A good gym program for footballers' speed does fewer things, harder, and is judged on the pitch, not on the bar. It isn't a bodybuilding split. It isn't an ankle day, a knee day and an acceleration day either. It's built around the few lifts that push your main qualities to their limit, planned around your football, and checked against your sprint times. If your speed hasn't moved, the program hasn't worked, however full it looks.
Watch: the video this post comes from
Why a bodybuilding split doesn't build speed
Look at most footballers' gym weeks and it sounds a bit like a bodybuilding split. Chest day, back day, leg day.
Bodybuilders carve the week up by muscle group because that's how they're judged. On stage, they're scored on isolated muscles. That's how bodybuilding works. It's not how sport works.
Sport is the end result of moving well in the situation you're in. In team sports I call them micro scenarios: the run in behind, the race to the loose ball, the turn and go. Or it's an event where the whole goal is to get from A to B as fast as possible within the rules. You're not judged on how your quads look. You get a win or a loss based on where you finish.
So training muscle by muscle trains the wrong thing. See?
Ankle day, knee day, same speed
Specialising one piece at a time does the same thing to speed. Ankle day, knee day, block starts, acceleration, top end, you name it. Every box gets its own tick and its own special day.
And at the end of it, your top speed and your acceleration are exactly where they were last season.
That's fluff volume and fluff work. It doesn't build an elite athlete or a speed star. You never run out of things you could fix one by one, and you never run out of reasons to add one more block or one more exercise to a program that's already full. Everyone thinks more equals better.
But you don't just train these qualities. You have to develop them and progress them. That's the progression model:
- ✓Measure where you are.
- ✓Remove the things holding the others back.
- ✓Measure again.
- ✓Then progress to the next one.
What the gym never touches
Here's the part most programs miss. Speed has over 100 subcategories under it: your first 5 m, top speed, ground contact time, shin angle, how relaxed you stay at full pace. The gym and a preseason conditioning block only cover some of them.
The two that decide whether you get past a certain speed are neurological recovery and high-end elasticity. A squat never really touches either. Every player we measure who's stuck is stuck in one of those two, plus whether he's been exposed to max speed at all.
So a gym program for footballers that's built for speed has to know its job. Its job is strength, position and stability. It is not the whole answer, and it can't replace running flat out. I explain the full picture in does strength training make you faster.
What a gym program for footballers' speed should look like
I won't give you sets and reps here, because the right program depends on what your assessment shows. But these are the rules every program we write follows.
Fewer exercises, done harder. The lifts that put the most force into the ground for your sport, pushed to a real effort. If you want to sprint, you sprint. If you want more power, you do the thing that applies the most power into the ground.
Planned around your football. Not squeezed on top of it. No gym the day before a game. Rest, and start fresh after. If you've got more than two games in a week, the program steps back. Programming is about being strategic, not always about the exercises.
Respect the shared engine. Your heavy lower body session and your sprint session draw from the same nervous system. Drain it on Monday and Wednesday's speed work is already slower. More in can you lift and sprint in the same week.
Cut what puts the wrong stress on you in season. I've told athletes to drop Nordics mid-season, because they put too much stress on the hamstrings and that can get you injured in a game. If an exercise adds risk without adding speed, it goes.
Sometimes once a week is enough. When the goal is to maintain strength while you build reactivity, keeping the gym in the 50 to 60% range, nothing to failure, can be the right call. What you want is a career where you keep growing and don't pick up injuries.
How to know the program is working
The bar on its own doesn't tell you whether any of it carried over to the pitch. So we let the validation happen on the field.
Every session is timed and reviewed on film. If your lifts are climbing and your sprint times and bound distance aren't, the program is polishing the wrong parts. Right?
Our assessment shows which qualities are actually costing you, so the gym work you do is the gym work you need.