Regardless of what sport you’re involved in (track being the exception), it’s unlikely that you sprint in a straight line for more than 10-15 yards very frequently.

Athletic speed really depends heavily on three things:

1) Rate of acceleration

2) Rate of deceleration

3) Ability to change directions rapidly

Of these, rate of acceleration is the only one that really receives any attention from most athletes.  Not surprisingly, all three are HIGHLY dependent on the strength and power of your leg and hip musculature.  In addition to improving lower body strength and power, you can drastically improve your athletic speed by focusing on correct movement patterns, and by practicing transitional speed drills.

In my next newsletter, I’m going to show several transitional speed drills that I’ve developed over the last few months to help athletes of all sports perfect transitional movement patterns and improve athletic speed.

If you haven’t yet, sign up for my newsletter now! You won’t want to miss these videos!

-Kevin Neeld

At Endeavor, most of our hockey guys have been getting a lot more ice time over the last few weeks than they had been all Summer. I think it’s important for hockey players to take a few months away from skating on the ice (at least vigorous skating; some technique work is still okay), to give their bodies time to recuperate from the unique stresses hockey places on them.
Having said that, as our players started to make this transition, it was important I made some changes to their training programs. A few notable changes:

1) No more off-ice conditioning. After 10 weeks of hard conditioning off the ice, I decided to dial things back a bit for two reasons:  1) They were skating hard on the ice so they were getting hockey-specific conditioning that way; and 2) prolonged high intensity conditioning is the most threatening aspect of a training program regarding overtraining your players. It would be tragic for players to enter the season in a borderline over-trained state.

2) Drastically less lower body lifting. Prior to the pre-season program switch, my hockey players were performing around 8 lower body lifts a week. Now they have just a contrast pair (Back leg raised split squat paired immediately with a split squat jump) and partner eccentric hamstring curl on Day 1 (usually Monday) and a reverse lunge (front squat grip) paired with a slideboard ab rollout on Day 3 (usually Wednesday).

3) Along with the decrease in lower body lifting came a substantial increase in speed work. Physically speed work can be viewed as low load high velocity training. I think it’s appropriate to transition to less strength work and more speed work during the pre-season to help reinforce using your improved strength to maximize your speed potential. Transitioning to more speed work also gives players a mental break from the heavy lifting.

-Kevin Neeld