The justification for “Speed Kills” as one of the pillars of SHIFT Speed & Strength philosophy is simple: no athlete has ever been described as “too fast.” More speed is universally a good thing. My prior coaching business ATX Speed & Strength and this business SHIFT Speed & Strength exist to help athletes become faster, then apply that speed to their sport.

Becoming faster is speed development. Speed is developed using maximal effort sprinting with full recovery. We’re not going to dig into the bioenergetics here, but after about 5 seconds (most athletes) your body cannot sustain the incredible muscle contractions that have to accompany high-speed elastic behavior. Once you’re doing anything less than maximal muscular contractions in the specific coordinative pattern of sprinting, you’re no longer improving your skill at sprinting. So within a session, you can only do so many optimal reps for motor learning, thus speed develops slowly. As Tony Holler has said and as I describe in the “Speed Is Electric” chapter of Fast Kids Don’t Train Slow, “speed grows like a tree.”

Because of the limited reps you can do in a session and the limited sessions you can do in a week at the appropriate intensity, the core of speed development is a variant of the training philosophy at StrongFirst: “sprint as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible.”

Interested in running faster? Build your entire offseason training week around maximal effort sprinting; build your in-season training week with at least one maximal effort sprinting session included.

If you just utilize The Simplest Speed Development Plan In The World, you’re doing fine. But if you’re somewhat cerebral as an athlete or you’ve been forced to coach yourself, how do you know you’re doing a good job?

The Three Ps of Sprinting

Maximal effort sprinting is built on three elements: posture, power, and purpose. Purpose is your intention to go as fast as you can for 5-7 seconds. Your mental state coming into practice plays a major role in purpose, but the best way to assure proper intention is to be reliably timed (like in a race, on camera, or with an electronic timing system) or to compete against another athlete. So when it’s time for speed work, get amped up, raise the stakes, and fully commit.

Posture and power take a little more thought. When you want to build speed, you want to return to your ABCs: alignment, balance, and coordination.

This concept synthesized after several years as a Functional Movement Screen practitioner, RKC/SFG kettlebell instructor, Gold Medal Bodies and Gymnastic Bodies follower, and avid reader of Frans Bosch and Boo Schexnayder. I first applied the concept for teaching movement at Primal 7, where alignment, balance, and coordination represented the goals of training at each stage of progression. The ABCs of Movement were a way of setting objectives with each training exercise to reinforce moving well and feeling good while doing it. Shortly after, I adapted the ABCs of Movement to how I teach sprinting to someone new.

In FKDTS, this concept is the Hard Z and the series of drills to complicate it. This closely relates to Steve McGill’s idea about training a hurdler: because you add speed as you progress from static positions to marching drills to jogging pace to sprinting pace over hurdles, you add complexity for the brain. That complexity is what improves your skill. K Anders Ericsson explained in detail in Peak that improving skill and the physical myelination of nerves that accompanies it is what we really mean by motor learning.

So in your own practice of sprinting – your own practice of speed development – you should know the foundations that speed is built on before you add complexity. Ironically, you have to go slow…before you have any chance at going fast.

ALIGNMENT is “posture”

In a great sprinting position, the ankle, knee, hip, and shoulder are aligned on the stance side and the other leg – called “swing leg” – is knee at hip height, bent at 90 degrees. Most amateur athletes struggle with the hip aspect of this, partly because of working desk jobs and partly because of old injuries. I’ve explored whether or not athletes should spend precious training time stretching in an older article, but if you can’t extend the hip fully while standing on one leg, you need activation and you need stretching. Then you need to build your training program around exercises that keep that mobility in place.

Broadly speaking, you build the Hard Z posture with planks, supine hip bridges, and single-leg balance first. You focus on the core components of the position using static exercises. You emphasize your calves, hamstrings, and glutes until the positions are automatic.

Mastering the Hard Z is foundational. It’s a position that, eventually, you will pass through in milliseconds on each stride, yet if you can’t achieve it, you will waste energy and effort trying to stabilize your joints rather than pushing against the ground. Once you can hit and hold the Hard Z any time, though, you’re ready to progress beyond basic alignment and get on to essential balance.

BALANCE is “stability”

This doesn’t fit neatly into the 3 Ps of Sprinting, but without it, there’s no motor learning to be had from speed development. Balance is your ability to enter and exit the Hard Z position from nearly any other position without compromising its alignment requirements. Balance is also your ability to switch from Hard Z on the left leg to Hard Z on the right leg with control and while demonstrating symmetric mobility.

Those ankle sprains from middle school volleyball…that scar tissue from crashing your bike in college…that stiffness you never worked out because you quit your PT exercises after 3 weeks…this is where all those past debts show up. Athletes who perform at an intermediate level in their sport yet can’t A march, can’t high skip, or can’t run high knees for 30 yards without collapse consistently have an injury history that needs management. The trouble isn’t your ankle itself. The trouble is how you compensated for spraining it and how ingrained that compensatory movement pattern is.

Owning balance – again, entry to and exit from the Hard Z without compromise – is prerequisite to sprinting well because, as Cal Dietz has remarked, sprinting is the most extreme thing a human body can do. Our brains are about survival first and foremost, only then about performance. So if you can’t hold the position you’ve hit because of a weird movement pattern or a damaged joint, you won’t run as fast as you want. Your brain will shut down power production to preserve your tissue. You don’t have a say in the matter! And if power production is shut down, you’re not actually doing maximal effort sprinting, therefore you’re not developing speed.

At this point, you need a comprehensive overhaul of your training. Maybe it needs to be recovery work at night, maybe it needs to be care from a PT or chiropractor or massage therapist, maybe it needs to be a new warmup to correct your movement patterns. But you need some intervention to restore balance. Once you can hit the Hard Z while marching, skipping, cycling, and bounding, you’re ready for coordination.

COORDINATION is “power”

At last you’ve reached maximal effort sprinting. When you can hit the Hard Z from any entry, the most complexity you can add is going full speed. But there’s still considerable progression to maximize your motor learning.

Every athlete benefits from sprinting up steep hills. Formally, you’re accelerating up steep hills, not sprinting, since you don’t hit maximum velocity, but the impact to your nervous and muscular systems is still incredible. Emphasizing the Hard Z with a bigger-than-usual leg split (think “thigh to chest”) while accelerating builds power. Doing so at maximum cadence builds elastic power and lays a foundation for excellent mechanics on flat ground. Basically running as hard as you can up short, steep hills makes your first 3 steps on the field effective and efficient, which may be enough to level up your performance by itself.

Then you can progress to accelerating on flat ground. Much like building balance, don’t limit yourself to standing still then going for it. Start from a pushup position and scramble to a hard acceleration. Start on your back. Do a shoulder roll, forward roll, or backward roll. Hop on one foot or jump from both feet. Everything you can do to complicate the start of your acceleration diversifies the motor pattern and teaches your body to apply maximum power into running from any position. This is a part of how sprinting makes you a better athlete – it’s brain training for power production!

Ultimately, speed development depends on maximum power acceleration that transitions into maximal effort top-speed sprinting. Your focus is the same throughout – violent, high-frequency Hard Z – but your body position changes with every step. Just keep your reps to about 5 seconds and quit taking sprints when you feel a bit uncoordinated.

The Key Ability Is Availability

I’ve oversimplified speed development in this piece. You can pick up my book for more depth on drills to do, then graduate Joel Smith’s work on Just Fly Sports, before you move on to something incredibly detailed like Frans Bosch’s Running. But your technical knowledge of speed is meaningless without the work – and the work itself is your biggest limiter to developing speed.

Most athletes new to true speed training underestimate its impact on their body. 15-20 total seconds at maximum effort is barely 4 reps. Yet those 20 seconds of work probably require 20 minutes of training time. Then, those brief 20 minutes of training time probably need 48 hours of rest before you can repeat them.

Remember: sprinting is the most extreme thing a human body can do. Maximal effort sprinting strains your entire web of fascia. It taxes every piece of connective tissue from your toes to your jaw. It challenges the force production of every muscle from the sole of your foot to your eyebrows. Every 5-second rep includes 16-20 steps at the highest achievable contraction rates and signaling rates your brain can achieve. And given how greedy your brain is about energy, that all makes sprinting unbelievably expensive physiologically.

So when your brain feels low on resources, you can’t sprint. That means coordination comes apart after a rep if you don’t take several minutes to recover energy stores. Coordination comes apart if you attempt so many reps that your brain tries new signaling paths to avoid the stress. Coordination comes apart if you haven’t waited a few days to rebuild tissue. Coordination comes apart if you haven’t slept enough to insulate the nerve pathways. And attempting to sprint when coordination has fallen apart is a huge risk of catastrophic injury.

No matter how much you need more speed to level up your play, you have to obey your body’s rhythm for developing it. If you’re injured, you not only can’t play, you can’t sprint, so you can’t get better. That’s what I mean by the key ability being availability.

Speed grows like a tree. Tend to it lovingly and patiently by practicing it as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible. Most importantly, remain available!

Recap: The Three Ps and The ABCs

When you’re training speed, remember: posture, power, and purpose.

Show up committed and fresh. Know the Hard Z position. Then “hit it hard.”

Set yourself up to hit it hard in the Hard Z by mastering your alignment, balance, and coordination.

Progress slowly. Progress patiently. As Christopher Sommer of Gymnastic Bodies has said in his many writings, “make haste slowly.” If you do, you’ll be rewarded with more speed. More speed makes you a better athlete, especially when you focus on the right things during your sport practice.

Working through all this methodically and at the pace your body can handle is why I coach athletes. I care about speed development. I love seeing athletes perform better as they get faster – and I always know getting faster will work because Speed Kills.

I hope you get to be the first athlete ever described as “too fast.”

Better go plant your tree.