing the issues will help the athlete recognize that life isn’t as out of control as they may imagine it is. A coach may be the only person to whom an athlete feels they can safely vent their fears and anxieties, and hopefully the coach is empathetic enough to listen and provide support.

Coaches need to point out to athletes that fears and anxieties are demands, just like weight training is a demand, and we can use them to make us better or allow them to damage us. Share on X

As coaches, we need to point out that these things are demands, just like weight training is a demand, which we can use to make us better or we can allow to damage us. Framing our problems accurately will help us correct or manage them. When we have a slow athlete, we shouldn’t label them as “slow” and move on. Capable coaches figure out why the athlete is slow (lack of strength, poor fitness, improper mechanics, lack of confidence, etc.) and then implement a plan to fix those issues. The same should be true for mental barriers to success. Coaches need to help athletes identify the areas in their life that cause stress or other mental barriers and then equip them with the tools to manage or overcome them.

Addressing Distress

Distress can cause anxiety. Fear—which is different than distress—can also cause anxiety. Fear refers to how we perceive the possibility of something happening to us instead of the probability. When we look at the logical probability of something happening to us, it is typically low, but the possibility of it happening, no matter how small, results in fear. The “fight or flight” response is a physiological reaction to a perceived harmful event.

In other words, our body gets full of adrenaline so it can either run away from the charging saber-tooth tiger or stand and fight the big kitty. Our body has been conditioned to react to fear. Fear, however, is an emotional response to a perceived danger or harm. That emotional response exists because of the lack of trust. When we trust ourselves or others, we don’t perceive events as being harmful to us. Few people fear sitting in a chair, as they trust the chair will hold them. Many people fear public speaking because they don’t trust how the audience will respond to what they say, and/or they don’t trust their own ability to deliver a coherent message.

We need to identify our fears and learn to control them by understanding what it is that we don’t trust in the situation. When we can understand the psychological response to fear and control it, we can then allow the physiological response to help us to fight and not engage in flight. Allow fears to be a fire that fuels you and propels you forward and upward, but don’t allow fear to be a fuel that burns you up.

Mental Toughness and Resilience

Defining the problem accurately helps us find a solution. What is mental toughness? Is it being focused? Is it being angry? Is it being strong or intense?

Mental toughness is not accurately described by any of those, as they are all different areas that must be addressed separately. Mental toughness is most accurately described as the “ability to overcome an adverse situation in an expedient manner.” Mentally tough people aren’t better than anyone else. Mentally tough people are simply better at rebounding from challenges and rebounding in a shorter period of time than those who are not mentally tough.

Mentally tough people are simply better at rebounding from challenges and rebounding in a shorter period of time than those who are not mentally tough. Share on X

We all have heard the line “time heals all wounds.” Give us enough time and we will “get over it.” A mentally tough person “gets over it” and “gets over it” fast. The mentally tough person isn’t flawless or perfect—a mentally tough person makes a lot of mistakes. The difference is that when a mentally tough person makes an error, the next time a ground ball is hit to them they make a great play. Air ball? They drain a three. Mentally tough people respond to adversity and respond quickly. How does that happen?

Resilience, which is “the ability to rebound, recover, or bounce back to the original form,” is a skill. We are not born resilient. We learn resilience over time. But how do we learn resilience? Like any skill, we learn it with practice.

Sports have historically been an effective environment to help teach resilience. Failure is inevitable in sport, and when there is failure, there is an opportunity to practice resilience. No athlete bats 1.000 for very long, nor do they make every shot in every game. Getting a hit one out of three at bats in a game is seen as successful. Two out of three made field goals will get you a lot of praise in basketball.

Most athletes understand those statistics and realize that failure is part of sport and is something to overcome. However, not all athletes handle failure equally—often because some never learned to be resilient in the first place. Sport alone does not teach athletes character or skills, including resilience; sports are merely a tool that a coach can use to teach character and skills.

All athletes are not created equal—they come from various family environments and have various levels of support. Bobby Knight, the Hall of Fame college basketball coach, once stated in an interview: “Athletes today are not any different than athletes 30 or 40 years ago. What is different is the parents who raise them.” He went on to elaborate how parents (and coaches and teachers) tend to overly protect children, and that protection prevents the natural exposure to failure and thus the opportunity to learn resilience. When an athlete fails and a coach is present to help them cope with that failure, they acquire resilience. When an athlete fails and allows their emotions to take over, they may quit the sport or pout until they are “over it,” or simply blame the failure on others (e.g., Coach isn’t any good).

Many athletes—but not all—come from homes that include loving parents who go to great lengths to take care of their children and protect them from harm. A kid falls off a bike and the parent runs over and picks them up. Or even “worse,” the parent doesn’t let the kid have a bike until they are confident that the kid won’t fall off while riding. Similarly, athletes often have great teachers and coaches who want the best for them, and that “best” may include keeping them from pain or disappointment (insert rant about “participation trophies,” “everyone plays equal time” rules, or “ties are okay” that often come up when talking about our “entitled children” and lack of resilience).

I love my kids, so I try to provide for them and help them avoid the pain and struggles that I unfortunately went through. However, by attempting to protect them, I may be keeping them from the opportunities that I had as a kid to learn resilience. My attempt to help them may prevent them from developing the skill of resilience, which will be beneficial in their future challenges. In my 30 years of college coaching, there hasn’t been a blueprint for athletes who have resilience and those who don’t. In my experience, though, the athletes who have had more struggles in life tend to handle struggle easier than those who have had a smoother path.

I often work with Paralympic athletes. These athletes are not all the same, but one common characteristic that I have found is they tend to “grind” more and shrug off failure much more quickly than able-bodied athletes. I believe this is correlated to the fact that much of their life has revolved around overcoming adversity. The necessity to drag a competitive wheelchair around whenever you want to work out requires more resilience than simply throwing a pair of shoes in your backpack.

Coping, along with resilience, is a skill… Coping is not a passive activity—the skill of coping must be learned, and thus coaches must teach it. Share on X

Coping is the manner in which we “deal with problems.” Coping, along with resilience, is a skill. We all have different ways to cope. Ignoring is a common “coping mechanism.” However, ignoring is not actually a successful coping strategy—it will not allow us to deal with a problem for the long term. Ignoring simply delays the requirement to cope until later. Successful coping requires four steps:

1. Control our emotions. Emotions cause us to think less rationally and allow feelings to direct thoughts and behavior. Take a big deep breath and calm yourself.
2. Organize the inputs. In other words, what is happening. This is like the “data collection” step in the scientific method.
3. Plan a strategy. Once we have all of the data, we can plan a strategy.
4. Execute that strategy. This may seem like a simple step, but it is often the most difficult.

We are often capable of planning, but actually executing a plan requires a risk that many of us are unwilling to take. Control, Organize, Plan, and Execute. C-O-P-E. It is easy to remember the steps of coping. It is much more difficult to actually cope with our problems.

Coping with Loss

Loss is the most common area in our lives that requires coping. Loss of any kind will cause anxiety, distress, depression, and a lack of self-confidence, all of which can benefit from coping. Whenever we lose something, our emotions get the best of us. Lose a game. Lose a loved one. Lose a relationship. Lose our car keys. Obviously, we react to some losses more than others, but all losses require some form of coping.

Controlling our emotions requires patience and trust. Organizing the input requires focus and awareness. Planning a strategy requires critical thinking and problem-solving. Execution requires risk-taking and motivation. Coping is not a passive activity—the skill of coping must be learned, and thus coaches must teach it.

When an athlete has a poor performance or fails, they may act out or shut down—their emotions take over. In order to control emotions, a great first step is to take a deep breath. That simple action causes the athlete to pause. Sometimes, controlling emotions requires a coach to “talk the athlete down off the ledge.” Giving your perspective and listening to the athlete’s emotions will help them control their emotional state. Once those emotions are less overwhelming, you can address rational thought. “Why are you so upset?” “Was the performance as bad as you thought it was?” “What variables did you have control over that you didn’t control and what variables were out of your control?” (e.g., the opponent was much better, the referee made an untimely call, etc.).

Athletes need to understand that flawlessness is rare in sport. Improvement is more likely. Share on X

Once the facts are laid out, the coach can help the athlete strategize how to move forward. “What can we do at practice next week to improve and raise the probability of a better performance?” Words are key. Probability is different than guarantee. Better is different than perfect. Athletes need to understand that flawlessness is rare in sport. Improvement is more likely. Set process goals and not outcome goals, and then communicate with the athlete during the week to check how the process is going.

Coping leads us to being content—but not satisfied—with our current situation. Contentment and satisfaction are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Satisfied refers to being “pleased or full.” When we are satisfied, we no longer want or feel the need for more. As an athlete (and as a human who desires to reach their full potential), satisfaction prevents us from pushing forward—when we determine something is full, there is no need to do more. More tends to cause us to overflow, which becomes a waste. If we are satisfied, we lack motivation to get better.

If an athlete beats an inferior opponent, they can feel satisfied with the victory, and that may lull them into a false sense of confidence and prevent them from putting forth the effort to improve. After beating an inferior opponent, the athlete should feel good about their win, but realize that the next competition may bring a greater challenge. In addition, if an athlete fails to reach their goal, they don’t need to be happy about their performance, but they can be at peace with how they executed the game plan. They should realize that with more effort, they will perform better next time and possibly come out on top.

On the other hand, contentment refers to peace in our current situation. Peace allows us to see the good in what we have accomplished but doesn’t limit our desire to achieve more. We should be content (have peace), but we should never be satisfied unless we are finished with the process of getting better. Whether we win or lose, post a personal best, or perform poorly, we must be grateful for where we are and what we have been able to accomplish (contentment). Yet, we also must allow the win or loss, success or failure, to fuel us to become even better and to not settle (satisfied) for where we are.

Mental Skills on the Field of Play

Many of the suggestions thus far may seem easier said than done. Changing someone’s mindset is similar to changing someone’s mind: It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. One thing that doesn’t take much time and energy is the concept of breathing. Breathing is simple. We all do it, or we wouldn’t stay alive. Unfortunately, we all don’t breathe well enough.

Breathing is important. Routinely taking a BIG, DEEP BREATH is essential. Breathing detoxifies and releases toxins. Breathing releases tension. Breathing relaxes the mind and brings clarity. Breathing relieves emotional problems. Breathing relieves pain. Breathing strengthens our immune system. Breathing improves posture. Breathing improves the quality of our blood. Breathing increases digestion and assimilation of food. Breathing improves our nervous system. Breathing strengthens our lungs. Breathing boosts our overall energy levels. Breathing improves cellular generation (which helps us heal). Breathing elevates our mood. Breathing forces us to pause and be patient. Breathing keeps us alive.

So, stop and take a DEEP breath! Stopping thoughts and taking a deep breath now puts us in the position to think more clearly and rationally. This allows our emotions to be less in control, and we can tap into our brain, which contains the tools we need to make a plan on future thoughts and actions.

We should not avoid or ignore the mental struggles of our athletes. Share on X

Coaches play a huge role in helping athletes to be aware of their emotions and training them to manage those emotions. We should not avoid or ignore emotions. We should not avoid or ignore the mental struggle of our athletes. As coaches, we must help athletes understand their emotions and how they can manage and control them, so that they can reach their full athletic potential.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF