Acceleration is the holy grail of most multi directional sports. If you can burst through tackles or accelerate yourself out of trouble, it’s a priceless tool to have. If you’re slow off the mark, it doesn’t matter if you have amazing skill, you’ll rarely get the chance to show it because it’s so difficult to find space.
You accelerate out of a direction change. First step quickness is only useful if you continue to accelerate away. Deceleration doesn’t just stop at a standstill, you accelerate back out. This is why I always work on acceleration first in any training programme.
The goal of acceleration is to sustain a balanced posture while optimising the direction and magnitude of force in an effort to reach maximal velocity as fast and efficiently as possible.
There are three things we work on when improving acceleration:
Posture
Leg Action
Arm Action
When you break things down this way, the training becomes logical and you don’t just spend all your time doing starts and trying to make them faster. We all know that doesn’t work.
POSTURE
Your trunk needs to be strong enough to remain still while the arms and legs are driving it maximally in all directions. We need to train the pillar (core) to resist movement. So sit ups, side bends and Russian twists are of little if no use.
In order to keep the pillar still, we also need to improve hip and shoulder range of motion. if the hip lacks extension 2 things will happen, you will have a shorter stride length (we’ll discuss this later), and/or your body will make up for the discrepancy by extending the lower back. This results in slower acceleration and painful/tight lower backs and hamstrings.
If the shoulder lacks range of motion, the compromise comes fro the upper back, causing restricted lung capacity, collapsed posture and excessive rotation of the upper body.
We work on these deficiencies with daily prehab and again as part of the warm up. The warm up is vital to this. You need to prepare the body for what it is about to do. Every body is different, so needs preparing differently.
If the pillar has been worked on in an isolated fashion, it needs to be integrated into the required movement patterns otherwise it’s a lot of good work with no benefits.
At Spped Academy I like to use Pillar Marching and Skipping to focus on posture while the limbs are driving hard and Wall Drills to get the body used to the correct body position and force direction.
LEG ACTION
this is where some people get it (the fast ones) and some people don’t (the slow ones). The beauty is, as soon as the ones who didn’t get it, do get it, they are no longer the slow ones.
Te leg action really comes from a mindset. Your mind is telling your body to get from A to B. quickly as possible, so you begin to reach forward, both with the arms and the legs. This is what is called over-striding and actually causes a braking effect. so how do you take those brakes off and start to accelerate to your potential?
Focus on driving the knees back and down. Think about pushing the ground away behind you. The harder you push, the faster you’ll accelerate. If you focus on driving the knees, the force will come from the hips (Glutes). These are your power source. Think about power rather than quickness. Don’t try to rush side frequency. That will increase naturally as your body accelerates. Quick feet is not a part of acceleration.
Our Pillar Marches help your mind focus on the knee action while keeping posture still. Hill sprints of about 15m bring the angle to you while you are getting used to the Wall Drill. At Speed Academy we also use a push sled (not pull) to integrate the leg drive with body position.
Once you have developed your plyometrics programme, bounding exercises are excellent to work on that powerful back and down knee drive.
We always finish off with 4-6 x 10m sprints to put it all together.
ARM ACTION
Your arms will not make you faster – but they will make you slower if they are not efficient and in sync with your legs. What I mean by this is, don’t waste too much time on the arms unless they are holding you back.
The main mistake here is the same as with the legs. Most often athletes reach forward and focus too much on the hands, when what we want is to drive the elbows back to create a blocking effect for the leg action. This is where shoulder range is important. With the elbow now driving back, look to snap the hand back and down. Imagine you are flinging spaghetti at the wall behind you.
Without great posture the arms a of little active use. posture allows the shoulder blades to drop down into their rightfully place. Weak posture causes the shoulders to rise.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
This is how an acceleration session looks at Speed Academy.
Pillar Preparation 10mins –
Foam Rolling
Active Isolated Stretching
Muscle Activation
Movement Prep 10-15mins –
Band Walks
Dynamic Mobility (focusing on the requirements of acceleration)
Movement Integration (pillar marching/skipping)
CNS Activation (rapid response jumps/hops/runs)
Movement Skills 30mins –
Wall Drills (e.g. posture holds)
Prowler March
10-15m Hill Sprints
Lean, Fall, Run
I will work on one specific movement skill 2-3x a week for at least a 4wk block to allow the movement patterns to be learned, grooved and then applied to the sporting situation. You can’t expect the skill to hold up in a reactive, chaotic situation like sport unless it has been mastered in isolation first.
The next block might be first step quickness. This begins the integration of your acceleration skills into realtime play.
