I get many repetitive questions each day as you can imagine, from people looking for advice, so I wanted to show you my favorite 2 questions.

Question #1 – Weight Training:

One of my favorite questions is always:
“ I work with 13 year olds (or I have a 12 year old daughter or 15 year old son or ____ you
get what I mean) and these kids need to get stronger. I have them bench pressing and squatting already, what other lifts do you recommend since they are so weak?’

OK, here is my problem. The general conditioning of most athletes, especially younger athletes, is horrible. If you have an athlete of any age level that is ‘weak’, the first thing to focus on shouldn’t be in the weight room. I think we need to back up and work on the foundation of each athlete. I think weight training is a must to improve speed and power (although it is supplementary), but why are we so worried about rushing athletes into the weight room?

Let’s focus on core work step one. Abdominals, low back, hip/glute work is essential. Having a strong core is going to make your body more stable and help you generate the power from the rest of your body more efficiently.

Next, when it comes to strength training, we should be thinking about body weight exercises to get there. How many people have you seen that can’t perform a correct push-up or even a proper body weight squat? Exactly, too many.

Some coaches and athletes get too excited about how weight training can improve their speed & power and skip over the most basic (and most important) components of conditioning. Instead of worrying about what the greatest weight training exercises are, let’s first put our athletes in position to be able to benefit from weight training. If my athlete can bench press 350 pounds but can’t perform a rotational push-up, or squat 500 pounds but can’t do a 1-leg squat (pistol)
to save their life, then I have failed as a coach.

If you follow Athletes’ Acceleration’s Complete Speed Training (www.completespeedtraining.com) program at all, you know that I focus a great deal on conditioning and preparing our athletes. I still believe in weight training (it’s in the CST program
too), but general strength is also a staple in my program.

Let’s get back to the basics and focus on the general strength and conditioning of the athlete to create a strong foundation.

Question #2: Nutrtion

My other favorite question is that I got over the weekend but this question is also pretty frequent:

“What type of supplement do you recommend that I use to get stronger and faster, is their type of whey protein, creatine or anything else I should use?”

Now this might seem like a serious question to them until I ask them first what they had for dinner last night, what they had for lunch, and for breakfast.

Here was his response:

Dinner: fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy

Lunch: I got out of school early and got 2 JBC’s at Wendy’s
(a JBC is a Junior Bacon Cheeseberger and if you coach high school athletes
you already knew that)

Breakfast: Ohh, I woke up late and didn’t have time for breakfast.

Now, I didn’t make up this response, nor is it unusual nutritional habits for today’s American youth. People are willing to spend thousands of dollars a year on supplements but can’t take the time to eat an apple. How about trying to wake up 5 minutes earlier to make breakfast or even attempt to eat something from each food group? This isn’t rocket science to come up with a balanced diet but people are getting lazier each day. Our society needs an easy button for everything.

People are just looking for me to say take this pill and you’ll get stronger and faster and you don’t need to change your current diet. They are pretty much saying that ‘I am too lazy and I don’t want to put in the effort it takes to make improvements’. Again, let’s just get back to the basics in everything we do and stop looking for the easy way out, please.

For people that are looking for actual nutritional structure and not just the latest pill/supplement then check out:

http://www.topfitnessprofessionals.com/DrBerardi.html

Sprinting is a skill. Doing it well takes practice.

You can get better at it, or make others better at it, simply by changing the way you use
your muscles. The primary ‘running muscles’ are the glutes and
hamstrings. So it is critical that athletes learn to employ those
muscle groups when performing speed work.

Today’s tip is one of the greatest coaching cues for improving running
mechanics and speed. I’m absolutely positive that once your athletes
apply this simple cue to their running, they will immediately get faster.

Today’s Speed Cue: “Step over, drive down”

When doing any type of speed work, it is critical that your athletes learn to step over the opposite knee and drive the foot down into the ground so that it lands underneath the hips with each stride.

In terms of mechanics, your athletes must perform the speed drills (A march, A run, A skip, Fast Leg, Arm Action drills) that reinforce the ‘step over, drive down’ principle. The purpose behind having them perform these drills and exercises is to reprogram their neuromuscular
system to fire the muscles in the patterns that produce greater force and therefore greater speed.

Most athletes have never been taught to run the right way so they are very inefficient.

A major problem affecting the vast majority of inexperienced athletes is called ‘reaching’. This occurs during the recovery phase of running when an athlete allows the foot to travel out past the opposite knee. The result is that the athlete’s foot reaches and lands out past their
center of mass causing a breaking action.

Watch your athletes when they practice or go watch some film of them competing. As they run, check or pause the video as soon as their foot touches the ground. If it is out past their hips instead of directly underneath the hips, they are ‘reaching’ and running considerably
slower than they are capable.

Additionally, they are placing great stress on their hamstring because the muscle is not working in the way it is meant to. So if you are seeing hamstring pulls, lower back problems, calf and/or achilles strains in your athletes, especially as the season wears on, there is a good chance that part of the problem stems from poor running mechanics.

One way to start to fix this problem is by applying today’s Speed tip. By giving your athletes cues to think about during practice, they will begin to reprogram their movement patterns and immediately get faster.

For example, to fix the reaching problem (which I can assure you your athletes have) cue them to ‘step over the opposite knee and drive down.’

Greater speeds are produced by applying more force to the ground. By learning to drive the foot straight down, landing underneath the hips, athletes will make the most of their existing strength levels and reduce injury.

To learn more about speed development, click here:

http://www.completespeedtraining.com