How Speed Can Win Games

Here's a personal antidote from a game 2 weeks ago that hopefully doesn't sound like a huge pump up of myself but here goes.

If you've read this blog for any stretch of time you'll know that I regard sprinting speed as the holy grail of football - especially L/A football.

You'll also know that my training is based entirely around maintaining and improving speed too.

You'd probably prefer to know that speed "can be" highly genetic but it can be improved upon with the right training. Not by a huge amount, but when half a second can equate to 3 - 5m, then it counts big time.

Because it is highly genetic it means to get meaningful gains from it, it needs to be trained far longer then anything as a slow build is the best way here.

The implications of greater maximum speed output is explained in this video from earlier this week:

You'll also be interested to know that aerobic system development is only 30% genetic so it has huge trainability compared to speed which means you don't need to spend as much time and effort on it as you think to make great improvements from season to season.

I did my very speed session way back on September 7th, 2016 which would have been 1 -2 weeks after the season finished last year.

Since then I have completed 62 sprint specific training sessions.

Now back to my story of 2 weeks ago.

At the time we were 5th on the ladder and playing 2nd place, who beat us the last time we played.

We were playing at their deck which is right on the beach so the wind can provide them with a pretty handy home ground advantage but we were still confident of a win with some playing players making it back.

We started off well in the first quarter kicking to the scoring end which obviously meant we needed to defend against it in the 2nd quarter and if you can defend 1 quarter in a game like that, you've pretty much won the game right there as it's now 2 scoring quarters to 1.

They kicked the first 2 goals of the second quarter to claw back to a goal or 2 so we needed a goal against it to break even for this quarter.

I had gone for a ball on the wing coming out from half back which bounced sideways and rendered me useless for that moment but it had bounced to one of my teammates who pumped into the forward 50 about 40 - 45m by the time wind held it up.

Our full forward couldn't quite make the drop of the ball but had planted himself in front of his defender and opened up a corridor for the ball to go through in th hope that he could turn his defender around somehow (he's now real mobile!).

After the crappy bounce I'd turned around and started making it back to goal, knowing that most of our forwards had been sucked up the ground and that I'd need to get back to assist Buckets.

I was 1 - 2m behind two opposing players with 1 either side of me running back to goal when Buckets made a corridor for the ball to bounce through, so I was 55 - 50m out from goal at this point.

I knew I had one of the blokes for speed but I wasn't sure about the other bloke who usually plays on me against this team and has stayed with me on various occasions but once I saw the ball bounce past Buckets, and with no other players between the ball and goal, it was go time.

On went the afterburners and I managed to burn both opposition blokes off and run into an uncontested goal.

I was pretty chuffed because at 38 and a half, I'm probably not meant to be able to sprint like that.

Later that night we had a club function and a bunch of senior players watching our game actually mentioned it to me so it must have stuck out a bit in a lowly game of reserves football.

What really stuck with me was that one of the senior blokes said "you must be really happy because that's exactly what you train for."

I hadn't actually thought of it like that but he was right.

That moment right there showed that my training had done what it is meant to do and even better, in a game situation.

That's direct training transfer right there - the holy grail of training.

On top of that it gives me the confidence that going forward into finals, being able to display my speed like that may be the difference between winning and losing a final.