How to Get Faster: The 7 Components of Athletic Speed

Every athlete who walks into our facility in Tampa Bay wants the same thing, and most of them say it within the first five minutes: they want to get faster. What almost none of them can tell you is what speed is actually made of. So they do more sprints, more conditioning, more of whatever made them tired last week, and yet the stopwatch hasn’t moved.

Speed isn’t a single quality you either have or don’t. It’s the output of seven separate physical traits, and you can train every one of them.

Why “Just Run More” Doesn’t Work

Running more makes you better at running tired. That’s conditioning, and it has its place. But top-end speed is a maximal effort, like a heavy squat; you can only express it when you’re fresh, and you improve it by training what’s underneath it.

That’s the part most athletes skip. They train the outcome instead of the inputs.

The Seven Components of Speed

• Force production: How hard you can push into the ground. Sprinting is a strength expression before it’s anything else, and an athlete who can’t produce force has nothing to apply.
• Rate of force development: How fast you produce that force. At top speed your foot is on the ground for roughly a tenth of a second, so strength you can’t access quickly doesn’t help you.
• Elasticity: Your tendons’ ability to store and return energy, like a stretched rubber band. This is what separates athletes who look bouncy from athletes who look heavy.
• Mechanics: The positions your body hits while sprinting: shin angle out of a stance, posture, arm action, where your foot lands relative to your hips. Bad positions leak force no matter how strong you are.
• Mobility: Usable range of motion, especially at the hip and ankle. If you can’t get into a position, you can’t produce force in it.
• Acceleration and top speed: Two different skills. Acceleration is the first 10 to 20 yards, driven by horizontal force and long ground contacts. Top speed comes after, and it’s a different mechanical problem entirely. Most field-sport athletes need the first one more than they think.
• Recovery: Speed is a nervous system quality. Training it on tired legs builds fatigue tolerance, not speed.

Notice how few of those are solved by sprinting more.

Where Most Athletes Should Start

For a high school athlete who has never trained seriously, the fastest returns usually come from the least glamorous end of that list: getting stronger, cleaning up mechanics, and learning to sprint fresh instead of at the end of practice. Depending on training history and sport, athletes may see meaningful change in a matter of months, but it comes from the inputs, not from repeating the test.

The other piece is honesty about where you actually are. A running back who’s slow out of his first three steps has an acceleration problem, and no amount of flying-30 work will fix it.

If you’re not sure which of the seven is holding your athlete back, Steven Hoschak can run a movement and speed assessment and tell you where the gap is before you spend a season guessing.

Conclusion

Speed looks like a gift because you only ever see the finished product. Underneath it are seven trainable qualities, and almost every athlete has at least one they’ve never worked on directly. Find that one, and the stopwatch tends to follow.

Whether your athlete is preparing for a combine, a first varsity season, or a return from injury, Lionhearted Performance, located at 2550 Green Forest Ln #101, has a team of experienced coaches who can assess where your speed is breaking down and build a plan around it. Contact them to schedule an assessment.