How David improved his acceleration speed in-season

Manurewa U23 footballer David Grey dropped a 0.993s 5m sprint time on June 21st massively up from his previous PB of 1.074s back in March. A 7.54% improvement by David, who has a gym training age of 2 years. With a standard error of 0.01s, this improvement falls outside David’s natural variability. It is even more impressive to achieve this in-season, proving that gains can still be made in-season and not solely a period of maintenance.

WHY IS THIS EVEN IMPORTANT?

With David being a footballer, instances in a game are prevalent when linear speed impacts game-defining moments. Therefore, having a high ceiling whereby, you have high maximal speed at your disposal, and secondly being able to access a large percentage of your maximal speed sooner are key elements. If a winger or forward can dart away from a defender, or a defender can make ground on a breaking-away forward, it will influence game-defining moments positively for your team.

SO, WHAT DID WE DO?

David is already a strong athlete, so traditional weightlifting volume is low with intensity being high and isometric work included. Providing a potent central nervous system stimulus with large forces being applied, whilst minimizing fatigue through low volume and isometric work. A couple of the key physical capacities we’re striving to develop in-season are rate of force development (RFD) and the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC), along with improving the effectiveness and efficiency of football-specific movements.

RFD refers to the ability to rapidly generate large force, during sprinting the time to apply force into the ground to move rapidly is less than 150ms and reduces the faster we get. Being able to maximize the force we can produce during this window is paramount. SSC refers to our ability to be stiff & elastic, using our elastic structures such as our tendons to increase force production.

The RFD & SSC in-season work has come in the form of plyometrics, football-specific movements (acceleration, max velocity, change of direction, transitional movements) and non-countermovement (NCM) ballistic jumps using VBT to drive intent & velocity. Removing a countermovement aims to reduce muscle slack and improve RFD, whilst also being a good stimulus in-season as it eliminates stress induced by eccentric muscle contractions. This work has been pivotal to increasing Davids’s ability to generate large forces into the ground within short timeframes during football-specific movements.

The locomotion exercises (plyometrics & football-specific movements) also improve contraction dynamics during movement, the ability to quickly apply force into the ground, be stiff & elastic and then quickly relax cyclically. These exercises also provide an opportunity to assess movement strategy and analyse if there are ways David could move differently to be more effective and efficient. Whilst this work is high intensity, fatigue will be low due to the low volumes, although still providing a potent stimulus for adaptation.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF IMPROVING SPEED IN-SEASON.

It is often assumed that in-season is solely a period of maintenance for the physical piece of the pie but even with constraints in-season and fatigue prevalent, gains can still be made. Volume & intensity influences fatigue levels and often footballing volume is high in-season with 2-3 training’s, gameday and extra footballing commitments. When looking to develop our physical capacities or our football-specific movements (sprinting, COD, transitional movements etc.), it is paramount to aim for quality, not quantity. This is exactly what we did, low volume, long rest periods, and good quality reps that will stimulate the neuromuscular system for adaptation. We also monitor fatigue through simple reactive strength testing to know when it is time to pull back. Often less (volume) is the better option in-season.

Finally, the last consideration is looking at physical capacity vs movement strategy, where is the kink in the pipe. It will often be a combination of both but without assessing we won’t understand how performance can be leveraged from physical capacity development or altering movement strategy. Whilst still room to improve, David’s movement strategy during acceleration is up to scratch, therefore it has been a physical capacity focus through rate of force development work, which has proved influential.