Blog

Sitting in the bleachers behind the bench, bundled up between our team physiotherapist and nutritionist, I tightly squeezed their hands in mine. With the match level at a 2-2 in the 89th minute, our team had drawn a last-second penalty kick. Our 21-year-old striker, one of the league’s top goal scorers (and with both goals in this match to his name as well), adjusted the ball in his hands, settled it on the spot, and took three large steps back.

As we waited for the whistle, the goalkeeper bounced up and down dramatically on his line and the shooter’s eyes shifted just barely from the keeper to the left corner flag. I held my breath as the whistle rang out, silence falling over every spectator in the freezing stadium.

The young striker accelerated forward, striking the ball to the left side of the goal.

Wide left. Not even a save—simply a miss.

He hung his head, standing frozen in the middle of the box. As the other team celebrated their great fortune, a few players ran up to pat our forward’s back and encourage him. From afar, I could see his head shaking in disbelief.

I waited in the hallway outside the locker rooms for the last of the players to debrief and hit the showers. As he passed me, he avoided my eyes and dropped his head. “I bombed,” he grunted in no particular direction. I followed him toward the bus.

“What ran through your mind?” I asked, neither confirming nor denying his seemingly obvious but self-deprecating statement.

“Nothin’,” he huffed. “Said I already put up two. Add one more and make it a ‘hatty.’ Get the win.”

I nodded and shrugged. “What was the difference between the two goals in the run of play and the penalty?”

“Penalty isn’t run of play,” the young forward sighed, shaking his head. “Everyone’s watching. My parents were here. The national team scout was here too; saw him during warm-ups… I really wanted that hat trick.”

“What did you feel and where?” I asked, trying to gather more information about what exactly went on in the seconds before the penalty. “Was it distraction, confidence, stress… something else?”

He shrugged this time. “Nah,” he said as we dropped our bags in the luggage compartment under the bus. “Just thought, oh wow, this is a really big moment. Heart was beatin’ real fast and felt kinda tingly all over… like it was a big deal, y’know?” He smirked as we loaded ourselves into the bus, mounting his cool demeanor again. “Whatever. It’s done.”

Preparation and Performance

The world of performance sport is erratic at best, with its captivating highs and lows. Incredible feats of human achievement occur just as often and just as quickly as devastatingly poor performances. With the inherent instability of the sport world, stress and pressure are an inevitable experience for athletes, coaches, parents, and team staff alike. As such, it is important to understand and prepare for these occurrences, so as to limit their impact on performance when it truly matters.

Stress and pressure are an inevitable experience. It is important to understand & prepare for these occurrences to limit their impact on performance when it truly matters, says @thejulialion. Share on X

Mental preparation is as equally relevant and realistic as physical preparation training, which every athlete (and coach) is familiar with leading up to competition. As a psychophysiologist—or, more simply, a “sport psychology researcher” or “brain-body connection expert”—I teach performers how to manage their stress using a three-phase plan of mental skills training.

Before diving into the mental training portion of this blueprint, it is important to define the term “stress” and then understand how the body’s built-in stress management system works.

Stress, the Brain, and the Body

“What is stress?” has been the topic of some many thousands of research articles, most of which lead to further questions of what stimulates stress in the first place, why we humans most often frame it as an inherently negative experience, and whether there is a distinction between physical and psychological stress.

Dr. Richard Lazarus (1984) famously defined stress as a relationship “between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as taxing,” “exceeding resources,” and potentially “endangering his or her well-being.”

This definition expands upon earlier research, which framed stress as “a response to any demand placed on the body.”This assumed that everything in life is a stressor and that stress was an answer to “any vigorous, extreme, or unusual stimulation, which, being a threat, causes significant change in behavior”—an interpretation that relies too heavily on an inherently negative reaction (Seyle, 1980; Miller, 1953).

What the human body tells us about stress, though, is that it is neutral.

When the brain and body first receive a new stimulus from the environment, the brain interprets this new stressor and tells the body how to react accordingly.

The brain asks: “Is this environmental stimulus positive? Is it negative? Is it irrelevant? Is there a potential danger nearby? Should we run?”

Let me frame this in the perspective of an athlete—any competitor can attest to how different performance environments are compared to training. For some players, the presence of spectators (which can include parents and scouts), the pressure of achieving their goals, and other environmental stimuli can be appraised as “dangerous” and begin a stress reaction, disrupting their focus during performance. This can happen even if the athlete is proficient in this skill and capable of perfect execution in training. Other athletes thrive under these conditions, using the “hype” as a driver for their performance and experience skill enhancement. And, in the same environment, another competitor may appraise these new situational stressors as “irrelevant” and have no skill disruption at all.

Compared to training conditions, competitive scenarios are just different, and naturally high-arousal athletes who suffer under pressure need to train for these changes.

Compared to training conditions, competitive scenarios are just different, and naturally high-arousal athletes who suffer under pressure need to train for these changes, says @thejulialion. Share on X

So, what exactly happens when the brain receives and appraises the stressor? Depending on how the brain perceives the stimulus, it instructs the body how to respond through the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls all of the body’s involuntary functions, like breathing and digestion. Its two branches, the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, play primary roles in stimulating and inhibiting the stress response.

If a stressor is appraised as negative or threatening, even potentially, the sympathetic nervous system (also known as the “fight or flight response”) is activated. This can be thought of as the body’s gas pedal.

Through a series of complicated brain activity, the hormonal system releases a slew of hormones, namely adrenaline and cortisol, which heighten the body’s senses. The heart rate increases. The body’s attention is diverted from unnecessary systems, like the digestive and reproductive systems, temporarily slowing these processes down. Energy may surge at first, possibly resulting in jitters or stomach discomfort. Arousal is high. This is the built-in survival mode.

As you can imagine, this state is not optimal for peak performance in most sports. A golfer, sprinter, soccer player taking a penalty kick, or gymnast likely cannot perform well under these conditions, because the demands of their sport are specific and require accuracy.

However, there is another branch of the body’s build-in stress management circuitry, called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for regaining and maintaining homeostasis. You should consider this the body’s brake pedal.

This division of the system essentially inhibits the stress response created by the sympathetic nervous system by allowing the body to relax its muscles, decrease its heart rate, and reinitiate a focus on the nonessential systems such as digestion. The body is low in physiological arousal and thus able to continue its recovery processes. This is the built-in regeneration mode.

Is a completely relaxed parasympathetic state optimal for athletic performance?

Probably not. Very low levels of arousal might be preferred in some sports, such as darts or shooting sports, which only require very fine motor skills. Sports requiring physical fitness, especially in speed, power, and endurance sports, are less compatible with a low-arousal state. The body is required to perform at its maximum capacity for a duration of time; activating the full recovery mode is not possible!

Every athlete has an optimal level of arousal for their peak performance in their sport—some players thrive on the “hype” and need to psych themselves out to a high level of arousal before competing, while others need to calm themselves down from their naturally heightened arousal state (again, perception of threat and thus, stress). It is important that every athlete naturally identifies and can regulate themselves into this zone.

The process of identifying optimal zones for performance and the complete workings of the ANS and its branches are grounds for another article. In the following sections, I will present methods of teaching stress management to these naturally high-stress athletes.

The Competition-Stress Compromise

To begin addressing stress in sport, we must accept that mental and physical arousal (the feeling of stress in the body) is simply part of being a competitor.

As tennis icon Billie Jean King proclaimed, “pressure is a privilege.” The very presence of pressure, of competitive stress, means that an athlete has something important on the line: there is something to lose, but also something to gain. The investment of time, energy, dreams, and (in many cases) money is high. This is an experience that not every athlete, and certainly not every human being, gets to know or feel. It is specific and special.

Once athletes have accepted the presence (and privilege) of pressure, it is time to reckon with competitive stress in an individualized way in order to strike an optimal, replicable balance of “low arousal” and “over-arousal” in performance.

It is here that we introduce the three-phase blueprint for athlete stress management: preparation, maintenance, and damage control

Preparation

Athletes spend a lot of time physically preparing for what is often a very short competition.

Marathoners clock double-digit hours of training in the two weeks before a race. Soccer players pull two-a-days for a 90- to 120-minute match. Sprinters put in weight room and track sessions for events lasting seven seconds to two minutes.

Why? Because, in theory, the best-prepared athletes and teams usually win.

Athletes who are prone to becoming distracted—or even paralyzed—by their stress in competition may report a spiked heart rate and/or lack of concentration, appear lost, or simply underperform in competition as opposed to their normal training output. This requirement for preparation also applies to their mental training and strategies for managing stress.

Here are the facts of the matter:

1. It’s often easier to prevent stress, and thus the distracting response, from happening in the first place, rather than to deal with it once it’s arrived.
2. No athletes, especially stress-prone ones, can outwork a lack of preparation when it’s time to perform.

For athletes who struggle with performance pressure, staying ahead of the game—as much as is humanly possible without causing its own kind of perfectionistic stress—separates high performers from the casual, spontaneous types.

Physical training is a form of preparation. As every coach knows, very rarely can athletes out-perform a lack of fitness. Appropriate physical and mental fitness are as essential to peak athletic performance as oxygen is to human life. Skills, tactics, and technique have to be drilled in advance in order to achieve automated execution, which is less distracting and tiresome than non-automatic skills.

If players put the time, effort, sweat, and tears into their physical and mental training in advance, they can enter a performance situation confident in the execution of their skills, says @thejulialion. Share on X

If players put the time, effort, sweat, and tears into their physical and mental training in advance, it breeds confidence. They can enter a performance situation confident that they are physically and mentally prepared to execute their skills at that time. Coaches must encourage athletes to trust that training and the process.

Planning is also a key factor in mitigating stress in advance. When the time for performance comes, making decisions and handling difficult, cognitively tiring situations wastes mental real estate that should be entirely focused on performing. Encourage athletes to eliminate as many decisions and as much stress as possible in advance. This includes gathering necessary information, packing, planning, asking the right questions, and implementing pre-performance routines as long as possible before “go time,” so that 100% of their focus can be on performing.

The use of mental imagery is a helpful tool in the preparatory phase of a competition. Using their imagination and all five senses, an athlete can create a detailed image in their mind of peak performance: how they look, feel, and experience being in a flow state and performing optimally, even under the glare of lights and an audience and surrounded by noise. Imagery allows athletes to familiarize their brains with potentially new and stressful stimuli in advance of “go time” with the goal of mitigating the perception of threat and sympathetic stress response during competition. When it is time to perform, the brain and body should both say, “I’ve been here before—we’re good.”

Likewise, a solid pre-performance routine can help athletes focus in as the countdown to performance draws to an end. This may be the playlist they listen to, the order of the warm-up, the statements and affirmations they repeat to themselves, a pre-game mindfulness meditation, or the order in which they dress. This ritual or routine assists with concentration by taking away the distractions before a match and the number of decisions athletes have to make, and tells the brain, “Hey, we’re prepared for whatever comes our way. It’s ‘go time.’”

Maintenance

When stressful situations do inevitably occur—even when everyone involved has done their best to prepare—it is just as important for athletes to have tools in their belt to handle and minimize the stress response as it comes.

This is a skill called “coping.” Whether purposeful or not, everyone has developed an intuitive set of coping mechanisms, and they are often positive and helpful. Sometimes, however, they are not beneficial to performance (and, in fact, can distract from or decrease performance).

Thus, it is critical to help athletes develop purposeful, positive coping mechanisms around competitive stress. Like all skills, it takes lots of practice for this to become automatic.

It is critical to help athletes develop purposeful, positive coping mechanisms around competitive stress. Like all skills, it takes lots of practice for this to become automatic, says @thejulialion. Share on X

Remember that the brain perceives stress subconsciously. If the body suddenly slams on the gas pedal, it is worth consciously reappraising the situation; in this case, building a purposeful awareness of the situation so athletes ask themselves:

• What emotion am I feeling and where?
• What am I stressed about?
• Is something dangerous?
• Is it actually negative?

Often, simply helping athletes become conscious of the situation—the stimulus/threat and the psychophysiological response—is enough to relieve their pressure instead of them helplessly drowning in it.

Sometimes, though, reappraisal is not sufficient in reducing the stress response. In the midst of high-pressure situations, athletes may default to over-controlling their movements, doubting their ability to compete, and using derogatory self-talk. It goes without saying that this makes the situation worse!

Through practicing and maintaining positive self-talk, athletes can bolster themselves against external pressure and noise. Encouraging an athlete to repeat positive affirmations of themselves or the training process (i.e., “I’ve trained for this. I am ready”)—or, as a coach, repeating it for and to them—is a straightforward, memorable way to reinforce this positivity. In this case, fake it until you make it does apply.

In situations when stress is not acute, but rather reoccurring or long-term, regeneration plays a vital role in the Maintenance Phase. Some stress, like long in-seasons, tournaments, or multiple back-to-back events, last more than a few minutes, hours, or days. It’s important that, just as in workouts, the rest periods and type of regeneration are adequate for and proportionate to the amount of stress being dealt with. Insufficient recovery can lead to fatigue and illness and, in worst-case scenarios, injury or burnout, all of which are suboptimal for high performers.

An athlete’s ecosystem can also be a valuable coping mechanism. Coaches should encourage athletes to seek out other things to focus on besides their sport, especially when it is a primary source of stress. Taking part in non-competitive hobbies, exploring new things, and having go-to people or places can help remove the constant concentration on sport, develop athletes’ self-awareness and self-concept, and remind them of who they are, regardless of competitive outcomes—they are complete human beings before they are athletes.

Damage Control

In absolute best-case scenarios, stress has been prevented and managed before ever arriving at this point. But sometimes stress, and the resulting performance decrements caused by it, just sneaks up from behind when no one is looking. To minimize the damage and return to mental fitness as quickly as possible, the athlete requires another set of coping mechanisms.

Developing and implementing mistake rituals can assist athletes in releasing distractions and regaining focus when errors have been made. If an athlete is prone to succumbing to their own negative self-talk (and even resignation), encourage them to instead mentally bookmark that mistake to return to later at an appropriate time for self-feedback.

Developing and implementing mistake rituals can assist athletes in releasing distractions and regaining focus when errors have been made, says @thejulialion. Share on X

Instead of dwelling on their mistakes and losing focus in competition, instruct athletes to select a physical cue (shaking out hands, wiping off shorts, running hand through hair, etc.) or a verbal cue (“cancel,” “delete,” “forget,” etc.) to snap out of the cycle of “I’ve made this horrible mistake and now…” They should fight the urge to immediately overcompensate for the mistake, which leads to distraction and fatigue, using the mistake as motivation to continue performing well but not to stay in the past. Once an error occurs, it becomes a piece of the past and nothing they can do will change it. Thus, it is important to help athletes develop routines to mentally refocus on the present and tune into performing to their maximum capacity—no more and no less.

Athletes do not and should not have to handle stress crisis situations, whether seemingly big or small, alone. Athletes should be encouraged to reach out for help and use their surrounding resources, whether an on-staff sport psychologist, a social support network, their immediate team ecosystem (teammates, coaches, etc.), or others. It is also important that athletes are never shamed or alienated from their teams during times of stress—this makes “reentry” to the team, once the situation is solved, much more difficult, whereas peer and leadership support can help expedite the process.

Even in the Damage Control phase, recovery is still important. It is vital to focus on regenerating after large doses of stress. As coaches should know, contrary to the popular motivational phrase in the gym, rest is not earned. It is required for the brain and body to heal from the literal damage caused by stress.

This Too Shall Pass

As the player and I boarded the bus on our way back from the game, the young striker trying to shake off his disappointment from the missed penalty kick, I squeezed his shoulder encouragingly. “You did your best. We’ll work on it this week, so you have some strategies to help you in PKs next time. Enjoy your dinner.”

When we began the following training week, this athlete and I started to implement this three-phase strategy. We included more stress-protective elements in his mental training and practiced skills like positive self-talk and purposeful awareness until he felt confident that, should he feel so isolated in a high-pressure situation again, he would have the appropriate resources to meet the demands.

This mental skills training helped to reduce his stress, as he later reported to me that “even if I do get stressed, I know what it feels like, so it’s not scary and I have stuff to help me handle it now.”

He has not missed a penalty kick in the year since.

Regardless of motivation, determination, or level of mental toughness, everyone faces a stress crisis at some point, whether big or small, in the public eye or in private.

Giving athletes more useful skills and resources to meet the mental and emotional demands of sport can reduce negative feelings that result from pressure situations, says @thejulialion. Share on X

Athletes are no different, especially in the very volatile, commoditized world of high performance. Giving athletes more useful skills and resources to meet the mental and emotional demands of sport can reduce negative feelings that result from pressure situations. Coaches should teach players to maximize resources, prepare, reappraise, and practice productive coping skills, and remind them that all stress does wane and pass at some point.

And they will recover.

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

Gordan, R., Gwathmey, J. K., and Xie, L. H. “Autonomic and endocrine control of cardiovascular function.” World Journal of Cardiology. 2015;7(4):204–214.

Haney, C. J. “Stress-management interventions for female athletes: Relaxation and cognitive restructuring.” International Journal of Sport Psychology. 2004; 35(2):109–118.

Lazarus, R. S. and Folkman, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. 1984. New York: Springer Pub. Co.

Mellalieu, S. D., Neil, R., Hanton, S., and Fletcher, D. “Competition stress in sport performers: Stressors experienced in the competition environment.” Journal of Sports Sciences. 2009;27(7):729–744.

McCorry L. K. “Physiology of the autonomic nervous system.” American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. 2007;71(4):78.

Miller, J.G. “The development of experimental stress-sensitive tests for predicting performance in military tasks.” PRB Technical Report 1079. 1953. Washington, DC: Psychological Research Associates.

Selye, H. “The stress concept today.” In I. L. Kutash & L. B. Schlesinger et al. (Eds.), Handbook on Stress and Anxiety (pp. 127–129). 1980. San Francisco: Josey-Bass.

“Yeah, they should be fresh for weights,” the coach said. “We’re only running five or six miles before coming to lift today.”

Welcome to the world of weight training with distance runners.

If you’re anything like me, you’re used to working with the traditional stop and go sports like football, hockey, basketball, or volleyball. Not distance and cross country runners. And then one day I found myself—a former heavyweight weightlifter and powerlifter, strongman, and college football player— surrounded by a group of runners with way too little lean muscle mass, wearing way too short shorts, and mud all over their legs.

There we all were, standing in the middle of the gym. It must have looked comical. The standard mix of rock music spiked with the occasional hip-hop song was playing over the radio, and the smell of the 120 football players who’d just finished their workout was lingering in the air, so I did what I always do. I started coaching this group like any other team in for a training session.

Talking in my normal voice and cadence, I started coaching everyone through the basic warm-up, but instead of doing what I was instructing, the runners just sort of stood there blinking at me. Although I was in the weight room I designed and built, I felt suddenly transported into the Twilight Zone. The world didn’t make sense, and I felt I didn’t belong in the gym anymore—this was going to get real interesting for everyone, real fast.

Faster at Any Distance

While that was my first experience working with a cross country team, I’m happy to say it wasn’t my last. I want to document a few of my observations so others in a similar situation won’t have to go through the same growing pains that I did.

Before my staff started working with our distance runners, we would watch them train after practice. From what I saw, these runners wanted to run faster, but their training revolved around their prescribed distance and tempo, followed by a push-up and sit-up regimen. After we were first asked to help the team, we talked to the athletes and their coaches about their priorities. Here is what they asked for:

• Get faster
• Stay healthy
• Work arms and core

As I said, they wanted to run faster, but their training didn’t reflect that. Sure, they had their distance and tempo work, but doing countless sit-ups or crunches as well as push-ups with a super-wide hand position won’t help anyone get faster. So let’s ask the tough question: How do you get people faster?

To me, it starts with three basic ideas:

• Get them to put more force in the ground
• Have them put the same force in the ground, but at a faster rate
• Have them put the same force in the ground at the same rate, but at a lighter body weight

When we strip down a training program, we’re trying to manipulate one of these three variables. Let’s dig deeper into the first two ideas.

Creating Force Through Body Control

Getting strong isn’t simply about increasing your one-rep max of a back squat or deadlift. It’s about body control. Sure, I’m watching the same videos on YouTube or Instagram that you are with people moving very impressive weight, but I’m not showing those clips to our distance runners.

I’ve come to learn that working with distance runners requires adopting a different mindset. No one is going to be taking hits of Nose Tork before cinching up their belts to hit a new PR back squat, and that’s OK. Strength with this population means something else, and it’s all about body control.

Strength for distance runners is all about body control, not hitting new PRs in the back squat, says @CarmenPata. #strength #distancerunners Share on X

When I say that most distance runners are not very strong in the traditional weight room sense, I’m not knocking them. Part of the reason is they lack training, which I hope to help remedy with this article. And part of it is the sport itself. With traditional stop and go sports, a significant amount of change of direction occurs naturally. The deceleration creates an eccentric load, which over time creates a training stimulus that can improve an athlete’s strength profile and body control.

Body control and greater strength are more than having a big squat. They equate to faster running times because the athletes are strong enough to maintain posture and running mechanics over the thousands of foot contacts they experience during practice and competitions. My favorite exercise to access and improve on body control is a take on the classic Turkish get-up.

Video 1. The athlete replaces a kettlebell with a medicine ball to perform stand-ups to train stability and body control.

Video 2. The athlete performs get-ups for stability and body control using a medicine ball instead of a kettlebell.

I understand these are not picture-perfect versions of the get-up, and I’m OK with that. These two variations teach exactly what I hope to get across—how to create force from their hips and express it out through their feet and hands while controlling their body through the entire movement. Maybe one day we’ll transition into the actual get-up with a kettlebell.

Our initial training sessions with distance runners focus on body control with non-traditional exercises, says @CarmenPata. #strength #distancerunners Share on X

In the meantime, putting a med ball on their shoulders or in their hand and telling them to stand up may not be sexy, but it does work. All of the initial training sessions with our distance and cross country runners focus on body control with non-traditional exercises. In addition to the modified get-up, we use the dreaded push-up and renegade row.

Video 3. The renegade row is another non-traditional exercise we use with distance runners to train body control.

Ah, such a simple exercise but so difficult to accomplish correctly. Even our athletes who’ve been doing this exercise for nearly three months haven’t completely mastered the movements. Just watch the hips. During the push-up, the hip is solid with no visible movement happening at that joint, but with the row, we still see some rotation starting at the hip as she begins the row. This is unbelievably better than what it looked like months ago, but not as good as it will look in a few more months.

While these are examples of great starting exercises, if you truly want to see how the athletes are doing, you have to put them off balance. Literally. The single-leg med ball slam is another deceptively simple exercise we use to help teach body control and single-leg strength.

Standing on one leg combined with the speed of the exercise are enough to add instability during the activity. I really appreciate how the medicine ball, going from the floor to overhead, dynamically changes a person’s center of mass.

Video 4. Medicine ball slams force the athlete to try to stabilize and correct their balance during the movement.

As you can see in the video, the athlete’s balance is all over the place. The amount of rotation that’s happening at his knee and hips is exactly what we’re trying to accomplish. Remember, due to the sport or general lack of training, we’re trying to teach general body control during a dynamic change of the center of mass and force the athlete to flex and extend their hips, knees, and ankles.

Developing Strength and Power

Once we start seeing improvements in general body control, it’s time to develop additional lower body strength in these runners. As mentioned, the ability to put more force into the ground is one of three ways to improve running times due to the increased ground reaction forces. When it’s time to start moving some weight, our go-to exercise is the single-leg split squat. Yeah, I know back squats look far more appealing, but it’s not where I like to start people.

Video 5. Our go-to exercise to start moving weight is the single-leg squat.

Look at her depth. Would you be happy with that depth on a back squat? Look at her hip action. Would you be happy with the way her hips are moving on a back squat? Look at the time under tension. Would you be happy with the tension on a back squat?

Let’s stop looking at the exercise and look at what the exercise does for the athlete. In this example, we’re still getting her legs stronger without the mental stress of loading a relatively heavy bar on her back and squatting. Remember, this is a population that, as a whole, doesn’t yet understand the positive benefits of being in the weight room. If these athletes choose not to show up to the gym, it doesn’t matter how good your program is, they won’t get any benefit from it. The first step to winning is showing up.

When the runners have better body control and start developing leg strength, it’s time to focus on developing some power. At the start of this post, I explained three ways to get people to run faster: put more force into the ground; put the same force in the ground, but faster; put the same force at the same rate into the ground, but do it at a lighter body weight.

If you’ve read any of my other articles, you know that I’m a huge fan of doing all sorts of jumps to develop power and rate of force production. Working with distance athletes is no different. Unlike most of the other sports, however, we spend significantly less time working vertically and focus much more on horizontal movements.

With distance runners, we focus on horizontal jumps to develop power and rate of force production, says @CarmenPata. #power #distancerunners Share on X

These athletes want to run faster, regardless of the distance they’re covering. With anyone who runs for their sport, we try to improve the amount of time their foot is in contact with the ground. Without funding to purchase the right equipment to measure ground contact time, though, it’s nearly impossible to accurately measure this other than looking at each person’s time. So while we cannot measure this, we can explain it.

We tell the athletes that one of our training goals is to improve everyone’s foot contact time by 0.01s per contact. As a comparison, your eye blinks at 0.03-0.04 seconds—we’re trying to make changes faster than you can blink. If the runner can sustain this improved foot contact time for ten steps, they took 0.1 seconds off their sprint. If they sustain it for 100 contacts, they improved their time by one second. If they sustain the improved contact time for 1,500 contacts (the average number of contacts per mile), the athlete has improved their time by 15 seconds. Get the idea?

As I said, we can’t accurately measure their foot contact times. Sure, we could simply use their results from training and meets to look for improvements. But there are way too many variables that contribute to their times in both of these scenarios.

This is why I come back to using jumps not only as a test but also as a training tool. While there are so many types of repeated jumps you can use, if you’re looking to have your athletes do one jump as a training tool and a test, I suggest the med ball broad jump shown in this video.

Video 6. The medicine ball broad jump used for training purposes can also serve as an assessment method.

If Video 6 showed a testing session, we would have recorded the distance the person jumped, their body weight, and the weight of the med ball. That way, as the athlete loses or gains weight, we could adjust the weight of the med ball to account for the weight change and then have an accurate comparison of their jump distance.

This, in turn, gives a relative comparison of how their ground reaction force and ground contact times are changing. If the jump distance improves, you can assume these two factors have improved. If the jump distance gets worse, you can assume the two factors have gotten worse. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best I can do while trying to measure things that happen faster than a blink of an eye.

Final Thoughts

After that first semester working with our college distance runners, plenty of learning happened for the athletes as well as our coaches. When our distance runners are in for a workout, we do many of the things from that first day. I didn’t decide to drop a bunch of weight to fit in, many of the runners still don’t appreciate my choice of music, and they still show up covered in mud. But at least now they have a change of shoes on.

With this group, I had to remember that the biggest challenge was that they were entering a world they were not only unfamiliar with but also had some very strong negative opinions about. We tried plenty of ideas with all sorts of results to help win over their hearts and minds, but that’s a story for another article (or two). Eventually, we figured out a winning combination. And while we still don’t have a distance runner whose highlight of the day is to get into the weight room (yet), it appears that no one hates being there.

The other big change? We’re beginning to move some iron during their training sessions. You’re probably not going to see many people post these workouts on Instagram, but that’s not the point. The point is that each week, these runners are getting a little stronger, they’re jumping a little farther, and they’re spending less time in the training room.

It’s the result of all of these little things that starts to make a big change, which is happening at their meets when they are seconds off their PRs. While I’m happy about these changes, I know that we can still get better.

Let’s keep the conversation going and find more ways to help distance athletes keep improving by leaving your thoughts or ideas in the comments section below.

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

One thing every coach of every sport knows is that they love speed. I don’t know how many times in my sport coaching career I have heard: “You can’t teach speed!” In my humble opinion, that’s most definitely a gray area. I would suggest that you can increase speed by increasing the efficiency of your athletes. Speed is a skill, and you can certainly teach a skill to be improved and more efficient, leading to the growth of that skill.

I went into the field of sports performance from a football background. As many of my colleagues with a similar background can attest, “speed” is an abstract in many ways. We understand that “speed kills.” We love having fast players. We grasp the concept that running fast will make you faster. However, for those of us with a weightlifting background, speed often takes a back seat in the educational process.

Sets, reps, exercises…. Do we use Olympic lifts, back squats, unilateral versus bilateral? What can we do in the weight room to improve speed? These discussions often dominate the scene. Coaches spend countless hours teaching their athletes the details of every weight room movement they program.

Often, though, when it comes to the speed training side of their program, coaches find a “canned” program on the internet or get a .pdf or PowerPoint from another coach, buy a stopwatch or a timing system, and off they go. There is no doubt that running fast is an integral part of any speed program.

Are we, as coaches, getting too far down the road of “just run fast” and maybe leaving the most important training modalities out of our programs? Can we explain the “why” of each and every drill we do, or are we just copying things we have seen or done before? Is every detail of our speed program well-thought-out and reasoned, or are we just having our athletes run as fast as possible and hoping it makes them better because Twitter said it would? Am I timing my athletes just to collect data, or is it actionable and giving me information I can use to make them better?

These were the questions I began asking myself when looking at how we program for speed. When I took a hard look at it, I came to the conclusion that we were doing a lot of running fast, timing just to time, and drills just to drill. We had to figure out a better process.

“Fast” is something we all desire in our athletes. Our solution? Get smarter, train smarter, and TEACH our athletes speed. Combining “fast” with intelligence, technique, and the same attention to detail most of you already use in your weight room programming can take your team speed to a new level.

Combining “fast” with intelligence, technique, and the same attention to detail you use in your weight room programming can take your team speed to a new level, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

You would never just set a steak dinner in front of a child and say “eat up” without showing them how to use a knife and fork. That would be inefficient, indeed. Why would we think that simply lining up our athletes and timing them running as fast as they naturally can would be any more efficient?

Yes, feed those cats some speed. Just make sure you have a solid plan to TEACH them to eat in the most efficient way possible. This article will discuss our ongoing educational process at York Comprehensive High School and discuss the how and why of going above and beyond the feeding process.

Chasing Numbers vs. Recording Progress

A very popular sports performance topic on social media is “chasing numbers.” The idea is to say, “I want our players to squat X amount” or “run a 4.6 forty,” and then build a program that has a primary focus of reaching those goals. As I mentioned in a previous article, I got my start writing for SimpliFaster after a long Twitter debate I had on that very topic. I’ve written before that I believe there is a gray area that coaches need to bring into focus when they discuss “chasing numbers.” The fact is we ALL chase numbers. We want stronger, faster, more powerful athletes. The real debate needs to be about our process for selecting and pursuing those improvements.

Every coach reading this has stories about the sport coach who declared that, once a certain percentage of his team could bench 300 pounds, they would win more games. Replace bench with squat, clean, or deadlift, and put any number in place of 300, and we have all heard it over and over. As qualified sports performance professionals, we understand the flaws of that mindset. However, we all also have proven and evidence-based protocols to force the adaptations we desire within our athletes in the weight room. We ARE chasing those adaptations (that are measured in number form) on a daily basis. The difference is how we go about that chase. We understand “why” we do things and how those specific things will help our athletes improve.

Jumping from strength programming to speed programming often results in a loss of those philosophies. If you wouldn’t do a 1 rep max on the back squat with a freshman athlete until a point in their development showed a mastery of squat technique, why would you line up that same athlete once a week and laser time them in a sprint without the same attention to detail? Yet, I’m quite sure that’s what happens in many places.

You know as well as I do that there are coaches out there who buy a timing system to see how fast their athletes are and feed them with “speed,” but neglect to teach the athletes mechanical efficiency. Those coaches have numbers—probably some pretty good ones. What amount of “food” are they leaving on the dinner table by not teaching those athletes “how to eat”? Timing our athletes without teaching them the most efficient way to move is “chasing numbers” in an inefficient manner. Yes, they probably will get faster by just running faster.

By refocusing on efficiency and trading some of the time you spend sprinting and timing for teaching, I contend you will see greater improvements in the long run, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

The human body has an immeasurable ability to adapt to stimulus. Is making that number a little bit better enough? I contend we should find ways to maximize those abilities in our athletes. Of course I do, so do you! Are you willing to take a real and candid look at your program? Can you answer the “why” question for every part of your speed program? By refocusing on efficiency and sacrificing some of the time you spend sprinting and timing to trade it for teaching time, I contend you will see greater improvements in the long run, and your cats will eat even better!

Our Process – More Than Sprint and Hope

The process that led us to take a deeper look into the way we design our speed program had a direct relationship to our strength program. In other articles, I’ve gone into detail about how we level our athletes and use a process of teaching and “slow cooking” our athletes in the weight room. We believe in the blocking system, to the point where I often have to spend time explaining to frustrated coaches and athletes why we don’t rush the back squat or an Olympic lift. I dwell over every detail to make sure our protocol is what’s best for our athletes.

We laid out every aspect of our strength program for our athletes in detail, from middle school through graduation. Then, when we went outside to the track, we lined them up and they all did the same drills, they all ran the same sprints, they all did the same tempo running, etc. We ran flying 10’s timed with our Dashr system twice a week. I did very little with that data other than post the five best times on social media with the hashtag #FeedThe Cougars. We were leaving a lot on the table uneaten.

I began to ask why our strength program was so detailed and individualized, but our speed program was so “canned”? How could we take the ideas and philosophies we lived by in the weight room and use them in our speed program? We have signs with the wording of the messages we preach: MOVE WELL, MOVE FAST, MOVE STRONG, and the most important sign:

The order of importance for athletic development:

1. Technique/Movement
2. Volume
3. Load

We had been using that formula backward. It was time for a better way of training, so we would reap better results.

It was at that point that I remembered I was still a football coach. Maybe I have not coached the sport in a few years, but deep down inside, I will always be a football coach. I was lucky enough to have coached at quite a few places over the years where we were pretty much at an athletic disadvantage week in and week out. You may wonder about my word choice of “lucky”? And I didn’t look at it that way always, either. Upon reflection, it couldn’t have been a better reality to develop in as a coach.

It’s easy to coach great athletes. Not to take anything away from those that do so, but that’s just a fact. All I’m saying is your margin for error is exponentially linked to the level of athlete you coach. If your team is loaded with D1-caliber players, does it really matter what offensive or defensive system you run? Humans by nature will adapt to their surroundings. If the small details don’t really make a difference between wins and losses because you have three NFL players on your team, there is a good chance those details get overlooked.

On the other hand, if you are outmanned most weeks, you’d better figure out an insane attention to detail very quickly. EVERYTHING you teach matters in being competitive. You also end up with one heck of a “coach’s eye.”

When I began looking at how we could overhaul our speed program, I went back to my roots as a football coach who would watch that first step of every rep in practice on video over and over. Share on X

If the first step isn’t right, we do not move to the second step. That thought process carried over even as my path changed. When I began looking at how we would overhaul our speed program, I went back to my roots as the football coach who would watch that first step of every rep in practice on video over and over. The coach who made his assistants explain why they did every drill in practice, and how it would transfer to Friday night. The coach that prided himself as a “teacher of sport,” not just a coach.

Chasing the ‘Why’ to Solve Your Puzzle

Step 1 in my process is chasing knowledge. I heard a great quote (unattributed) not long ago: “People fail on the margins of their knowledge.” This is a process I have become very familiar with over the years. What lies past the “margins” of your knowledge and how you push into those areas is your individual puzzle. Solving that puzzle is a daily routine for me and has been for many years.

I tell people all the time that my “superpower” isn’t innovation, per se. It’s having an intense desire to learn WHY people who are highly successful at something are so successful at it. What tools or exercises, etc., do they use and WHY do they use those in a specific situation, instead of just watching a video and attempting to copy what looks good? Knowing the “why” and not just the “how” allows me to take the general aspects of the great things each of these people do and innovate them into best practices for improving the athletes I work with.

I first did this as a football coach, learning the intricate details of the “why” of each of the most successful double wing offense coaches in the country. I then developed a highly successful version of my own and tweaked it to fit the athletes we worked with. Next came the foundation of my knowledge of the weight room and jumping programs. Again, I’ve spent my life seeking out coaches to build relationships with in order to learn the “why” of the art of sports performance.

This started with Ethan Reeve, who sparked my fire for this profession and continues to do so until this very day. I’ve never once used the exact same program, and I never will. I won’t ever jump from “program to program” because I believe in evidence-based principles that will never change. However, I am in a constant search for ways to tweak and adjust what we do and how we do it to move our athletes forward.

Sprinting was always something I believed in. Until I made it a priority to blow past those margins and be able to have my own “why?”, I never realized the impact I could make on our athletes. Most of us are not world-class sprint coaches and won’t ever be. Still, you should seek out those who are and learn! Seek to gain an understanding of WHY these coaches do what they do. Once you have that level of comprehension, you can then begin to build your program.

Every program is different. You need to be able to individualize what you do for your athletes, not parrot others in a different situation. I have read and listened to every word that coaches like Chris Korfist, Boo Schexnayder, Cal Dietz, Scott Salwasser, and Matt Gifford have said, and I have reached out to many others. This has allowed me to formulate our unique way of programming.

Social media isn’t where you get the knowledge you need. It’s too shallow. Many high school coaches follow well-known “speed” coaches on social media. They watch these coaches’ posts and the drills they do, and they say, “Hey, that looks cool. Let’s do that.” Trust me, I was one of them. The problem is most times we are seeing the best version of the best athlete that coach has.

A friend of mine called this “strength and conditioning porn.” Sprinting, jumping, lifting—whatever it is. Most of the time what we see isn’t reality; as he put it, it’s “pure fantasy.”

We have to get deeper into WHY the coach is specifically doing that drill and see if that is even applicable to the athletes we train. In episode 80 of the “Just Fly Podcast,” Cal Dietz discusses how he reached out to a world-class speed coach about issues his athletes at the University of Minnesota were having. The sprint coach had to really think about how to help because he had never, ever seen most of those issues with the level of athlete he worked with. Many of the coaches we follow on social media will not have the same experience as you and your athletes.

Make yourself a great teacher of speed by first being a great student of it. Network, read, study, and get a handle on the most basic fundamentals of speed, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

My point is, don’t compare and try to make your athletes into world-class sprinters by doing world-class sprinter drills. Make yourself a great teacher of speed by first being a great student of it. Network, read, study, and get a handle on the most basic fundamentals of speed. Then expand your base from there, until you have your own philosophy. Remember what I said earlier about coaching that first step? Master it, program it, teach it, and then coach it before lining your athletes up in sprinting groups, firing up the Dashr system, and saying, “Anytime after the beep…Go!”

Drills, Drills, and More Drills

Once you have the knowledge you need to teach what your athletes need, begin building drills that have direct correlation to those techniques. Don’t fall into the trap of “speed porn” when deciding what drills you will use. Be a teacher. If you teach fourth grade math, you don’t spend time on the AP Calculus curriculum because you watched a cool video of a lesson. You add to the base of knowledge a fourth-grade student will need to advance to fifth grade.

Additionally, don’t fall into the “go, go, go” trap. That can be a battle, especially for a sport coach or a strength coach with a sport-heavy background. One of those lessons I learned from coaching lower levels of athletes was to not get obsessed with constant full-speed tempo. Who cares how efficient and fast your practice looks if your teaching and learning process isn’t effective?

Not every rep has to be full speed during the teaching phase. The lifeblood of relative advantage is mental toughness, and mental toughness comes from confidence in your ability to perform what’s asked of you above anything else. Yes, the ultimate goal is to work to a point where athletes run faster than they did before. Is it really best practice to do something full speed using poor technique?

As a football coach, I would never jump into a full-speed “team” session without talking it, chalking it, walking it, jogging it, and drilling the techniques for each position. Why? Because we won’t get much better doing it that way. Why would you do drills for speed development any differently? Streamline the drills you do, choosing quality and transfer over quantity and aesthetics. Don’t program anything without asking and answering “why”? It will help keep you grounded in the basics, and mastering the ordinary, everyday aspects of what you do will always be a more effective route.

Back in my football days, we had a go-to play that we worked year-round to master. We ran it 70% of the time in many games. When we tried to “get cute” or go away from that play, it backfired more often than not. It was at that point I had one of our assistant coaches stand next to me, and every time I called anything other than “superpower,” I had him ask me why. If I didn’t have a good answer quickly, we ran superpower. It was our “ordinary,” and it rarely failed us because of our level of mastery of it. Design your drills with THAT type of process in mind.

A big part of us being able to use submaximal speeds to teach and build proficiency in our speed development program was the use of rate of perceived exertion, or RPE. This was a natural step that flowed very easily because of our use of RPE, as well as extensive use of APRE (autoregulated progressive resistance exercises), in our strength program.

Although it’s quite prevalent among coaches to say, “Okay, let’s run this one at 50%” or “75%,” etc., I kind of see that in the same light as a doctor writing an athlete a note to me saying “don’t lift heavy.” Unless you define “heavy,” there is a zero percent chance the athlete (or the coach, for that matter) will be able to quantify that into a real weight. The same goes for giving athletes a percentage. Most of them have no idea how 50% will feel compared to 75%. They will guess, and it most likely won’t vary a whole heck of a lot.

To remedy that, we correlate speed RPE to what we use in our strength program. Ten is hair-on-fire full speed, 1–2 is walking, and so on. So, when we give them a tempo speed, we will say “RPE of 6–7” if we want them in that 60–70% range. We practice this and let them feel each range. It’s not the perfect way of doing it, but until we can acquire some real-time heart rate monitors, it at least gets us in the ballpark. We use the same system for drills and warm-ups. You need to find a range that maximizes your athlete’s skill acquisition for each phase of your programming.

I’ve found that, for us, 4–5 building to 6–7 is a sweet spot in the general preparation phase of our early off-season. Our goal is to reach a level of proficiency where we can be in that 8–9 range most of the time, while dipping into that 10 a few times per session in our final phase. I once heard a coach say that sprinting at 90–95% will maximize the athlete’s ability to master technique. Going over that speed will actually cause them to lose efficiency.

I once heard a coach say that sprinting at 90–95% will maximize an athlete’s ability to master technique. Based on experience, I agree, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

While I can’t source that study, I can tell you from our experience that is exactly what we see. We do this with the idea of improving skill as we advance toward the part of the off-season where the athlete’s energy system must be prepared for the rigors of what can be a regular dose of 8–10 in the higher volumes that come from sport practices.

 

Dartfish and Video Keep Us Honest

The next step in the process was figuring out how to make sure the drills we focused on were effective. We need to be sure we are progressing before we begin adding speed. Once again, I leaned on my football experience. Using video of practice sessions became invaluable as a football coach, and it has now become invaluable to us in our speed program (and other areas) as well.

We try to record as much as we possibly can in our speed development program. I’ve found that the biggest advantage of using this tool is it keeps me honest. One thing I’ve always said is that action on the video is never as bad or as good as it can seem live. Watching the movement of your athletes and having a mental or physical checklist of what you are looking for in each session is a huge advantage. Video has become a tool that drives our programming.

Some battles we’ve had with our kids involve shoulder rotation, how they hold their hands (no fists), hand level, and not crossing the body. Video analysis has become a huge factor in helping our athletes improve in these areas. If we can see it over and over, we can cue them in drills individually. We can also actually show the athlete, and that is worth 100 reps.

Another area that video has helped is the start. We want an athlete to be a jet, not a helicopter. I read that a while back, and it has become a huge cue for us. Just as a sport coach uses video as a teaching tool, so do we. Most of our sports teams utilize the Hudl system. I have access to that as well and can easily upload and share any footage with athletes or coaches. I do caution sending those out to less-experienced athletes, however. I’ve found it best to watch with the athlete until they have a grasp of what we are teaching and why.

Record as much as you can, and not just when you are timing. You want to see as much video of your athletes in an “organic” setting as possible, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

Record as much as you can, and not just when you are timing. You want to see as much video of your athletes in an “organic” setting as possible. If you video once in a while, the athletes will perform for the camera. If it’s part of the daily process, chances are you will see the movement in a more natural form, allowing you to coach it.

Timing and Speed Training – Realities of Workflow

From reading this article, you might have assumed I’m not a fan of timing our athletes on a regular basis. Or maybe I’m not a fan of running fast to get faster. The fact is those assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

I love fast, I love timing, and I love timing our athletes when they move with technical proficiency. I’m also a fan of developing a year-round speed development plan that will maximize our athlete’s abilities on the field. I’m a fan of improving efficiency by teaching technique and mastering correct basic movement patterns. I’m a BIG fan of teaching our athletes to move in a way that will allow them to move at max speed with the lowest possible risk of injury. Doing all of these things will allow us to progress the athlete to a point where video will give us actionable information on when we should start timing our athletes at max speeds.

The combination of the timing and feedback also allows us to get the RPE number of the point at which our athlete’s efficiency breaks down. If we have an athlete who can really move well in that 6–7 range but loses it above that, we need to time them at that 6–7 range while coaching them to run their best time possible without breaking down. They will improve as they push themselves more and more. Soon enough, they will be at an 8 with better technique and moving faster than they would have at a high level with less skill development.

That’s a TOUGH sell to athletes and sport coaches. We have to emphasize that “slow cooking” process they have become familiar with in the weight room. We all know intent goes up when the timing system or stopwatch goes on. Running at full speed with bad technique is not the most direct path to maximizing speed. Besides, what’s the hurry? In the weight room, you understand that you will hopefully be the most powerful version of yourself during your competition phase, not in the first off-season phase of training. Why would speed development be any different?

I love the sprinting groups. I love the excitement and energy that is in the air when the athletes see me walking out with what we call the “Nuclear Codes Case” that holds our Dashr timing system. I love the level of competitiveness those things bring out in our athletes.

 

The technology of sports performance gets better by the day. I love that fact as well! In fact, I absolutely embrace that. You certainly don’t have to have technology in your program to be successful, but in my experience, it is a huge help, and it makes your life as a strength coach that much easier. Just the area of data tracking and record-keeping for your speed program is life-changing!

I used to be an Excel guy. I’d print a sheet and hand it to the kids. I carried a clipboard and wrote down number after number. Then I sat down in front of my computer and painstakingly typed in that data. From a sprinting standpoint alone, think about the old hand-timed and clipboard way of doing it. Could you hand-time multiple times a week and enter that data? I couldn’t, that’s for sure.

The future is here, and if you can possibly do so, embrace it. I’m so excited by what the future holds for us as sports performance professionals. As just one example, Dashr has produced a radio frequency identification (RFID) module that uses wristbands worn by the athlete to full automate the timing process. With the Dashr wristband, each athlete has an individual barcode that they scan into the system, get set, and go. When they break the laser at the finish, the data uploads to a single spot. When you need it, you print it.

Need historical data? There’s no need to flip through sheets on a clipboard or search an Excel document. You’ll go from pencil, paper, a hard time with a +/- 0.5 of a second “thumb” error, and multiple coaches needed, to a fully automated system that tracks, uploads, and stores all the data. The future is bright, and it’s welcoming in any and all growth-minded coaches.

Our Athletes Are the Bottom Line

As you can see, I love the pursuit of knowledge and the journey toward mastery of the art of sports performance (that will never end). You can also see that I love technology and all the possibilities that are out there for coaches today. What I love most is doing what will help our athletes become the best version of themselves on the field. To do that, we need to use the exact same principles we use in the weight room, the classroom, and/or on the field/court in our speed development program.

To help athletes become the best version of themselves on the field, use the exact same principles you use in the weight room, classroom, and/or the court, says @YorkStrength17. Share on X

Yes, let’s run fast to get fast. Let’s do that through a process of teaching the concept of speed and speed technique. Knowledge, teaching ability, and principled speed concepts combined with intelligence and technology will allow you to turn your “cats” into precise and focused hunters who will be able to maximize their natural abilities to be the fastest animal they can possibly be.

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