How to know if speed training is working: measure your speed, not your effort. If your sprint times, your top speed in km/h and your bound distance are moving, it's working. If your week is full, your lifts are climbing and those numbers are flat, it isn't, however hard you're training. The gym can't tell you. A full week can't tell you. Only the measurement can.
Watch: the video this post comes from
The gym can't tell you if it worked
So where's the point where your training stops working? 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 the length of 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 warning sign is the session where your squat goes up and your power output doesn't. I go deeper on that in does squatting make you faster.
How to know if speed training is working: the engine test
Think of your speed as a car. In the middle, the engine. Around it, the paint, the seats, the chassis, the wheels, the mirrors.
The small parts are what a low-level program polishes one at a time. The ankle, the knee, the hip, acceleration, change of direction, reactivity. Polish one part and the car is no faster. That's it. Build the engine and every part moves with it.
So what's the engine? I call it being led by the max. If you can put a lot of force into the ground in a very short time, everything that takes longer rises with it. The slow qualities sit underneath the fast one. You don't build the max out of 40 small pieces. You train the max, develop it, progress it, and the pieces come with it.
That gives you the first test. Is your training moving the engine, or just the paint?
Cut the list: engine or paint
Before you add a single exercise, write down everything you do in a week. Then mark each one.
- ✓Engine: does it push one of your main qualities to its highest level and pull everything else up with it?
- ✓Paint: is it fluff that doesn't push anything to the max, and doesn't make you perform better?
You can tell paint because it never pushes anything maximally. And the only way to progress is by eventually doing maximum work.
I'm not asking you to do more. I'm telling you to do fewer things, much harder, much more intensely, and measure them. Then you can see what's actually progressing, and whether it's pulling everything else forward with it. See?
A pro setup can still sit on a low-level program
Here's the trap a lot of high-level players are in.
You've probably got a first team strength and conditioning coach, a squad gym plan, a club physio who looks after you, and maybe a private coach you pay on top of all that to work on your shooting. None of that matters if there's a low-level program underneath it, because in that program the engine gets the least time.
You get plenty of running, plenty of intensity, plenty of exercises. And none of it is specific to what you'll meet in the game. None of it is actually heavy, or flat out, on the main qualities: strength, speed, elasticity.
Your week is full. It's full of polishing. Nothing in it adapts you to a higher level. Being busy feels like progress. It isn't the same thing.
What to actually measure
Measure it, find out where you're actually lacking, then be specific to that. Don't drift into exercises that aren't bringing you any closer to what you're trying to do. 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.
Here's what tells you it's working:
- ✓Sprint times. Your first 10 m and your flying sprints, turned into km/h. Every session we run is timed and reviewed on film, so changes show up quickly.
- ✓Bound distance. The 10-bound test: a 5 m run-in, 10 continuous bounds, measure the distance. Good when you're fresh but dropping across the week means recovery. Short even when you're fully recovered means elasticity.
- ✓The bar against the bound. If the lift is up 20 kg and the bound distance is the same in March as it was in January, the strength hasn't turned into power.
- ✓The pitch. Are you getting there first? Winning the race to the loose ball? That's where it gets validated in the end.
A typical update from one of our coaches after a session reads like this: a PB in the 0 to 10 m sprint and a PB in the bound, so power and acceleration are improving, and the stride looked clean and coordinated. That's what "working" looks like. Specific numbers, moving.
Send your numbers
One last thing, and it's about you, not the program.
The athletes who stop sending their numbers after sessions are the ones whose progress slows first. They have nobody giving them feedback on when to progress and when to back off. Then one or two things change in their life, exams, a job, a busy month, and they can't keep up.
Track it, send it, and let it tell you the truth. Right?
If you're not sure whether your training is building the engine or polishing the paint, our assessment measures where you are now, so every session after it has a number to beat. For how speed is measured in the first place, see our biomechanical assessment.