Soccer Speed
Our approach
In most clubs, whether youth, amateur or professional, Speed is treated as part of fitness and specifically as part of speed strength and speed endurance. But this is counter productive to the development of speed.
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How to Develop Football Speed?
Many coaches and trainers believe that speed is something you are born with rather than a skill you can develop. Genetics is a very important factor and does make a difference to the make-up and shape of athletes and their capacity to become stronger and more powerful. But strength and power are only two components of speed and will assist in how fast you can run in a straight line, but in a multidirectional sport like football being able to run fast in straight lines only or having the capacity to lift very heavy weights in the gym will not necessarily transfer onto the football pitch.
Soccer Speed is a Skill and just like any other skill it can be taught, it can be developed, and it can be improved through a systematic and progressive training approach.
Many professional football clubs have used specialist Sprint coaches whose background is Track and Field to improve the speed of their players, but the biomechanics of straight line sprinting is different to multi-directional speed, required in football. Practising straight line sprinting continuously, will improve a player’s conditioning, the key is to develop maximal sprint speed and transfer that ability to accelerate into the multidirectional sport of soccer.
Why? Because full-out sprinting in a football game only makes up about 1% of the total movement in a 90 minute game! You may ask, is the ability to run fast over 50 metres not important? Of course it is, but let’s put it into perspective.
Football is a multi-directional, explosive sport where there is a change of movement every 4 seconds. There is little benefit in football players spending too much time on drills which develop maximum straight line velocity when they would benefit more from shorter multi-directional explosive drills. So focusing on these basic movements and individual skills is far more beneficial.
The Four Components
There are four Components of Speed that we need to take into consideration when coaching Speed in Football:
- Quickness
- Reactive Speed
- Active speed
- Complex Speed
