🏃‍♀️ Lacrosse x speed, importance of isometrics, + more

What’s up y’all? Cici here.

Welcome back to More Her Speed, a weekly no-BS newsletter all about women in coaching.

Fastest Game on Two Feet

Last weekend we did a collaboration event with the Premier Lacrosse League in Palos Verdes, California.

It was such a dope experience for both sides… It was amazing seeing speed transfer to lacrosse and having the lacrosse coaches watch what we do.

Lacrosse is becoming increasingly more popular and without a doubt, there is a need for speed.

Not only did we teach and focus on different parts of a sprint, but touched on deceleration and change of direction properties as well.

We had a testing station all together after warm up, and then broke up into speed and skill stations depending on age.

Through our events we’ve found that sectioning the kids off 15 and under and 16+ is usually the best way to separate the training and tailor best to the training age of the group.

Overall, it was a great experience and I got to see some of my high school lacrosse girls that I trained this off season. Seeing two worlds collide is a beautiful thing as a coach.

Importance of Isometrics

We’ve been gradually incorporating more and more isometrics into our program and there’s no one better to learn from than Alex Natera.

He puts out amazing work and resources and has put together an in-depth course about testing and programming isometrics that I highly recommend.

We used this as a base for some of our draft prep testing and will continue to use it to monitor peak force and quantity load.

He goes over a number of sprint specific iso’s and stresses mid running stance in most of the setups for testing and training.

For those looking for a good free educational resource- here is a great example video of one of the tests we will be implementing in our first week of testing on the force plates.

These iso push tests are to be done at max effort 3 second holds for 3 reps on each side. All tests are to be done unilaterally in which we measure relative peak force to bodyweight, time to peak force, and force at 100ms and following intervals (150, 200, 250 ms).

These intervals aren’t required but an added measure to look at that would give us objective feedback relative to sprinting.

I’m excited to take a deeper dive into the iso research and what the results yield, hope y’all enjoy as well!

Quote of the Week

"Once you know what failure feels like, determination chases success."

-Kobe Bryant

Appreciate y’all,

Cici

See you again next week!

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