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Speed training, and how to tell whether it worked

There is no shortage of speed sessions to copy. The hard part is knowing whether the last eight weeks of them did anything.

Search for speed training and you will find a thousand sessions. Acceleration ladders, flying sprints, resisted starts, contrast work, plyometrics, sled pushes. Most of it is fine. Some of it is very good. Almost none of it will tell you the thing you actually need to know in April, which is whether the athlete in front of you is faster than they were in February.

The measurement problem is the real problem

A speed programme is a bet. You spend eight weeks of an athlete's limited training life on one approach instead of another, and at the end you either confirmed the bet or you did not. Without a measurement you can trust, you cannot tell the difference between a programme that worked, an athlete who grew three inches, and a tailwind.

So most programmes get judged on race results, which is the worst available instrument. A 100 metre time contains the start, the reaction, the drive phase, top speed, speed endurance, the wind, the surface, the lane and whoever was in the next lane. If it drops by a tenth you have learned that something improved. You have not learned what.

What is worth measuring instead

Three numbers cover most of it, and none of them is a race.

• Acceleration: how fast the athlete gets going from a stop. Usually a timed segment from the blocks or a standing start.
• Maximum velocity: how fast they are moving once they are already moving. This is a flying run, and it is the number most programmes never collect.
• Where the two meet: the point on the track where the athlete stops accelerating and starts holding. It moves as they get better, and it tells you which of the two to train.

Collect those two or three times a season under the same conditions and you have something no race result can give you: a straight answer about whether the training changed the athlete.

The honest problem with timing them

A hand time cannot do this job. The error in a stopwatch is around two to three tenths of a second, because a person has to react to the start and then react to the finish. The improvements a good eight-week block produces in a high school sprinter are measured in hundredths. The instrument is an order of magnitude coarser than the thing it is measuring, so what you are mostly recording is how the timer felt that day.

This is why timing gates exist, and why they cost what they cost. The cheapest automatic system on the market runs about $150, most sit between $400 and several thousand, and the coaches who own them are usually the ones who did not have to ask.

Where StatLap comes into this

The speed gates in StatLap are two phones. You set the distance between them, one phone watches the start line and one watches the finish line, and when a runner breaks the second gate the speed comes back in metres per second and miles per hour along with the segment time. No person presses anything, so the reaction error is gone. It is free, permanently, and it is not a trial.

Being straight about the limits, because they matter for test design: it is two gates, not five. You get one segment per run, so a five-split profile of a single sprint is not something this does. It triggers on a camera seeing movement across a line rather than on a laser beam, so the line has to be set properly and the light has to be reasonable. And it needs two phones, which for most squads means two people.

Gate runs save into their own training section, kept apart from meet results on purpose. A Tuesday fly-in is not a competition mark and should never end up looking like one on an athlete's record.

The rest of this, in detail

Each of these takes one piece of the above and does it properly: how to run the test, what the number means, and where the method lets you down.

• How to time a flying 30 without buying timing gates
• Where does your sprinter actually hit top speed?
• Acceleration or top speed — which is your athlete missing?
• Why your 40 times keep dropping and nobody is faster
• How often should you test speed?

None of it replaces knowing your athletes. It replaces guessing about them, which is a different and much lower bar.

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