Strength and barbell training has been used to make athletes faster for decades, but in the process, there is rampant confusion in the optimal method of utilizing barbell work through the seasons of an athlete’s speed and power career.
A barbell is not the track, but yet has the potential to offer a wonderful and unique world of improvement to a speed seeking athlete. There are a lot of variables, however, that most coaches don’t consider when prescribing a resistance training program, such as:
- What are the positions the athletes need to learn to be able to maximally apply strength to the track or field of play?
- What is the tipping point where max strength work can become counterproductive to speed?
- Is there a need to isolate specific sprint-intensive muscles, or stick to general movement patterns, and leave activation to therapeutic interventions?
Just shaking your fist at athletes, demanding they are weak and simply need to squat and deadlift more isn’t going to offer a lot of help in the realm of speed. An athlete can utilize a variety of biomechanical and muscular strategies to move a barbell from point A to point B. It isn’t a surprise that some of the fastest sprinters in the world will rarely, or ever, see a heavy squat or clean, although clearly some athletes genetics allow them to reach a particular level without seeing a significant quantity of barbell related movements, at least ones that are heavy or significant in nature.
I love talking about my own take on how lifting is optimally utilized for speed, but I’d rather leave it to true experts, coaches who have been working with speed athletes since before I was born. To that order, I have for you, four coaches take on strength training for speed development:
- Chris Korfist: One of the world’s foremost speed experts, and hugely successful high school sprints coach.
- Dan Fichter: The most well-traveled, invested coach I know in picking the brains of the best and brightest scientists and coaches in recent history. Dan owns two gyms devoted to improving athletic speed and power, and is an award winning football coach at Irondequiot high school in NY.
- Henk Kraaijenhof: Dutch sprints coach who trained Merlene Ottey and Nelli Cooman. One of the worlds top speed experts, as well as a leading thinker and scientific contributor to sprint development.
- Boo Shexnayder: Legendary jumps coach, and top track and field educator.
Question #1: In a nutshell, what is your view on the role of strength training in speed development for athletes of novice vs. advanced levels? Along those lines, what are your thoughts on various barbell strength standards for speed athletes?
Dan Fichter: I have a lot of thoughts…first off, to make a general blanket statement, which I don’t like to do a lot but I will here. Most younger kids need to get stronger to run faster. They are trying to manage 4-6 times their body weight when sprinting. With that being said, weight training and getting stronger are huge for a younger kid.
There are prerequisites in order to support the proper response. Breathing and position are two of the easiest to fix and work at all levels. Most will add weight to a bar without consideration of position and posture. I’d spend more time not on chasing a number but chasing the position one is in upon completion of each rep, and how fast one can eventually move the load. To set a standard is tough.
“I’d spend more time not on chasing a number but chasing the position one is in upon completion of each rep, and how fast one can eventually move the load.”
Chris Korfist: First, I think the best exercise for speed development is sprinting itself. From there, depending on the athlete, you can watch to see what they may need work on. For a novice sprinter, I always start with training the structure. If they have no lateral strength, they will never run very fast. If they are quad dominant and “push” their run, I go with posterior chain exercises.
I also think that training a novice in isometric positions has great benefits as well. I usually start with 30 sec holds with moderate weight. From there I go to a counted descent and explosion and then a fast descent and a hold at the bottom.
The kBox has taken those concepts and put them into one movement. Once their structure is sound and their form looks good, we can start to add different lifts for power and we start to measure power output and bar speed in movements that try to replicate different aspects of running.
We use a variety of single leg squats in different positions and RDL’s. Throughout the movements, we try to replicate the proper placement of legs and arms. Nov through Feb for me is pretty bleak for opportunities to run, so we try to replicate running as closely as possible. Even at my new school, we only have a 40-yard hallway.
Henk Kraaijenhof: The role of strength in speed development is overall complex and confusing at any level. Is it important for some of the athletes, very much so, but for others probably not at all. It depends on the athlete and so it is hard to figure out beforehand who might benefit and who is better off focusing on other factors.
Once we are looking at strength training barbell exercise are important, since barbells are cheap, versatile, easy to adjust the load and present almost everywhere. That does not always mean Olympic lifting, which is good to increase power output, but I feel many strength coaches, especially with a weightlifting background tend to exaggerate its importance and effectivity.
Boo Shexnayder: With novices you can indiscriminately improve all types of strength, while with advanced level athletes this isn’t the case. With advanced level athletes it becomes necessary to improve absolute levels of each form of strength, but you must still preserve the intricate balances between these forms of strength and other athletic qualities. Failure to do so results in a deterioration in movement quality.
The most typical problem results when absolute or maximal strength levels advance to a point where power and elasticity are compromised, but nearly anything can be overdone. I strive to achieve and maintain a 1:1:1.5 ratio when examining the clean, bench, and deep squat. If the bench lags a bit it’s OK, but other than that I think you have to hover in this zone to get the best movement quality. These ratios are very important to me because this seems to be the zone which produces bodies athletes can perform in.
Question #2. At what point do you feel the weight room becomes detrimental to speed development?
Dan Fichter: I think the weight room can always be a tool if managed correctly. The key here in what I think you mean is if athletes keep lifting heavy weights with the wrong firing patterns, weight lifting can really slow you down! Coordination is critical to performance. Sometimes lifting heavy weights can be detrimental. But again, you can’t compare apples to oranges. If you are in the wrong position doing “anything” it can be detrimental to your performance.
“If athletes keep lifting heavy weights with the wrong firing patterns, weight lifting can really slow you down”
Chris Korfist: If you are lifting instead of running your focus is misaligned. That is why I like the 1080 Sprint so much. It is the perfect compliment to sprinting. After a set, athletes feel their glutes and hamstrings working. If the weight is too much, they feel it in their quads. But, reading the graph can also show when the weight is too much. From that point, once you sacrifice form or speed and start powerlifting recruitment patterns, you are going backwards.
I see this is squats and other big lifts. To get the numbers, the hips and spine start doing funny things and I think it slows athletes down.
Henk Kraaijenhof: Speed depends more on the ability to apply force and generate high power output at high velocities than on high levels of maximum strength. So by monitoring maximum strength, explosiveness, power output, and of course running speed, we are able to prevent maximum strength from having a negative effect on those factors. High levels of maximum strength do not automatically translate in high speed (nor does any other factor, apart from high speed itself 😉 )
Boo Shexnayder: Never when applied properly, in a way appropriate to an athlete’s training age. However, there does come a time when maximal or absolute strength levels are sufficient and to chase added gains in maximal strength results in losses in elasticity, mobility, and coordination which are far too costly and impair performance. It’s hard to imagine a situation where you would cease weight training completely, when power and elasticity gains are there to be had.
Question #3. As sprint posture and position is such as important aspect of the speed equation, do you also utilize the weight room as a place to work on the strength or endurance of these specific postures/positions? Is there any particular work you are fond of in this regard?
Dan Fichter: This is where I believe isometrics are a huge part of athletic development. Getting into these extreme positions helps the brain understand and communicate back to muscles what the right position is and their job needs to be at that specific time. This is the foundation of our work in the gym. I wrote an article years ago on it and still live by the same rules. You have to teach it!!!
Henk Kraaijenhof: Once you enter the weightroom: forget about specificity of training, standing on one leg is something else than standing on your support leg while running 12 meters per second. Any exercise you do in the weight room always implies more load and thus lower velocity, than running full speed. Should we not do weight training and only run high speed, of course not! But keep this in mind.
Chris Korfist: I use the 4 way hip machine to strengthen the lateral chain. Positioning feet and hands in various places can hit different parts of that muscle group. In our single leg squat work, we focus on driving the knee up and heel to glute. In our Bret Contrearas butt exercises, we always drive through the big toe. For endurance in the weight room, I like my Real Runner. From Doc Sports.
Boo Shexnayder: Obviously specificity in strength training is important, you have to train to develop the qualities needed for high performance. But I look at those more as global qualities… strength and power, improvements in recruitment, improvements in rate coding, etc. However, once past those basic qualities, I think it is a mistake to chase extremely high levels of specificity in the weight room. The weight room is simply the place to get strong, get powerful, and to develop endocrine fitness. To get overly specific in the weight room often results in training that misses key needs because it’s too fancy or gimmicky. The time to chase specificity with sprinters is during the sprint work.
Stay tuned for part II of this elite coach roundtable, featuring questions on training sprint muscles in the weightroom, velocity based training, as well as the psychology of barbell and resistance training!
Coach Bios:
Fichter is presently the head football coach at Irondequoit High School in New York.
Henk Kraaijenhof currently works for Vortx and his blog is helpingthebesttogetbetter.com.
He has published work in performance, training systems and protocols for elite athletes and has also conducted research in the development and application of scientific training systems. Henk is also involved in scientific research projects in human sports performance in Norway, Estonia, Italy and the Netherlands. He is currently also working as a mentor for the Olympic coaches and Olympic talent coaches in Holland.
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