Fast Is a Skill: Speed That Shows Up in Games

Speed is one of the most misunderstood qualities in athletic development because most people train it the same way they train conditioning. They add reps, shorten rest, chase fatigue, and assume that suffering equals transfer. The problem is that sprinting is not a grit test. Sprinting is a high output skill. If the outputs drop, the practice changes. If the mechanics change, the stimulus changes. If the stimulus changes, the adaptation changes.

That is why the best speed programs look almost boring from the outside. There is plenty of intent, but there is also patience. There is intensity, but there is also restraint. A great speed session is not defined by how exhausted an athlete looks at the end. It is defined by how fast they can stay, rep after rep, week after week.

To build that kind of speed, you need two pillars that cannot be separated: acceleration and top end speed. Then you need the glue that makes it transfer: the ability to apply that speed under the information and pressure of sport, what many coaches call reactive speed.

Acceleration is how athletes create speed

Acceleration is the phase where athletes turn stillness into motion. It is the first few steps, the first 5 meters, the first 10 meters, and for many sports, the phase that happens most often. But it is not just “getting out fast.” Acceleration is a force orientation problem. Athletes have to project their center of mass forward while pushing the ground back, step after step, without standing up too early or reaching out in front of the body.

This is why the best acceleration coaching focuses less on cues like “move your legs faster” and more on creating the right shapes and pressures. Sprint biomechanics research supports that perspective. In trained sprinters, the technical ability to apply force effectively, especially the orientation of force during acceleration, is strongly related to sprint performance (Morin et al., 2011).

When that force is aimed correctly, athletes do not need to look like they are trying harder. They simply move further with each step. They waste less motion, they lose less time to braking, and they build momentum that carries into later phases.

Top end speed is how athletes raise the ceiling

Top end speed, sometimes called maximal velocity, is what happens once the athlete is already moving fast and wants to keep getting faster. Posture becomes taller, ground contacts get shorter, and the sprint becomes a test of how much force can be applied in very little time while keeping rhythm and alignment.

A simple but powerful insight from sprint science is that faster top speeds are not achieved because the legs move faster through the air. They are achieved because the runner applies greater forces to the ground during brief contact times (Weyand et al., 2000).

This matters for programming because it explains why so many athletes stay stuck. They do plenty of hard running, but very little true fast running. They develop a strong “fast tired” gear, not a higher max speed ceiling. If an athlete never practices moving at high velocities with clean mechanics and full intent, the nervous system does not learn the timing and stiffness required to live there.

Why acceleration and top end speed need each other

Acceleration and top end speed are not competing priorities. They are phases of the same pathway.

Acceleration is the runway. Top end speed is the ceiling. A higher ceiling gives athletes more room to accelerate before they cap out, and better acceleration gives athletes the momentum needed to access their ceiling when space opens. Training only one phase tends to leave an athlete with a missing link. They might be quick but never separate, or smooth at speed but unable to win the first steps that decide most plays.

This is one of the reasons speed training should not be reduced to one magic drill or one magic distance. The question is not whether you train short sprints or flying sprints. The question is whether your training teaches the full story: how to build speed, then how to express and hold it.

Rest is not a break, it is the quality control system

If you shorten rest, you shorten speed.

That statement is not motivational, it is physiological. After maximal efforts, the ability to reproduce high power is closely tied to metabolic recovery, including the resynthesis of phosphocreatine, which supports repeated high intensity outputs (Bogdanis et al., 1995). When recovery is incomplete, power drops. When power drops, sprint speed drops.

But the bigger issue in speed training is not just energy availability. It is coordination. Sprinting at high velocity is a tight motor skill. Slight fatigue changes posture, ground contact strategy, and stiffness. The athlete might still be running hard, but they are now rehearsing a different pattern. Over time, that is how “speed work” becomes endurance with sprint clothing on.

Good rest periods protect the real stimulus: high velocity mechanics performed with intent. They also protect what matters most long term: the ability to return next week and do it again. The best speed progress is built by consistent exposures, not heroic sessions.

Why you do not need a ton of sprint volume

The fastest way to ruin speed training is to chase volume until the athlete is slow.

Speed is built through high quality exposures. More is not better if it forces the athlete into submax sprinting with max intent. That is just practicing being slower.

There is also an injury reality that coaches have to respect: big spikes in high speed running are repeatedly associated with higher hamstring strain injury risk in field sports. In Australian football, high speed running patterns were linked to hamstring strain injury risk, and the authors discussed how managing high speed running exposure is relevant for prevention (Duhig et al., 2016). In elite soccer, high speed running and sprint running were investigated as injury related factors, reinforcing the idea that how sprint exposure is accumulated and managed matters (Malone et al., 2018).

This is where many well meaning programs fail. They remove sprinting for weeks, then add a “speed day” with lots of volume, then wonder why athletes feel tight or break down. Speed demands consistency, and tissues demand progressive exposure.

A useful mindset is this: speed volume should be as low as possible while still high enough to create repeatable, high quality exposures across the training year. If you can sprint fast today and sprint fast next week, you are doing it right.

Resisted and unresisted sprinting, and why you should use more than sleds

Resisted sprinting is often treated like one tool, the sled. In reality, resisted sprinting is a category. Sleds, hills, and non motorized treadmills can all create overload that nudges athletes toward better acceleration mechanics and force application. The key is choosing the right tool for the right job, then pairing it with unresisted sprinting so the athlete still practices true speed.

Sleds: the cleanest way to overload acceleration

Sled sprinting is popular because it is simple, scalable, and specific to the push of early acceleration. A systematic review and meta analysis concluded that resisted sled training is effective for improving sprint performance, particularly in the early acceleration phase (Alcaraz et al., 2018).

What makes sleds useful is the way they slow the athlete down just enough to reinforce projection and horizontal force application. Done well, sleds also give coaches a built in guardrail: if mechanics fall apart, the load is too high or the athlete is too fatigued.

It is also important to understand what sleds do not do. They do not automatically improve top end speed, because the overload changes the velocity and often the rhythm of the sprint. That is not a flaw, it is just specificity. Sleds are an acceleration tool.

Hill sprinting: free resistance that often fixes common mistakes

Hill sprints are resisted sprinting disguised as outdoor training. Gravity provides the overload, and for many athletes, hills instantly clean up overstriding and poor shin angles. A slope encourages athletes to keep steps underneath the body and push through the ground rather than reaching.

From a monitoring and programming perspective, hills are also more nuanced than people think. Research has examined uphill sprinting through load velocity and force velocity profiling across different gradients, showing that hill grade meaningfully affects sprint outputs and can be assessed with profiling concepts (Delaney et al., 2022).

Practically, that means the incline is the load. A shallow hill tends to preserve more speed and rhythm, which can make it a better choice when you want resisted acceleration without turning the sprint into strength work. A steep hill can be useful when you want a bigger force bias, but it can also change mechanics enough that it stops looking like the sprint you are trying to improve. Hills are a tool, not a replacement for overground sprinting.

Non motorized treadmills: controlled resisted sprinting with measurement potential

Curved non motorized treadmills are often used for short, hard sprints, and athletes usually describe them as brutal. That is not just perception. Research comparing curved non motorized treadmill running with overground and motorized treadmill running found different cardiometabolic demands, which means coaches should be cautious about assuming a one to one transfer of pace and volume between modalities (Edwards et al., 2017).

They also change mechanics. Running on a curved non motorized treadmill has been shown to significantly influence gait characteristics such as step length, stride length, and stride angle (Hatchett et al., 2018). In addition, accelerated treadmill running is mechanically different from true overground acceleration because the athlete does not need to generate the same fore aft impulses to accelerate the whole body through space (Van Caekenberghe et al., 2013).

So why use them? Because they can still be valuable when treated correctly. They can be a controlled acceleration overload option when space and weather limit overground sprinting, and they can be useful for consistent testing. Recent work supports that sprint performance measures on a non motorized treadmill can show moderate to excellent intra session reliability when protocols are managed well (Doma et al., 2023).

The coaching takeaway is simple: use non motorized treadmills as a resisted stimulus and a measurement environment, then make sure athletes return to overground sprinting so the skill expresses in the context they compete in.

Unresisted sprinting: the non negotiable that makes everything transfer

Resisted tools improve aspects of acceleration. Unresisted sprinting is where athletes learn what fast actually is.

This is not philosophical. It is specificity. At high velocities, posture, stiffness, and rhythm become the limiting factors. Resisted work can support the push, but it cannot fully replicate the coordination demands of maximal velocity.

Even training that uses submaximal but fast sprinting can improve performance when exposures are consistent and quality is protected. A study using flying sprints at roughly 90 to 95 percent of maximal velocity found improvements in sprint performance over a short training period (Skoglund et al., 2023).

The most practical model is pairing. Use resisted methods to teach force and projection, then use unresisted methods to confirm that the athlete can cash it in as speed.

A classic applied example highlights the concept well: resisted sled pulling improved acceleration performance, while unresisted sprint training improved performance in the maximum speed phase in non elite athletes (Zafeiridis et al., 2005). That is not a debate about which is better. It is a reminder that different phases demand different exposures.

Weekly sprint volume, off season versus in season

There is no single ideal weekly sprint volume that applies to every sport, schedule, or athlete. What the evidence supports most clearly is the pattern that works: consistent exposure is protective, sudden changes are risky, and the in season plan should maintain speed without burying the athlete.

In the off season, the goal is development and tissue tolerance. The best way to think about off season sprint volume is not “How much can we do,” but “How much can we repeat.” If sprint training is so dense that athletes cannot hit high outputs two or three days later, the dose is too high. Off season progression should feel like a ramp, not a roller coaster, because the injury risk literature repeatedly warns about abrupt increases in high speed exposure (Duhig et al., 2016).

In season, the goal shifts to maintenance and readiness. Matches and practices already impose stress, and the speed plan needs to fill gaps rather than compete with competition. Elite soccer injury risk work has examined the relationship between high speed running, sprint running, and injury, reinforcing the importance of managing exposure within real team sport schedules (Malone et al., 2018).

Two additional pieces of evidence sharpen how coaches should think about in season dosing. First, in professional football players, eccentric hamstring strength decreased when athletes accumulated seven to eight weekly sprint efforts above 90 percent of maximum velocity (Shah et al., 2022). That finding does not mean seven is automatically dangerous for every athlete, but it strongly suggests there is a practical ceiling where too many very fast exposures, layered on top of sport demands, can degrade force capacity.

Second, emerging observational data suggests that well timed exposures to very high speed may be beneficial for hamstring injury outcomes compared with never touching those speeds. In elite football, a retrospective analysis found that for half of the turnarounds examined, there were no match hamstring injuries when players were exposed to running bouts greater than 95 percent of maximal sprint speed during training, and notably, there were no hamstring injuries when those exposures occurred at two days before match in that dataset (Buchheit et al., 2023).

Put together, the message is practical: in season, you often want fewer total high speed reps, but you do not want zero exposure to high speed. The goal is small, consistent, well placed doses that keep athletes prepared without spiking load.

Reactive speed, and why it is the bridge to game speed

Even if an athlete improves their 10 meter split and their flying 20, that does not guarantee game speed. Games are not closed drills. Athletes sprint because something happens. They see information, make a decision, then express speed in the direction and timing the play demands.

Reactive speed is that full package: perception, decision, and action under pressure.

One reason reactive training transfers is that it preserves the link between what athletes see and what they do. The concept of representative learning design argues that training tasks should maintain the information sources and action demands of the competitive environment so learning transfers more effectively (Pinder et al., 2011).

That is why racing and chase drills often translate so well. They naturally create urgency, timing, and decision constraints that mimic sport. The athlete is not sprinting because a coach yelled go. They are sprinting because the opponent moved, space opened, or the race demands it.

At the same time, game like work does not automatically develop maximal sprint qualities on its own. In soccer, a meta analysis comparing small sided games and running based high intensity interval training found running based HIIT favored improvements in sprint performance, suggesting that game based work often needs supplementation to develop certain speed qualities (Clemente et al., 2021).

This is the cleanest way to blend it. Build the physical ceiling with true speed exposures, then teach the athlete to access it through reactive, representative constraints. If you only do closed sprinting, you might build a faster athlete who struggles to apply speed under pressure. If you only do chaotic game work, you might build a better decision maker who never raises their max speed ceiling. The combination is where performance lives.

The real principle that ties the whole program together

Acceleration training teaches athletes how to create speed. Top end training raises the ceiling and teaches athletes how to express high velocity. Resisted sprinting, whether sleds, hills, or non motorized treadmills, can reinforce the push and projection of early sprinting. Unresisted sprinting is the irreplaceable practice of true speed and rhythm. Rest protects quality, and quality is what makes speed training speed training.

Then reactive speed turns that capacity into a weapon. Athletes learn to race, to respond, to solve the problem that sport presents. When that happens, speed is no longer something they show in testing. It becomes something they use.





References

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