Year-Round Speed: Integration and Progression
#77 - Strength & Speed Coaching - Pursuing Your Best ⚡️
In Speed Is a Skill, we made the case that speed belongs in your program. In Mechanics and Drills That Matter, we covered how to teach it.
Now the harder question. How do you keep speed in the program all year without overloading your athletes or giving up your lift time?
The answer is simple. You build doses of speed into the week and let it run year-round.
Integration First: Speed Lives in the Week
Here’s the mistake I see most often. Coaches treat speed like a phase. They run a spring speed block, or a summer camp, or an off-season emphasis, and then speed disappears for the rest of the year.
We do the opposite. Speed shows up every single day, in small doses, woven into a structure our athletes already know.
If you’ve followed A Week in the Life, you’ve already seen this. Here’s where speed lives in our week:
Monday. SHREDmill bursts. Short, intent over distance, acceleration training.
Block Day. Atomic Stations (many are calling this style of training performance circuits now). Sprint, jump, throw, and bounce, with our fly runs rotating week to week (10 yard dash, fly 10, fly 30, 40 yard dash).
Thursday. SHREDmill again, this time emphasizing the transition from acceleration to max velocity (Tony Villani calls this Gear 3).
Friday. A sprint, jump, throw, and agility circuit or game. High intent, low wear and tear (and fun).
Notice what’s happening. No single day is a “speed day.” Every day is a speed day, because a small dose of quality sprinting is baked into the flow. Athletes accelerate, hit max velocity, jump, and throw across the week without ever doing a punishing volume of it.
That’s our key to year-round speed. It’s not about doing more. It’s about placing a little bit, consistently, inside a system your athletes already trust.
Why Placement Beats Volume
Speed is a high-intent, low-volume quality. A few clean reps at full effort teach the nervous system far more than a pile of tired ones.
That’s why our speed work sits early in the session (although not always), before heavy fatigue, and stays low in total volume. Two to five quality exposures with as much recovery as an athlete needs is plenty. When you protect intent and keep volume low, you get the training effect without the wear.
This is also what makes year-round speed safe, which brings us to the question I get more than any other.
“Isn’t In-Season Sprinting Risky?”
Coaches worry about sprinting in-season. The fear is that adding max-effort speed work on top of practice and games will pile up and cause soft tissue injuries.
Here’s our take. Poorly dosed sprinting is risky. Consistent, low-volume sprinting is protective. Tony Holler talks about it like a deposit into the bank rather than a withdrawal.
The biggest injury risk usually comes from not sprinting for weeks and then asking an athlete to go full speed in a game. When athletes sprint a little bit every week, all year, their bodies stay adapted to it. The shock never comes, because max speed is never a stranger.
Because our volume is already low, we don’t separate our in-season and out-of-season athletes. That sometimes surprises people, so let me explain the thinking.
Our bet is long-term. If we deliver a good, intense stimulus consistently for four to six years, the volume in any single week doesn’t have to be high to get all the benefit. A few quality reps a week, over years, builds fast, durable athletes. The low weekly dose is exactly what makes it safe to run in-season without pulling anyone out.
That said, if your setting calls for more caution, this is a great place to use a Stoplight system. Green means full go, yellow means reduce or modify, red means back off for the day. We covered that approach in the Summer Training series. We don’t personally need it given how low our volume is, but for a lot of schools it’s a simple, smart way to autoregulate in-season athletes without building a separate program for them.
Progression: How Speed Advances Across the Year
Here’s where our approach might differ from what you’d expect. Our weekly structure stays consistent year-round. We don’t run an acceleration season and then a separate max velocity season. The days, the flow, and the language stay the same.
So how do athletes progress?
The progression happens inside each block, cycle to cycle, using a concurrent approach. My conjugate background comes from Joe Quinlin at Northwest Missouri State University, and this is the heart of it.
Here’s the plain-English version. Conjugate, or concurrent, training means you develop many qualities at the same time, all year, rather than training them one at a time in separate blocks. Instead of a month of only acceleration, then a month of only max velocity, then a month of power, you train all of them concurrently, every week. Acceleration on the SHREDmill, max velocity in your fly runs, power in your jumps and throws. They all stay in rotation.
The progression comes from what you rotate in and how you advance the stimulus over your training cycles. From one cycle to the next you might:
Rotate the sprint variation (10 yard dash to fly 10-10 to fly 30-10 to 40 yard dash)
Advance the plyometric or jump variation
Progress the intent, quality, or complexity of the exposure
Adjust the primer or start position
The structure holds. The stimulus advances. Athletes see the same reliable week, but the work inside it keeps moving forward.
This is why our athletes don’t plateau even though the weekly template never changes. The template is the container. The rotation and progression inside it are the training.
Why This Works in a School Setting
Concurrent training fits the school day better than block periodization for a simple reason. Our athletes are always in-season for something. We have multi-sport kids, different sport calendars, and no clean off-season where we could run an isolated speed block even if we wanted to.
Training everything concurrently means every athlete gets exposure to every quality, all year, no matter what sport season they’re in. Nobody misses their “speed block” because they were playing a fall sport. Speed is always on the menu.
Final Thoughts
Year-round speed isn’t a scheduling problem. It’s a design choice. Always start with your big rocks first and speed is one of the biggest rocks.
Build a small dose of quality sprinting into a week your athletes already know. Keep the volume low and the intent high so it stays safe in-season. Hold the structure steady and progress the stimulus inside it, cycle to cycle.
Do that for a few years, and you don’t just get faster athletes. You get athletes who know how to sprint, who stay healthy doing it, and who never lose the skill because it was never taken away.
Next up in the Speed Series is Coaching Speed in Large Groups and Tracking Progress, where we’ll get into the logistics of running quality speed work with a full class, and how to measure it so athletes can see themselves improving.
How do you fit speed into your year? Reply to this email and let me know what’s working in your setting.
Keep pursuing excellence,
Preston Pedersen, M.Ed., CSCS
Strength & Speed Coach • Pursuit PE ⚡️
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