You’ve seen me say it before, “The first step to getting faster is getting stronger”. The relationship between strength and speed is commonly misunderstood. Either athletes are afraid to get stronger in the weight room because they think it makes them slow, or they spend all of their time in the weight room thinking it will make them fast. Neither idea is in line with what actually makes an athlete faster. The first part of this article, I will address how getting stronger can help make you faster. The second part will talk about how the wrong program actually can make you slower and hurt your performance.

When you run, you bound from one foot to the other. This is called your stride. If you want to improve speed, you have to improve both your stride frequency and stride length. Stride frequency is how many strides you can do in a given amount of time, stride length is how far you bound from one foot hitting the ground to the other. Stride frequency is improved largely by tricking the brain to send out messages to the hips and legs to cycle faster. This can be done by over-speed training and hundreds of hours of proper technique work. Stride length is largely effected by how much force is put into the ground when your foot hits. This is improved by hundreds of hours of proper technique work, and improving your body’s ability to create force. Increasing force comes from getting stronger. Getting stronger comes from a well-designed, progressive resistance training program.

The role of getting stronger in the weight room is to convince your body and brain that is capable of putting out more force than it is used to. The easiest way to visualize this is to think about walking a mile with a 30 pound vest on. The day, walk the mile without the vest on. Day 2 will seem a lot easier. This is due to the body and brain adapting to the 30 pound vest, and when it’s gone, these adaptations stick around for a little bit. Even though you are only moving your bodyweight, your body is geared to move something 30 pounds heavier. Your muscles put out a greater degree of force, so your body moves faster, and it feels lighter. This is the same adaptation that getting stronger in the weight room causes during speed training. If you can squat 250 pounds, and you only weigh 150 pounds, your legs are capable of moving much more than your bodyweight. When they are only moving your bodyweight, your body seems lighter, so it moves faster. This has the same effect on men and women. Within certain parameters, and in conjunction with a proper running program, consistantly improving your strength in the weight room can help you consistently improve your speed on the field.

Strength training must always be accompanied by running technique work as well as speed drills specific to the needs of the sport the individual is trying to get faster for. Weight training is a valuable component of a training program, but the needs of the sport in regards to sport skill, conditioning, tactical work, etc., need to be addressed as a high priority as well. An athlete can get slower if they spend all of their time focusing on their weight room lifts, ignoring all the other components of the sport. A weight training program should be designed to compliment tactical sport work, not trump it. The overall goal of a program should be to improve an athlete’s on-field performance as well as decrease injury. Next month, I will discuss how focusing too much on weight room lifts can actually hurt your performance.