Know the Speed and Strength Training Pyramid and become a faster athlete

If you are going to build a house, you need a solid foundation to make sure that the house won’t easily collapse.   This is also applicable to athletes since they need to develop their strength.  They depend too much on their speed and strength that if it fails them then their whole dream might collapse.   This is known as the training pyramid.   This is the foundation of the training program for most of the athletes nowadays.  It is true that each of us differs in strengths and weaknesses because of the different training experience we have.  We need to look at the foundation of the athletic performance.   After the performance evaluation, we can identify the areas of strength and weaknesses.   From there on, we can improve on anything we want with regards to our body.

General Physical Performance (GPP) is the considered as the base; therefore, it encompasses a wide variety of training concepts.   Here, it is believe that some general physical qualities are much more important than anything else regardless of the sport you want to excel in.   By improving GPP, you are able to enhance the physical abilities needed in that specific sport.   Those, who are new to strength training, should begin at that physical level.   Those are already experience must revisit GPP to enhance their performance once more.  GPP is composed of:

1. Aerobic and anaerobic fitness
2. Static and dynamic flexibility
3. Core strength and stability
4. Coordination and balance
5. Muscular endurance

The performance of an athlete will be greatly affected if they lack in any of these areas.  Sad, to say, you won’t progress far if you lack in part of these areas.  It is not important, what type of training you are into, but you need to include all of these into your routines.

Strength

This can be identified mostly from your ability to lift heavy objects.  It depends on what type of activity you are engage in.   Most of the athletes would improve their performances by doing ground based, multi-joint, and free weight exercises.  If you want to be faster, you need to develop relative strength.   This has something to do with the weight to body ratio.   It is said that the fastest athletes can squat twice their body masses.   This would take time to develop, but would really improve your jumping ability.   Here are the type of strength that you can train:

1. General strength
2. Max strength
3. Strength endurance
4. Relative strength
5. Starting strength

Speed-strength

This means that it is along the force velocity curve.  In the force-velocity curve theory, it is assumed that faster movement would generate less force.  This has something to do with the amount of time needed to contract the muscle.  Strength training can force end of the force velocity curve.  The goal should be to use the strength to apply them at a greater rate of speed, or learn to apply our newfound strength with more athletic movements.  To achieve this, you can several activities including speed squats, band squats, Olympic lifts, sled pushes and pulls, resisted sprints, weighted plyo's, vertimax.  And all of these fall along the speed-strength continuum. 

Speed

Speed training is the utmost peak of the pyramid.  This means that you need sport-specific movements and the performance must be at a high velocity with the use of optimal technique.  To train such way, you need to train at the velocity end of the force-velocity curve.  The external resistance must be lower while the rate of speed and force application must be high.  Your training needs to start with sprints, plyo's, and agility drills, which falls into speed training.  You need to train in all aspect such as top speed running, acceleration, change of direction, and deceleration.  This kind of training would prepare you for almost any kind of sport.