Get up to Speed

The NFL Combine, Sprint Profiles, and the Importance of Overspeed Training

Like every year, the NFL Combine and its main event – the 40 yard dash – brought excitement, amazement and debate. For the stats geeks, this performance data (40 yard dash, vertical and broad jumps, 3 cone and 20-yard shuttle and bench press) is now entered into a publicly available repository, which anyone can access […]

Football Fast and the NFL Combine: an inside look with Ryan Phillis

The NFL Combine. One week of poking, prodding, and testing potential talent from head to toe – not just figuratively but also literally. Cognitive tests, personality tests, and the head-to-toe medical evaluation. We are not privy to any of these of course, but we do see the on-field skills and drills and athletic performance tests […]

Coach Garfield Ellenwood: What the athlete feels, what the coach sees, and what the data reports

The speed development triangle: what the athlete feels, what the coach sees, and what the data reports. In that order, those three qualities dictate the process coach Garfield Ellenwood uses to attack working with his sprinters and hurdlers. Training athletes ranging from college freshman to Olympians, Ellenwood provides continual sprint development—and that’s the key. He’s […]

Training Acceleration and Max Speed for Paralympic Athletes with Georg Pfarrwaller

Georg Pfarrwaller has done his research. Studied JB Morin’s work on improving acceleration, tested out flywheel training and VBT apps, and tinkered with different loading parameters and periodization models. Coaching for PluSport, a Swiss organization dedicated to developing Paralympic athletes while also offering recreational athletic opportunities for individuals with disabilities, Pfarrwaller faces the dual challenge […]

Bridging the Gap Between Elite and Recreational in Return to Sport Protocols, by Patrick Marti

For athletes at any level, serious injuries can not only derail their progress in the sport, but also threaten a core part of their identity. This reality equally extends to adults who may not participate in a professional competitive sport. In most cases, at our clinic Therapie Kreuzplatz in Zurich, we are managing non-professional clients […]

Total Athlete Management with Sebastian Pisano of Wesport

The act of “managing” athletes tends to bring two completely separate images to mind: either an agent negotiating contracts and financial packages or a coach overseeing the planning and loading of a training program. At Wesport, a new boutique management organization based in Stockholm, those two distinct rails have been merged within a company targeting […]

The Next Generation of German Sprint Training

Digital natives are changing the course of speed development for Germany’s fastest sprinters. Following a long tradition rooted in Soviet and East German methodologies, a new wave of internet-savvy speed coaches in the Hessischer Leichtathletik-Verband (HLV) are using their fluency with YouTube, Instagram, and a host of virtual seminars to add a diverse range of […]

Individualizing Speed Training in the Bundesliga with Patrick Eibenberger

Competing in the top tier of German football (soccer), Borussia Mönchengladbach play a season that begins at the end of one summer and concludes on the cusp of the next, with the regular demands of their league fixtures multiplied during months where the club is also engaged in UEFA Champions League or UEFA Europa League play. […]

Improving Sprint Speed in High School Athletes, By Kyle Davey

Kyle Davey, Coordinator of Athletic Performance at RE_Building by NWRA in Salem, OR, lays out his methods for using resisted sprint sessions with the 1080 Sprint to improve speed with high school athletes.

Building the Athlete First—Magnus Norman on Guiding Tennis Players from Good to Great

Magnus Norman, formerly a top-ranked Swedish tennis pro and currently an elite professional coach, describes the long term athletic development program at the Good to Great Tennis Academy, where the coaches coordinate to train the next generation of top Swedish players.