Soccer Speed Training Philosophy

"You have to figure out what makes your body accelerate; you have to move your body
down the track. I'm continuing to be adamant about figuring it out."
- Gail Devers, one of the greatest track athletes of all times.

Soccer Speed Development

Speed, agility, quickness development workouts are varied to achieve maximum results in the shortest amount of time. Workouts typically include exercises and drills involved in the major components of speed development; technique, acceleration, flexibility, quickness, power, strength, agility, mental focus, and benchmarking (methods to test improvement).

A key principle of speed training; you can't train the body to move faster by training slow. It's simple; long slow running trains the body to run slow. One more time: Slow running teaches your body to be slow! Soccer speed training uses overspeed training to program the body and the brain to move fast

Steve Rigdon travels from Madison Alabama with children, Jacob 10, Casey 14, Covie 12 for soccer speed training

How to Boost Competitive Performance

By moving away from outdated training routines such as traditional weight lifting for strength and selecting strength training specifically for sports, it’s easier than you may think to boost performance to previously unattainable levels. Long slow distance running only teaches the body to run slow. Even endurance athletes are using sprinting workouts to improve speed and endurance.

In a nutshell, Championship Soccer Speed will show you specific training methods that have the most impact on sport performances by increasing speed, acceleration, reaction, agility, and quickness.

Amazingly, many new breakthroughs in sports speed take years before they become widespread. Example: Scientific studies have shown that when individuals train their arm muscles at a specific angle, they achieve major gains in strength, but there are almost no improvements at other angles, even though exactly the same arm muscles are involved. And this does not help in most sports...well, arm wresting maybe.

When athletes go to the gym, for example, they usually focus on the traditional exercises that they’ve read about in magazines, and know how to do. These include traditional bench presses and squats. These exercises are great for developing general strength, but they won't help develop speed unless explosive-lifting techniques are applied to strength training. (If your school has a strength coach that uses explosive-lifts in sports training, consider yourself very fortunate). Muscles adapt, and lifting at the traditional tempo of up-on-two, down-on-four, will build strong slow-twitch fiber, but it takes strong fast-twitch muscle fiber to score touchdowns and win gold.

Basically, squatting makes you a better squatter. In test after test, squats do not help vertical jump. Squats build slow muscle fiber, which is positive since that's 40% of your "muscles." Plyometric drills and explosive lifting techniques build the fast (IIa) muscle fiber and the super-fast (IIb) muscle fiber.

To improve speed, specific exercises must be targeted at building all three muscle fiber types. So the combination of explosive squats (or leg press) followed by ten squat or lunge jumps with maximal effort do the job. Plyometric drills, and super-fast agility ladder drills will make muscle stronger and create the potential for significant gains in speed. This type of work, within the context of speed technique training, will make athletes faster.    More on developing muscle fiber types, click here.