Can you get faster or is speed genetic? You can get faster. Some things are given to you, like the length of your bones and where your muscles attach, and they change how you should train. But what most people call genetics is really two other things: not enough of the right exposure, and a bottleneck nobody has measured. A ceiling is permanent. A bottleneck isn't.
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Why "talent" is such a convenient answer
Everyone tells you world class athletes were born with something you don't have. That's really convenient to believe, because it lets everyone off the hook. Coaches don't have to get better. Parents don't have to question the system. And the kid who doesn't make it just gets told it wasn't meant to be.
I've heard low level coaches say it to a whole group: "Statistically, most of you won't make it." They believe it, so they coach like it. But if you're going to be great, you can't build your plan around general statistics. Greatness is rare. It's not general.
If you're in the gym every week and still can't get away from anyone, it's not your effort and it's not your genetics. You just don't know yet what your strength is and what your weakness is. So you do more of what you already do.
What looks like talent is often volume
I lived this one. I left home at 16 to play professional football in Europe. What nobody explained to me was that the players I was up against had been in pressure, game-specific football since they were 6 or 7. By 18, they'd received the ball with a centre back stepping into them maybe 3,000 times. I'd seen it maybe 50.
Their nervous system already knew what was coming before the ball arrived. Mine was still working it out in real time. My first touch in training was fine. In games, where things happen in milliseconds, it fell apart. People would call that a talent gap. It's a pattern recognition gap. See the difference? One is fixed. The other is reps.
Can you get faster or is speed genetic? Ceiling vs bottleneck
Here's the honest part. Some of you is given. Two players can squat exactly the same weight and get completely different things out of it, because of femur length, where the muscles attach and the levers they've been given. That's real. It's why I can't tell you a magic strength number that makes everyone fast.
But your levers decide how you should train. They don't decide whether you can improve. When an athlete gets stuck at a speed, it almost always comes down to a couple of specific things underneath it. Usually how well the nervous system recovers, and how elastic the legs are off the ground. Sometimes getting stronger past a certain point even makes a player slower. None of that is genetic. All of it can be measured.
And at the top level, that one step is worth a full time professional contract.
You can't out-volume the system, but you can outsmart it
The usual fix is "train more, play more". Do the maths. In a 90 minute match, the one scenario that's beating you shows up maybe four or five times. That's not enough reps to change your nervous system. A whole season might give you 200.
Now strip it down. Set that one scenario up so it repeats every 15 seconds. That's 200 reps in a single session. You can't squeeze 12 years of general exposure into one, but you can isolate the thing that's failing and do it often enough to force a change.
That's how I coach speed. I don't tell athletes to run more and hope. Ground contact time, how long the foot stays on the ground each stride, is one block. Projection angle, the direction you push yourself, is another. Force through the hip is another. Each gets its own measurement, its own target and its own plan. When one moves, we go to the next. Volume works for the first years. Then it runs out, and precision is the only thing that keeps the curve moving.
What the numbers say about our athletes
Billy went from 22 km/h to 36 km/h over four years. George was running 17 to 19 km/h at 11 and now runs 35 km/h. Hais, our head coach, started at 17 to 18 km/h, below average, and now runs 38 km/h. Sean Dulic went from the German third division to a five year Bundesliga deal at Hoffenheim.
If speed were fixed at birth, none of those would be possible. Right? We've tested more than 1,000 athletes, and the ones who made the biggest jumps usually weren't the most talented. They were the ones who turned up every single week and did the work between sessions when nobody was watching.
More on this in the genetics myth, and if you're a parent wondering why your kid is a step behind, read why is my son slow at sport.
The gap is real, but it's closable. The first step is finding your bottleneck.