Plyometrics for speed work when they train the spring in your legs: fast, reactive, short ground contacts that look like sprinting. The one I'd pick over almost anything else is bounding. It builds the elasticity that lets your tendons throw energy back into the ground, and you can measure it with a tape measure on the training pitch. But plyos cost your nervous system too, so more is not always better.
Watch: the video this post comes from
Why plyometrics for speed matter: the spring
Strength and elasticity are not the same quality.
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 recycle that energy straight back into the ground. It's why the Mbappes of the game look like they're not even trying.
So the job of plyometrics is to train that spring. Not to make your legs burn. To make them return energy faster.
Stiff returns, tense absorbs
Here's the problem most athletes run into.
A stiff, reactive system returns that energy. A tense, muscular system soaks it up. So the harder an athlete tries, the more he tenses, and the more energy he leaks on every single ground contact.
It's not about trying. It's about letting the elastic system do what it's built to do. That's why high-end elasticity has to be trained as its own quality, with fast, reactive, short-contact work. And it has to be measured, not guessed.
Two numbers tell you where you are:
- ✓Ground contact time: how long your foot stays on the ground each stride.
- ✓RSI (reactive strength index): how much distance you produce against how long you spend on the ground.
The two bounds we use
Bounding is an explosive jump from one leg to the other, covering ground with every step. It comes in two main versions.
Power bounding. Every bound is for max distance. You're trying to get as far as you can each time. It trains the push forward you need when you're accelerating: hip, knee and ankle all driving you horizontally.
Speed bounding. Here the priority is rapid ground contacts and a quick recoil off the ground. Land with a stiff leg and spend as little time on the ground as possible, like you're getting off hot coals. Then push straight off the other leg. This one is closest to what happens at top speed.
The nice thing about bounding? You get the training effect without adding extra running volume.
How to set up the 10-bound test
You need a flat surface and a tape measure. Lay the tape out in a straight line.
- ✓Start 5 m back from the start of the tape.
- ✓Run in, then do 10 continuous bounds, landing as far as you can each time.
- ✓Measure where your heel lands on the last one.
There's a second way: start from a dead stop with your toes on the line and do 10 max bounds from standing. That one has longer ground contacts, so it's more about starting power. I prefer the run-in version, because it's closer to speed and the contacts are shorter.
Every one of those bounds is reactive. Each one affects how far you go on the next. If you're well under 30 m, it's not your strength stopping you from getting faster. It's your elasticity.
How often to do plyometrics for speed
Plyometrics are not free. Effort is expensive for the nervous system, and that's where most players go wrong.
For power bounding, one session a week, on a day you're fresh and well recovered. Same for speed bounding. If you want both, alternate them week to week. That gives you room to recover and stops you stacking fatigue.
And watch the trap. 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 plyos, which costs more recovery, and you get slower again. See?
That's how you tell them apart:
- ✓Bound distance is good when you're fresh, but drops across the week: that's recovery, not elasticity. More plyos won't fix it.
- ✓Bound distance is short even when you're fully recovered: that's elasticity, and that's when plyometrics are the answer.
I go deeper on that in why your legs feel fresh but your nervous system isn't, and on the contact numbers in ground contact time explained.
The bigger picture
Plyometrics are one piece. Speed has over 100 subcategories, and elasticity is just one of them, but for a strong player who's stuck it's very often the one. Right?
So the order is the same as always. Measure where you are, find the thing costing you the most, train it properly, then measure again. If you're not sure whether your bottleneck is your spring or your recovery, our assessment will show you.