🏃‍♀️ Sand training, max velocity, and Mike Tomlin’s advice

What’s up y’all? Cici here.

Welcome back to More Her Speed, a weekly no-BS newsletter all about women in coaching. This week I’ll go over some programming, as well as a HOT debate on sand speed training.

Plus! We had a webinar last week, and it was an awesome opportunity for me to meet some of y’all and interact with you. If you missed it, tap in here for a preview (specifically on how to get athletes to buy in.)

Strength & Speed… How do they work together?

NFL offseason is coming to a close, and one great question I got asked on the webinar was how we layout our weeks with respect to lifting and speed… how do we decide what to focus on each day with our players?

We have two main types of days in training:

1. Maximum velocity: on ‘Max V’ days, we want our guys to reach a high speed stimulus coupled with low volume of work

2. Acceleration: on ‘Accel’ days, we are focused on the acceleration phase of a sprint, and more about reaching a higher acceleration for longer distance in shorter amount of time

We aim to pair high nervous system demands together.

When considering acceleration, we are looking at force-based power and high velocity at the early part of the sprint.

On this day? You’ll see squats, deadlifts, and lower bar speed (~0.5 m/s)

With max velocity there are higher forces in less time, so we would pair more speed strength and power qualities.

Max velocity also has a high eccentric demand so in the weight room we reproduce this effect with heavy single leg exercises.

On lower velocity days, we would aim for upper body or auxiliary lifts (less demand on the nervous system.)

Speed is a very physical-based skill, so we want to make sure we are giving the athletes the right exposure of stimulus. Also it is KEY to give them appropriate rest between heavy training sessions to give their body enough time to recover.

Sand Training: Yay or Nay?

An interesting, and possibly controversial tweet I saw this week was from Ken Vick and his opinion on sand training. 

Sand training… We’ve all seen it, and most of us have probably done it. BUT… is it effective for what we are trying to accomplish?

I am open to all feedback here. But, with summer upon us I see more and more videos of beach workouts and guys training in sand pits.

I’m not completely against a trainer that does a sand pit workout in an early phase of training, but I would argue that there are better ways to increase force production and foot intrinsic strength.

If we are talking on a strictly speed basis, using sand as the surface for high speed production is not my first choice. There’s a ton of articles on training in sand and possible return to play protocols.

I found this tweet and the replies (good or bad) particularly engaging.

Quote of the week

“Excuses are the tools of the incompetent”

This one comes from Pittsburgh Steelers Head Coach Mike Tomlin. We all have tools at our disposal. We choose which tools to use, how to use them, and what we are trying to accomplish with them.

You can wake up and take action, or you can wake up and think of a million different excuses for why you haven’t taken action. The choice is yours. Get after it this week.

Appreciate y’all,

Cici