Does strength training make you faster? Early on, yes. When you're starting out, strength is the bottleneck, so training it moves everything. But there's a point where you're stronger than you've ever been, leaner than you've ever been, and you still can't chase the winger down when he goes. From there, more gym isn't the answer. It's usually what keeps you one step short.
Watch: the video this post comes from
And it's not your effort. It's not your genetics either.
Does strength training make you faster at the start? Yes
When you started, more worked. More gym, more sprints, more sessions, and you were getting there first, right? That's totally normal.
Early on, strength and general fitness are the things holding everything else back. So you train them and everything moves with them. Every athlete we measure who's early on goes through that, and it works.
Then you get stronger. You get fitter. Your stamina is better. And on the pitch, nothing really changes. That first step still takes a while to get going.
So what does everyone do? They push harder. More load, more volume, another strength block. And more is the one thing making it worse.
Speed isn't one thing
There are over 100 subcategories underneath speed. Your first 5 m, your top speed, how long your foot stays on the ground, your shin angle on the first stride, how well you relax at full pace. The gym and a preseason conditioning block only cover some of them.
There are qualities under speed that a squat and a fitness block never really touch. And when a player hits a speed he can't get past, it almost always comes down to two of them:
- ✓Neurological recovery
- ✓High-end elasticity
Every player we measure who's stuck is stuck in one of those two. And under both sits a third thing: has he actually been exposed to max speed, with the right recovery after it?
Stuck point one: your nervous system
Your nervous system decides how fast you're allowed to move. If it's never exposed to high speed, or it's exposed without the right recovery after, you're teaching your body to be slow. Full stop.
Most players get this wrong one of two ways.
Either they're never really exposed to high-end speed at all. Small-sided games, possession work. They never get anywhere near flat out, so the nervous system never gets asked to go any faster, and it doesn't.
Or they do hit high speeds and there's no recovery after it. His legs feel fresh, his muscles feel recovered, so he assumes he's ready to go again. But the nervous system (the brain and spinal cord, which send the signal to fire) recovers on a completely different timeline to muscle.
After a single flat-out speed session, we see 7 to 24 days to full neurological recovery, depending on the player. If he's pushed past his actual max speed, it can take up to 50 days. Those are our own figures from around 1,000 athletes, not a published study. And they mean days to 100% neurological freshness, not days until you can train again. He feels fine the whole time.
Now put a football week on top of that. Training, a game, extra sessions. The brain pulls the handbrake. I call it the neural governor, and it's protective. Reactions slow, the first step gets heavier, and he spends longer on the ground every stride. Then he repeats that slower version of himself, week in, week out.
The fix is both halves. Expose the nervous system to high speed, then give it the recovery that follows. That's when it adapts and resets to a higher level than before. So your flat-out work gets planned around your football, not squeezed in on top of it. And the moment you feel yourself dropping off in a session, stop. Anything after that point trains a slower version of you.
Think of it like compounding. The return comes from letting it build, not from pulling the money out every week to check on it. I go deeper on this in why your legs feel fresh but your nervous system isn't.
Stuck point two: high-end elasticity
This is the one that confuses the strong player. He's stronger than he's ever been, so why can't he get away from anyone?
Because strength without elasticity means more time on the ground. And every millisecond on the ground is half a yard the other player gets on you.
A heavy squat is slow force. You've got time to produce it. Running in behind or chasing a loose ball, you don't. When you're flat out, anywhere from 100 down to 90 milliseconds on the ground is a strong target. The 80s to low 90s is really rapid. In that window there's no time to push with muscle. The force has to come from your tendons, and tendons act like springs. They stretch on contact and throw that energy straight back into the ground.
It's why the Mbappes of the game look like they're not even trying. See?
A stiff, reactive system returns that energy. A tense, muscular system soaks it up. So the harder this athlete tries, the more he tenses, and the more energy he leaks on every contact. It's not about trying harder. It's about letting the spring do what it's built to do.
So elasticity has to be trained as its own quality: fast, reactive, short-contact work. And it has to be measured, not guessed. That means ground contact time and RSI (reactive strength index: how much distance you produce against how long you spend on the ground). More on the training side in plyometrics for speed.
How to tell which one is holding you back
Here's where it gets tricky. The two mask each other.
A nervous system that hasn't recovered blunts your reactivity. You come off the ground slower, which looks exactly like poor elasticity. So you add more plyometrics, which costs more recovery. And it works the other way too. Poor elasticity means you produce speed with effort, and effort is expensive for the nervous system. Now you look under-recovered, so you rest more, and nothing changes. You're treating the symptom. The cause never gets touched.
So you measure. The 10-bound test: a 5 m run-in, then 10 continuous bounds, and you measure the distance. You can do it on the training pitch.
- ✓Good when you're fresh, but it falls away across the week: that's a recovery problem.
- ✓Short even when you're fully recovered: that's elasticity, and it needs work. If you're well under 30 m, it's not your strength stopping you.
Does that make sense? At the top level, that one step is worth a professional contract. And that's the difference between a ceiling and a bottleneck. A ceiling is permanent. A bottleneck isn't. Yours is a bottleneck.
If you want to know exactly which one is yours, that's what our assessment is built to find.