Does squatting make you faster? Yes, in one part of the sprint: the first stride or two out of a standing start. That's where your foot is on the ground long enough to use the strength you built. After that, every stride gets quicker, and by the fifth or sixth stride the speed is coming from reactivity, not strength. So the squat helps, but only up to a point, and the point is different for every athlete.
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I'm not telling you to get out of the gym. I'm telling you to know what the bar is actually giving you.
Does squatting make you faster? What it gives you
Out of a standing start, your first stride can sit on the ground for upwards of 200 milliseconds. That's a long time to bend the ground. Over that length of contact you've got time to express the force you built in the gym. So there's a real link between squatting ability and initial acceleration.
The other thing it gives you is position. A stronger athlete can get lower. He can hold the knees-bent position through his first strides, and that's what lets him push forward and stay close to the ground instead of standing straight back up. You can read more on this in the first stride, where strength pays off.
Where squatting stops making you faster
That 200 milliseconds doesn't hold. Every stride after the first gets shorter on the ground. Second, third, fourth. By about the fifth and sixth stride you're sinking into the 110 to 100 millisecond range.
Once you're in there, what's producing the speed is reactivity. It's not strength anymore.
Strength still has a job at that point. It stabilises your posture so you can hold the position you're in. So it's not useless. But it's not the thing creating the speed.
Here's the arithmetic nobody does. When you sprint, your foot is on the ground for about a tenth of a second. I've measured athletes at 118 milliseconds. That's the whole window you get to put force into the floor. Now think about how long a heavy deadlift or squat takes you. Two seconds. Maybe three.
I assessed a man who pulls 300 kg. Stronger than almost every athlete I've ever put through a session, and he could not get out of his own way. Years of training a slow expression of force, then asking the body to produce it in a tenth of a second. It can't, because nobody ever taught it to. That's not a strength problem. That's strength that can't get out fast enough.
Three ways a bigger squat can cost you
Body weight. Strength on its own isn't the number that matters. It's power and strength relative to your own body weight. You can gain the strength, gain power with it, and still come out worse off if the weight you put on to get there was too much for what you got back. I break that one down in power to weight ratio for sprinting.
The ankle. As you get stronger, the rest of the body has to take what you're now producing. The ankles are the ones I watch. At contact, the ankle has to hold under that new level of force. If it gives way, the force doesn't transfer. Now you've got a stronger athlete standing on a joint that can't hold what he's putting into the ground.
Tension. Bracing has its place under a bar. It stabilises the pelvis and the trunk, and that's what you want there. The problem is what it does to the top half. If your upper back is constantly locked up from lifting heavy, you lose the ability to rotate smoothly and calmly. Running fast is rhythm. The harder someone tries, the more they tense, and the more they tense, the more they lose the timing to move the legs faster. It's why the Haalands of the game are still quick at that size. They carry all that strength and they've kept the rotation through their upper body.
Two signs you're on the wrong side of it
First one, on the pitch. You're strong in the duel. Nobody moves you off the ball. Then it turns into a race over that first step and you're just not getting there fast enough. Sound familiar? I wrote about exactly that in strong in the duel, second to the ball.
Second one, in the gym. The lift keeps going up and your power output stays exactly where it was. Same bound distance in January, same or lower in March, and the bar has gone up 20 kg. That means the strength hasn't turned into power. And sometimes power actually drops, because you've lost the rhythm in how you move.
So how much should you squat?
It's not a number on the bar. I can't tell you it's two times body weight, because it's different for every athlete. It comes down to femur length (your thigh bone), where your muscles attach, and the levers you've been given. Two players can squat the same weight and get completely different things out of it.
That's why we let the validation happen on the field, not in the gym. The bar on its own doesn't tell you whether any of it carried over. The point you're looking for is the session where your squat goes up and your power output doesn't.
How to find your point
You measure both and watch which one moves. The 10-bound test: a 5 m run-in, then 10 continuous bounds, and you measure the distance. Every bound is reactive, so it shows you whether the strength is coming out fast. Track it next to your lift.
But not randomly. Test after a proper reset. Three weeks of low intensity, 50 to 60% of your max, nothing to failure, no max strength work. You're not trying to develop in those three weeks. You're maintaining. Yes, you'll lose a little strength as the tension comes off. That's fine, because you're moving back into a reactive, fluid state. Then you measure.
Don't read this and quit the gym, right? You'd lose stability and you'd lose the ability to hold your contacts. Keep the gym work in that 50 to 60% range, keep the ankles strong, keep some mild plyometrics in to stay reactive, and watch how your strength translates now the tension is down. All of it planned around your football, not squeezed on top of it. Sometimes one gym session a week is enough.
If you want to sprint, you sprint. If you want more power, you do the thing that puts the most power into the ground for your sport. That's what our assessment measures, so you know which side of the line you're on.