Top speed is a quality most athletes talk about training but rarely actually reach in their sessions.
The conditions have to be right. The nervous system has to be fresh - which is why this session sits after an active recovery day and before a strength day. The warm up has to build the stiffness and reactivity that top speed demands. And the rest has to be long enough to actually recover between reps.
4 minutes between sets is not excessive. It is the minimum needed to produce a genuine maximal effort on the next rep. Cut it short and you are no longer training top speed. You are training fatigue tolerance.
Steal this. Take it to the track on Thursday and tell me how it goes.
#speedtraining #sprinttraining #athleteperformance #performancecoach #eliteathlete
Coaching is great. Now your shit, build experience, keep learning along the way and you’ll be unstoppable. Thank you @elevate_speed_rehab
#coaching #movement #speed
How does utilising the quality of speed differ in track, bobsleigh and team sports?
Previous Olympic Bobsleigh athlete, now high-performance coach @b.eric tells us this week in episode 319 with host @rdgmediauk .
Comment 'podcast', head to YouTube or Spotify/Apple to listen.
The first thing I do when working with a new athlete is watch them warm up.
Not a formal assessment. Not a test battery. Just a well designed warm up and a trained eye.
You can see everything you need to know. How they move when they are not thinking about being observed. Where they are stiff. Where they compensate without realising it. What they naturally avoid. How their body responds to increased demand as the warm up progresses.
Timing gates and force plates have their place. But the coaches eye - knowing what to look for and being able to draw the right conclusions from what you see - is the most underrated assessment tool in the game.
Observe first. Test later.
#performancecoach #athleteperformance #speedtraining #eliteathlete #sportscoaching
Speed is not built in isolation. It is built on top of a strength foundation that was developed first and given enough time to convert into power and explosiveness.
Maximal strength persists 25-35 days after the last stimulus. Speed fades in 5-10. Get the sequence right and you have weeks to express everything you built. Get it wrong and you are still laying foundations when you should already be competing at your best.
Most athletes train hard. Far fewer train in the right order.
#speedtraining #strengthtraining #athleteperformance #performancecoach #eliteathlete
Maybe not as entertaining as Cool Runnings, but maybe more informative when it comes to S&C in the bobsleigh and sprinting...
@b.eric competed for Germany in bobsleigh, winning Olympic silver in Pyeongchang 2018 alongside multiple World Championship medals.
Since retiring from elite competition, he has moved into high-performance coaching, working with athletes in speed development and sliding sports.
Comment 'podcast', head to YouTube or Spotify/Apple to listen.
Most athletes think they are training top speed but they are not. They are training a fatigued submaximal effort and calling it maximum velocity work.
Two things prevent athletes from actually reaching top speed in training:
1. The runway is too short to fully accelerate before the fly zone begins.
2. The rest between reps is too short to recover enough to produce a genuine maximal effort on the next one.
The fix is straightforward. Give yourself 25-35m of walk-in runway, accelerate hard and hit your subjective top speed just before entering the fly zone.
Rest 1 minute per 10m of total distance - runway and fly zone combined.
What you measure and train after that is actually your top speed.
#speedtraining #sprinttraining #athleteperformance #performancecoach #eliteathlete
Wednesday sits between two hard days. Most athletes either do too much and compromise Thursday and Friday or do nothing and waste the opportunity to flush and maintain.
This session threads the needle. Tempo runs at 60-70% effort keep the movement patterns sharp without taxing the nervous system. Lower body mobility addresses what Monday and Tuesday left behind. The upper body lifts maintain stimulus without creating fatigue that carries into the weekend.
Active recovery is not rest. It is preparation disguised as an easy day.#speedtraining #athleteperformance #performancecoach #eliteathlete #recoverytraining
I have spent most of my adult life on the road. Different countries, different languages, different cultures. My wife is not German. We speak English at home. Half my work happens in a timezone that is not mine.
But every time I come back to Potsdam, there is a specific feeling I have not found anywhere else.
Germany has a reputation. Strict. Humourless. Grey. And honestly, some of that is not entirely wrong.
But here is what people miss. There are very few places in the world where you can live exactly the way you want without anyone caring enough to judge you, while also having access to genuinely beautiful surroundings, functional infrastructure and a culture that actually values time away from work. Not as a concept. In practice.
What surprises people most is how the city feels. Potsdam is not small - but it feels that way. People greet you on the street. You start recognising the faces around you. There is a warmth to it that you do not expect from a city with this much history and beauty sitting right outside your door.
It sits in the middle of Europe, surrounded by lakes and forests, forty minutes from Berlin, a few hours from everywhere else. The winters people complain about last a few weeks now. The rest of the year is better than most people expect.
What stays with me most though is something harder to explain. Germany is one of the few countries that looks directly at its own history - the worst of it - and talks about it openly rather than burying it. I think that takes a kind of collective honesty that is rarer than people realise. And it says something about the character of a place.
I could not see myself living anywhere else full-time. That still surprises me sometimes.
Start with high volume, low impact work to build tissue tolerance, ankle stiffness and coordination. The drill work is not just warm up - it is developing the rhythm and timing that higher intensity plyometrics will later demand. Add deeper ranges of motion carefully - eccentric control comes at a fatigue cost and placement in the week matters. Then reduce volume and raise intensity progressively as the season approaches.
When intensity goes up, volume comes down. That is not a guideline. It is the rule.
#speedtraining #athleteperformance #performancecoach #eliteathlete #strengthandconditioningSonnet 4.6Adaptive
Speed is not built in a vacuum. It is built on top of a strength foundation that was developed first.
Maximal strength persists 25-35 days after the last stimulus - Speed and power fade in 5-10, get the sequence right and you have months to express everything you built. Get it wrong and you are still building when you should already be competing at your best.
Most athletes train hard, far fewer train in the right order.
#speedtraining #strengthtraining #athleteperformance #performancecoach #eliteathlete
Tuesday is where most athletes make their biggest programming mistake.
They either go too hard and compromise Wednesday’s recovery, or they go too easy and waste a day that could be building something meaningful.
This session fixes that. It sits perfectly between Monday’s speed work and Wednesday’s recovery - heavy enough to drive adaptation, structured enough to protect what comes next.
Every element has a purpose. The cluster sets keep bar speed high under heavy loads. The exercise pairings save time without sacrificing quality. The isometrics train the rate of force development that no conventional lift can replicate.
Save this. Take it to the gym on Tuesday and tell me how it goes.
#strengthtraining #athleteperformance #performancecoach #eliteathlete #speedtraining
