FOOTBALL HIGH SCHOOL OFF-SEASON SPEED TRAINING: WHAT I’M TRYING AND HOW I HOPE IT'S GOING TO GET US CRAZY 40 TIMES

By: Regan Quaal

I recently took a new job at Shakopee High School as their full-time strength and conditioning coach.  This has always been my goal of mine to move on from college to the high school setting where I could train the athletes more regularly and harder.  I looked at them as blank slates that have never really been taught anything training wise so I could shape their idea of training.  

Now being here this is my first time in my 8 year career being in charge of a whole football team's off-season training, which is a big task and honestly one of the biggest things I was and wasn't looking forward too.

I'll start with why I wasn't, the big one being I can't stand the cocky egos you come across in football.  The issue is I have to feed those egos to get their swagger up even more so they keep training harder and harder in preparation for the next football season.  So far I have found a pretty good balance of keeping people in check and boosting them up when needed.  The other reason is it is a huge responsibility there like 130ish guys total in our high school football program and I have to figure out a way to keep them all excited and stimulated to keep progressing in their training for the next 8 months.

I was really excited though because I knew I could make a huge impact in athletic development if I did things right and progressed them slowly and correctly.

I'll start with my plan for our off-season speed training.  We take a Tony Holler “feed the cat” approach to how we train our athletes when it comes to speed work.  We time our kids twice a week only giving them between 2-4 reps of max effort each day pending what we are timing. 

We started off the off-season with timed 40s and 20s as one typically always does with football.  The big reason why we chose the timed 20 alongside the 40 is so we could see ratios of 40 vs 20 time and develop an idea of which of our athletes are good at accelerating vs top end speed abilities.  The results were not shocking; most of our athletes were far better at accelerating than maintaining top end speeds.  Another thing we noted was our younger guys tended to be better at top end speed than our older guys as well.  We also saw this when watching them perform their repeated hurdle hops.  Leading us to believe they were more elastically driven then our older guys who are more muscularly driven.  This could be due to many factors, the big one we came up with though is the schools previous strength coach was very powerlifting and bodybuilding based, so we think that our older guys performing that style of training for a few years led to them being more muscular driven because the programs he puts together lacked exercises that were designed to develop elasticity.

Now to the program plan we put together our plan was to test 40 yard sprint and 20 yard sprint on 
- week 1
- week 6
- week 12
- week 18
Giving us three separate phases of training to develop our athletes speed as seen by drops in our 40 times.  Below I will go over each of the three phases we are planning on running.
PHASE 1 (week 2-5): establish and build top end speed & improve acceleration mechanics
During each phase we will perform 4 weeks of training two day per week, the days were as following:
Day 1: fly 10s

• The goal here was for our athletes to establish there top miles per hour ability, then build it over the course of the 4 weeks while improving the sprint technique by naturally figuring out how they best run fast.  We used 20 yard build for our flies during this phase

Day 2: resisted 20s

• This was the first time we have ever added resistance to our sprints. We were hoping to develop the ability to keep a better forward lean during the start and a better shin drop as well to get more drive out of each of our steps during the acceleration.  We had our 11/12 grade use 60lbs of resistance and our 9/10 use 30lbs of resistance during this phase.  Also we wanted to see how big of a drop off the weight caused for our athletes compared to their initial fly 20 we timed, helping us know if they are more elastic or muscular driven possibly.

PHASE 2 (week 7-11): Maintain top end & accelerating longer
Day 1: fly 20s

• The goal here was for our athletes to see the difference between what speeds they can maintain for 20 yards versus what they maintained 10 yards in the previous phase.  Our hope was this would lead to more efficient flying sprints if our times improved over the weeks.  Also at the same time we were still working on bringing up our top miles per hour.  We still usd a 20yd build in for this as weel/

Day 2: Resisted 30s

• During this phase we had both groups run with 30lbs of resistance and extended the sprint another 10 yards.  We extended it in hope of developing the transition phase between acceleration and top end speed. Also another objective was improving our athletes ability to accelerate for longer.

PHASE 3 (week 13-16): Build top end speed & improve transition phase
Day 1: fly 10s

• After improving our ability to maintain top speeds for a longer last phase (building some capacity there) our goal was again to raise the top end speed again utilizing fly 10s.

Day 2: resisted fly 10s

• This is building off our previous phase of teaching to accelerate longer and develop the transition phase.  We now only timed the final 10m of the 30yd resisted sprint in hopes of bringing higher effort to the top end speed portion of the rep, the final 10.  My thought is the speeds they reach here will really develop their ability to transition between acceleration and top end speed during their 40s.

The only weeks that were not accounted for above are the weeks following our testing weeks, we label these weeks as our speed application weeks.  The goal with these weeks is to see if the speed improvements we are making can be applied to demands that can be seen in football. Obviously it isn't just like football because the drills are premeditated that we are timing so we can compare results across the entire team and so we can repeat it in the future to see if we are consistently improving.  In these drills we include change of direction of direction components, lateral movement, and backward movement.  The two different drills we selected test both top end speed and acceleration in a more football specific scenario, they are as follows below:

Day 1: 10 yard backpedal into 20 yard sprint (time final 10 yards)

• We chose this drill because it requires an athlete to open up their hips and come out of a backpedal into their sprint. Also it measures top end speed in more of a football context.  The trick is the higher the speeds the athlete can reach on the backpedal and transition it into a linear sprint the higher of top end speeds they are going to reach.

Day 2: 10 yards forward + 5 yards back + 10 yards forward (25 yards of total forward running)

• We set this drill up by putting the timing gates at the 0 & 15 yard mark.  We then put the cones the signal change of direction at the 10 yard and 5 yard mark.  This drill fit what we were going for as to measuring acceleration in a football context because it required the athlete to perform 3 separate accelerations (one linear, one laterally off right foot, and one laterally of left foot).  This gives us a good general idea if they are stronger enough to come into and out of change of directions at high speeds.  The only challenge we faced with this indoors was kids losing their footing, which won't be an issue once we get spikes on and are outside in the summer.

Review of Speed Program

• As of right now we are on week 7 of the program and we saw huge results after the first phase in 40 times, roughly an average of a .1 improvement across the board which we are very happy with.  The biggest weakness I saw with our guys is not knowing how to keep a forward lean on the start and let their shin angle drop so they can get more push off each step.  Also that they start to sputter out with 5-10 meters left in the 40 which makes sense when the longest run we do is fly 10s in the past and that is on ly 20 yards total.  Hoping the interventions we are making in training during phase 2 lead to some even better results.

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