Every athlete wants to be fast. I’ve found in conversation with new athletes that they also want that speed as fast as possible. My high school athletes are a balanced and patient group, much more so than conventional wisdom would suggest about teenagers. It’s actually the other Masters athletes like me who are wildly impatient about our progress. The question which best captures that comes up in our second or third conversation without fail: “How long will it take to really be faster?”
How Long Will It Take To Become Faster?
It’s a valid question. In my answer, I try to do some expectation-setting. As always, it depends.
- What’s your background in sprint training?
- What injuries are you dealing with?
- What are your recovery habits?
- How many days do you train now?
- What does “faster” mean to you in your sport?
But after much hand-wringing, we still have to get to the point…when can you expect to be obviously, measurably, meaningfully faster once you start a speed training program??
Know this: Speed grows like a tree. (Thanks, Tony, as always!)
That means speed develops slowly, like over months and years. So you better plant that tree now.
If you are new to sprint training, you can expect to be faster within a month. And you’ll get faster every week or two for a few months.
However, if you’ve been sprint training at high quality and low volume for a few years without major injury, you could battle for six or seven months to get a real speed improvement…but you could still get faster within 6-8 weeks.
What’s going on here?
How can it take so long to build speed yet you can get faster quickly?
Let’s distinguish speed from applications of speed. Then we’ll talk how each develops, how long it takes to see improvement, and what training has the biggest impact on speed.
What Is Speed?
I explore this at length in an early chapter of my book Fast Kids Don’t Train Slow and will revisit it in my next book (coming January 2025!).
Speed is electric. Speed is not muscular strength. It is not footwork. It is not jump height. All of those factors influence speed, but the fact remains that speed is neuromuscular coordination. Speed is how efficiently and rapidly your brain, spine, and nerves can get you into the right positions to bounce.
Speed is a skill and must be trained like one. Because speed is a skill, it develops the same way finger placement on the piano develops. And this is why beginners have a different experience training speed from experienced athletes.
But does any of this actually matter when you’re playing a sport?
What Does It Mean To Run Faster?
Running faster is a proxy for speed. It is an application for speed. But while speed (referring to sprint speed here) is a very specific internal coordination task, running faster is completely dependent on context.
A 100 meter sprinter’s speed is applied from a block start over 100 meters.
A wide-out’s speed is applied from a standing start over 30 yards.
A basketball forward’s speed is applied repeatedly from a jogging start over 15 feet.
Each of these athletes benefits from running faster, but they mean faster in the context of their playing surface, their start position, their objective, and their competitor’s reactions.
If a 100 meter sprinter can execute block clearance then lean at the finish line a bit better, they could win more races. Pure sprint training is critical to their potential performance, but it doesn’t capture the race model which could also be worth a meter or more once the gun goes off.
If a wide receiver can make two quality power moves that put a defender on their heels, they have open field in front of them to accelerate fully and hit top speed – but they still need awareness to spot the ball. Pure sprint training helps them, but only if the other football skills are sound.
If a basketball player can deceive a defender with their chest position or can drop their hips more before changing direction, they may get a clear lane to the basket regardless of their outright sprint speed. Sprint training is an opportunity with many, many benefits, but it doesn’t affect ball handling or decision-making on the court.
Yet executing those sport-specific skills makes an athlete appear faster during a game. They get more opportunities to apply the speed they have. And having more speed is always an asset – Speed Kills, after all.
So where do sport practice and speed development come together?
How Do You Really Get Faster?
If you want to run faster, sprint. Not enough?
Okay, check out my article The Simplest Speed Development Plan In The World for more details. It boils down to this:
- sprint at full-effort for 5 to 7 seconds
- rest at least 5 minutes between runs
- time every rep and stop training when you get slower for 2 runs in a row
- rest (or actively recover) the day before and the day after sprinting
- take every 4th week off from sprinting
The Plan Works But No One Does It…
If you follow exactly that plan, doing nothing else, you will train 3 days a week, you will run about 5 reps, and you will make a measurable improvement at least every month. It could be a tiny improvement, but you will improve every month…until. Until you fly ~1.00 sec per 10 meters. Until you get bored and give less than full effort. Until your sport season starts. Until you have a few bad nights of sleep. Or until you get hurt.
There is some natural cycling built into a plan like this. It’s the concept of auto-regulation, which used to be the main thing in methods like Dietrich Buchenholz’s Inno-Sport or books like Travis Hansen’s Speed Encyclopedia and Barry Ross’s Underground Secrets of Speed Development.
It works.
But it demands you be patient.
A little measurable improvement every month for years would make you really fast.
Yet very few people can stick to the program for that long.
Life happens.
We get distracted.
We chase other goals instead.
Speed Kills but you need other sport skills.
How SHIFT Athletes Get Faster
With my athletes, we prioritize speed (that’s Tony Holler again) while we work to get faster in the sport context (that’s Les Spellman).
SHIFT Speed Coaching athletes take a day off before true speed work. Then the next two days are strength, power, flexibility, rehab, or conditioning. For my Masters track athletes, in particular, we adjoin approach runs and race modeling to speed days.
On the one hand, SHIFT athletes develop speed more slowly. Meaningful, measurable progress in “pure” speed measures like the 10 meter fly improve every 6-10 weeks.
On the other hand, they run faster where it matters. On-field applied speed gets noticeably better every 2-3 weeks.
I can guarantee this sort of progress because my full-time job with those athletes is planning, sequencing, and adjusting training to keep them moving forward. I help my athletes find the next limiting weakness, then we attack it in training. Their job is to recover and bring the effort during practice. They don’t need to wonder if they are doing the right thing at the right time to keep making progress.
How You Can Get Started Running Faster
When you coach yourself, you have to choose your priority every week. You have to plan your own training. Then you have to execute. If you commit your entire off-season to speed, like I recommend in the book, then spend your pre-season and season being great at your sport, accept that you’ll develop a little speed year-on-year. And be excited that you’ll run faster on the field or court month-on-month.
But speed, real speed, pure speed, neuromuscular coordination speed, develops slowly. As I often quote Tony (last time today, promise): Speed grows like a tree.
Plant your tree now. Be way faster this time next year. Be noticeably faster next month. Be just a bit faster next week. Then rest and repeat.