Good Evening,

I hope you had a great weekend.

Our summer program is now enrolling. Check out the link below for program details. Don't hesitate to reach out with any questions.

​ADK Summer Performance Training​

If you have a college athlete who will be home soon and needs to stay sharp this summer. We are building programming for them. Reply "college" and I will add you to the pre-sale list.

Let me know if you or your athlete needs anything.

Have a great rest of your Sunday!

Colin

The Best Speed Training Tool

One of the best ways we have found to get our athletes faster is to run fast. It sounds a bit obvious but it's often left out of youth training programs.

To get faster we first need to know how fast you run.

We use laser timers that give us a very accurate 10-yard5-yard sprint speed from a 5 yard, 10-yard15-yard, 15-yard run in. You can do this with a hand timer but they are not very reliable and consistent (Check out the MY Sprint app).

Why is timing so important?

This gives athletes instant feedback on their sprint speed in a session. We record this so we can track their speed while they are training with us.

The timers help to develop “intent” in your athletes. Intent is their ability to move as powerfully as possible with the highest level of effort when called upon. This is an excellent mental practice for athletes to get used to putting it “all on the line” to perform.

This is not always easy training because of the amount of focus it takes to get faster.

The Speed Dip

It’s not uncommon to see a dip in their speed times over an 8-12 week session. This is typically because they are thinking about running fast and the technique involved. It's very hard to be powerful and think at the same time.

As they get more reps their sprinting becomes more autonomous. They do less thinking, learn to apply higher levels of intent while being relaxed and their speed starts to rebound.

The goal is to find “Relaxed Intensity.” Moving as fast as possible without muscling through and/or a lot of creating stiffness.

Adding timed sprints to every session has been one of the biggest performance improvements we have seen for our athletes.

As mentioned in previous emails, be careful using sprints as conditioning.

Sprinting fast has a high neuromuscular demand and the body has to do a lot of coordination at high speed. Fatigued sprinting runs the risk of the athlete learning poor running technique.

You don’t want to “run the speed out of your athlete.”

Coaches if you need help putting together a simple speed program you can implement in your practices please reply “Speed” to this email and will set up a time to discuss.