What Are You Going to Do When You Get There?

In the past 9-10 years of coaching athletes, I've heard myself or other coaches say "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" when trying to get athletes to be more effective when developing linear speed. The point obviously being that in order to maximize your effort, you needed to move as efficiently as possible to avoid energy leakage.

Imagine a 40 yard dash where the runners constantly swerved from lane to lane. There wouldn't be any world record times in that heat, I guarantee.

The problem, however, exists in that most performance coaches don't work with just sprinters exclusively. I happen to train soccer players primarily, and soccer is easily defined as a multidirectional sport. Recently, I sat in on a coaches' meeting at the local club I work for and overheard a coach describing one of his players:

"The boy has the biggest heart and tons of desire, and in a straight line, he'll smoke anybody. But, the problem is, what is he going to do when he gets to the ball?"

Do you see the issue at hand? For probably too long, sport coaches have been focused on developing speed in their athletes. At many tryouts for competitive teams, I've seen the coaches line up kids on an endline and have them race to an arbitrary point, focusing on the top 2-3 girls/boys who won. What they should have been doing was having them cut and run back and forth to determine which ones were the most agile and could maintain that top speed out of transition.

According to the FA, the governing body of soccer in England, the longest distance most soccer players run in a straight line (without changing direction) is about 20 yards. Any decent speed coach knows that in a 40 yard dash, most sprinters are STILL accelerating at the 20 yard point and have yet to reach top speed. In fact, top speed may not be reached until 50-60 yards. So, for any multidirectional sport, when administering a performance program, perhaps the heavier emphasis should be on the player's ability to change direction, not just how fast they can get from Point A to B.

When I work with my soccer players, we try to develop the "micro" skillset that leads to the improvement in the "macro" movement patterns. Meaning, I can't really expect a 11 year old player to cut perfectly through a series of cones if they aren't balanced and stable enough to perform a lateral single leg hop. That hop may not seem as "sexy" as performing intricate cutting patterns, but laying that foundation is crucial to successfully teaching that player how to change directions and stay with their opponent on the field of play. In that single leg hop, they will develop better balance and stabilization, strength and power, and will better learn how to control the decelerational forces that come with changing directions while maintaining certain speeds.

Now, will I use cones and have that player cut through them? Of course. But, I will not address the "macro" movement pattern without having at least initiated the "micro" skill practice. It would be foolish and unprofessional otherwise and I would be doing my athletes a disservice.

So, remember that being fast and athletic doesn't just occur in a single plane of motion. It's not who gets from Point A to Point B fastest, but who can get from Point A to Point B and then to Point C fastest!