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This is a transcription of a recent interview I did with Speed Training Expert Lee Taft

AC: I’m very excited today as I’ve have a special guest, Lee Taft, who is known as the “speed guy” in the fitness industry. I’m a big fan of his work. This is the guy that does speed better than anybody else out there. Lee, please let everyone know a little bit more about who you are and what you do

LT: First of all Alwyn, congratulations on all your success and for helping so many countless individuals and athletes reach their fitness goals. I appreciate what you do and I am inspired by you and what you have accomplished.

I’m always just so honored to be able to talk to people like yourself. I'm one of these guys that back in the 80’s kind of just got bit by the bug of training and to help make athletes faster. My background in speed came from when I was a college basketball player watching videotape when I was supposed to be critiquing the game, how I played and how the team played and everything. I started watching all athletes move, and it intrigued me. So, way back then is really how I got started in the business of learning about how to make athletes faster. From that time I started watching how athletes moved and I started to notice things that weren’t typically being told to us. We’re being told to do type-A movement, but really we’re doing type-B movement. That’s how the human body wanted to move.

I looked further and further into it and realized that we’re just so functional on how we figure out how to move. I would say over the last 20 plus years, that’s basically what I’ve built my reputation on is I teach movement based on how we’re meant to move, how we’re supposed to move. Then it’s a matter of understanding the evaluation process to know when you have to correct something. An example is, if I threw a ball at your face and you were 10 feet from me, I don’t have to tell you or teach you to either duck or put your hand up to protect yourself, that’s an instinct. Movement, reactive speed is just like that. That’s probably the best way I can get people to understand it, it’s very natural and it’s very reactive, we just have to clean it up a little bit because it gets a little sloppy without proper coaching and conditioning.

So, I’ve been doing it a long time. I enjoy it, I learned from people like yourself and everybody else in the industry, and hopefully I’ve been able to serve people.

AC: One of the biggest misconceptions out there is the concept of what speed is and how to go about improving it. Speed is something that everybody knows about from a general perspective- it’s getting faster, a better 40-yard dash time, getting off the ball fast, etc.

Let’s kind of start by just defining what speed is and how can we actually go about improving it.

LT: One definition that we’ll try to give is that speed is something that we all naturally have. We all have it at different levels and different abilities, not everybody is going to be like Usain Bolt or Carl Lewis but we all have the ability to improve speed. Speed is a skill, there are components of it that can be improved, and that is the misconception we had all these years is that you’re either born with it or you’re not. Again, I’m not going to make somebody who runs a 5.2 40-yard dash run a 4.2, but we’re going to be able to improve them through certain variables of biomechanics but also strength; we can make anybody faster!

Speed can be looked at like a 40-hour dash type speed. It can be looked at from three yard speed which is very, very common in most sports, it’s that ability to accelerate one or two steps and then make something happen quickly. But it also can be the speed or the initial starting movement, so the initial action of an arm or the initial drive of a leg, that is a reactive or starting speed component that we want to make sure that we address. Now, when we want to improve speed, again we have to start looking at what is it that we’re trying to improve?

If I’m a tennis player and somebody gives me a drop shot, how do I get started? If I’m in a good stance and if I’ve prepared myself from practice, I can teach an athlete to react better just through neuro-programming and they’ll be able to develop that quicker reaction. The next one is the starting speed, how well is my first step? That becomes a component of technique, biomechanics, and we want to make sure we have good arm and knee drive. But we also want to make sure we increase strength and power. If we’re going to increase those, we have a better chance of having a greater first step.

Then we talk about acceleration speed. Now it’s going a certain distance up to the point where we start hitting top end speeds. So we’re still creating more momentum and we’re getting faster through what we call acceleration. That gets improved through biomechanics, an understanding of – this is the cool part – how we have to accelerate to be successful in that particular situation. Let’s say you and I are playing chase tag, I’m in front of you a little bit and coach says go and you’re running me down. My goal is obviously to create separation, yours is to close the gap.

Let’s say football, you've got to close down; you've got to catch me. I’m a wide receiver, caught the ball, now you've got to catch me. We both have to accelerate as fast as we can to create successful play or score points, whatever it is. We’re both going to have to do certain things. We’re both going to have to just equate incredible force into the ground with our legs. But in order to do that, we've got to have to have a good coordinated arm drive and we’re going to have to have a knee drive up so that we can have a great leg drive down and back. All that is teachable, all that is very coachable. We can improve the techniques so that we don’t have a lot of unwanted motion, but we can also get in the weight room and improve strength so that now each drive means more. We put more force into the ground; it moves our body where we want to go more explosively.

Now let’s say you and I are playing basketball. I’m guarding you and you make an incredible crossover from the right to the left and I have to move with you, now I’ve got to be able to not only accelerate but also perform a lateral movement. It may be a shuffle like a defensive shuffle or it may be a crossover run. Again, it’s taking that skill – in this case it has to be a lateral skill, either a shuffle or a crossover – and it’s breaking down how that skill should look, and then it’s improving the individual components of it. So I get to push away with one leg, the other leg kind of reaches out a little bit and gets ready for ground contact, and then continues that stride sideways. If it’s a crossover, I may be basically running sideways but yet my upper body is kind of squared up on you in case you change directions or pull up and shoot.

That’s the cool thing about speed if you think about it. It’s no different than the skill of sport itself. If you’re dribbling, you've got to spend time on getting better at dribbling. Well, I get to spend time getting my athletes better moving laterally through multiple kinds of drills - I can add bands and resistance and medicine balls to make it better - I've just got to keep drilling each individual component until it makes the whole part, the whole movement, much more efficient and effective. So, speed training, there’s a lot to it if there needs to be. What I mean by that is if I watch you move, and you are really smooth and really effective and really economical on your movement, but didn’t have great speed; I know my job now might just be to improve your power because maybe you’re lacking some power, but efficiency wise you’re really good and you don’t make a lot of mistakes movement-wise. That’s the fun part. We have to evaluate an athlete, we have to evaluate the sport or the situation, combine what we see and strengthen the weaknesses that are holding back optimal performance. Then just through good, smart program design, develop a program that will improve the speed of the athlete.

In a nutshell, that’s basically what speed is to me. It’s a great, great area to improve performance. Like you said at the beginning, speed kills. It’s so nice to see an athlete make an explosive speed movement, and that’s what people come to watch. They want to see that big breakaway in football, that explosive serve in tennis or volleyball, or that slam dunk in basketball. That’s my definition of speed.

AC: One thing that we can really transition into here is the concept of power versus strength because I know a lot of people think they are the same thing when in reality they’re actually totally different. Can we break that down, Lee, power versus strength?

LT: Yes, absolutely. If we look at the first thing we want, we want to make sure we have strength because strength actually is what allows us to move. Without strength, we can’t do a few things. We can’t produce force to be able to ambulate or walk or move forward or whatever. So we need strength just to be able to move. Now as an athlete we need it obviously to be able to resist a force or to give resistance towards that force, and that can be our own bodies or the bodies of others.

The other thing in strength that is important to understand is if we have good strength in all of our surrounding joints, the musculature that’s surrounding joint, we are more stable. Without stability you might as well forget power because you have what I like to call energy leaks. If I don’t have very stable hips or stable supportive musculature around my knees or ankles or my feet or my back, when I try to produce a lot of force quickly, it just dissipates. There’s nothing solid to push through. So the first thing we set out to do with our athletes is to make sure they have they get some good old-fashioned strength training, getting some squatting whether you’re single-legged or double-legged, and work on lunging and step-ups, and do the same thing with the upper body too with push-ups, pull-ups, rows, etc. I’m a big fan of single arm, single leg movements just because that’s how we traditionally move. Unilateral training coordinates really well with our neuromuscular system. So, we've got to get the strength component locked in first before we can do anything else.

Once we have strength, now we need to increase our ability to apply that strength faster. So, that’s what we’re going to call power. That’s the speed, the time component and how quickly we make something happen or make something move, and most likely we’re talking about our body. When we start talking about power, the neat thing about it is I’m not one of these guys who thinks “you can never do speed things until you’ve done strength completely.” That’s not really the way it is. An appropriate example of that is skipping. We want a young kid that’s not too far out to learn to get up and run and walk, a four-year-old maybe, we want to teach them how to have the ability to skip or the ability to shuffle or do things that involve coordination development. When an athlete skips, that is just an expression of a longer stride, a higher stride. But in order to do that, we have to apply force into the ground quickly to be able lift ourselves off the ground and skip. So, that’s a very clean, easy power example.

Another would be throwing a medicine ball. If I want to throw a medicine ball and I want to get any distance at all, I have to take that strength and I've got to use it quickly to apply force to the ball so the ball can have some distance. When I want to improve those mobile directional speed skills we talked about earlier like the lateral shuffle, forward escaping speed like I was trying to escape from you or a crossover move, I can increase the speed of that by increasing my power. One way to do that is to add a resistance. I could take a band, I could put a long band or tubing around my waist or I could attach it to a wall or I could have somebody hold it and perform those skills. That’s going to increase my power. I’m going to involve more muscle fibers, I’m going to get more nerve activation and it’s going to excite my body to have to involve more muscle fibers and that way I can improve my power.

Strength has to be developed, but it doesn’t have to be developed totally before you can go to power. If you’re going to start teaching maybe like Olympic lifting, things of that nature, or you’re going to start doing bounding with an athlete- you know, those higher-impact, higher-risk type of exercises - then you want to make sure you have an appropriate strength level to be able to handle that skill. Hopefully that explains it. I’m not one of those guys who feels you only have to go phase one strength only and never do power training until then because I think we miss too many opportunities when we do that.

AC: What would a typical weekly training schedule look like for a young athlete working with you to get faster?

LT: If they were on a 3 day a week schedule it would look like this:

Foam Roll-3-8 minutes
Activation exercises- 2-3 minutes
Dynamic warm up mobility/flexibility- 5 minutes
Stability training for the legs and hip- 2-3 minutes
Deceleration training- 3-5 minutes
Multi-directional speed workout- 6-10 minutes
Strength training- 25- 30 minutes
Foam roll/stretch/mobility

Each day is either an A-day or a B-day. The A-days are linear stability, deceleration, speed days and the B-days are lateral stability, deceleration, speed days. The strength training is specific to the individual athletes needs. But all athletes learn the basic movement patterns (Pushing, pulling, Knee bending, hip bending, lunging…)

AC: If I wanted to learn from you, how to train multi-directional speed…what do you suggest?

LT: Ground Breaking 2…This is an in-depth teaching tool on the various techniques, methods, concepts and principles of multi-directional speed training. Viewers of this product will be able to understand how to properly identify and coach proper athletic speed skills for court and field sports. Plus, viewers will learn how to properly coach and progress jumping, leaping, and hopping for greater speed and power. Finally, there is a detailed section on how to coach Olympic lifting and many variations to young athletes.

Thanks again for the interview AC. I am a big fan of yours!

AC: Thank you Lee.
Folks if you are interested in learning how to develop speed and explosiveness programming - then you need to check out Lee's material: Ground Breaking 2

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