Understanding Athletic Speed

Understanding Athletic Speed

In this article I want to share what I mean when I say “Understanding Athletic Speed.”

I recently viewed a coach performing a multidirectional speed skill with an athlete. He was pointing to six different cones and the athlete had to run forward, shuffle laterally, or open up and use a crossover to get to the cone. At the cone, the athlete had to touch it and return back to the middle waiting for the next direction. The drill was fine, but the understanding of what was being coached wasn’t.

Let me explain what was being taught and observed by this coach and why he missed the mark on what was really occurring…

First off, when an athlete is being asked to touch a cone (especially 6 inches in height) you are immediately going to get a less than optimal change of direction position. Using a cone is not a bad thing. I use them all the time, but I understand what to expect from the athlete. When touching a cone, the athlete will tend to bend more at the waist than if it was a live random change of direction in sport. You will have to expect more of a narrow base on the cutting or planting leg. The athlete is trying to negotiate getting close enough to the cone so he or she can touch it, yet not slip and fall because of a plant that is too wide.

Secondly, what I heard and saw from the coach in terms of his cuing and voice inflexions did not precipitate the athlete to perform the exercise correctly. So basically the exercise was being treated as a drill and not a skill of athletic movement. This is what I saw…

The coach stopped one of the athletes after several reps. He physically and verbally instructed the athlete to increase his angle of the plant leg on the retreating movement (when he had to open his hips and crossover back to the corner cone). I watched the athlete move during the entire exercise and he moved exactly as he should have considering the coaching.

If the coach wanted the athlete to take a wide plant leg angle to decelerate and re-accelerate off that same plant angle, he needed to advise the athlete to go much faster and more aggressively into cone. I like to call this coaching the “Intensity of Speed.” If the coach had spoken with more excitement and urgency, “Come on, push push, powerful steps…”, or words like this with an excitement in the voice, it would have urged the athlete to raise his intensity of speed.

Once the speed increases into a cut, the natural tendency is to increase the plant angle instinctively. If the athlete doesn’t increase the angle and plants too narrow he will feel the mistake and make the adjustment during the next rep. If they do not make the adjustment, it is easy to coach them on it.

Coaching is much more than teaching athletes about angles and body positions. It is also about making the correct assessment of what the situation demands. As a coach you cannot always expect athletes to perform a certain way if the situation doesn’t permit it. Using the 5-10-5 agility drill to improve random quickness and innate change of direction ability is not an effective tool. The 5-10-5 drill is a rehearsed pattern that can be mapped out exactly. Live sports speed simply happens when it does. The athlete must learn to manipulate the body instantly with no real warning of when the change of direction will occur.

Hopefully, this article gives you some insight as to what I mean when I speak about Understanding Athletic Speed. As a coach, we all must learn to verbalize and coach what we expect. We cannot expect the athlete to act differently than what we are communicating to them through our actions and cuing.

Yours in Speed,

Lee