At Atlas High Performance, our Speed School sessions are all about getting athletes faster, more confident, better able to change direction and also improving their movement abilities on the pitch. We've taken the best parts of coaches like Les Spellman, Tony Holler and the guys at Speedworks and structured our sessions around that to give young athletes exposure to the best programme you can find. Here are 5 of our top exercises for increasing sprint speed and learning how to accelerate better.

If there's a silver lining to be found in anything, I'll find it. Having the extra bit of time during lockdown has been a god send for me (and you). Extra time to absolutely nerd out on reading research papers and brush up on some of the stuff that I haven't particularly looked at in quite a while. Recently I've been looking into isometric muscle contractions and their role in maintaining/developing strength and including them in a programme with plyometrics and speed work. No matter how far I go down the rabbit hole , it all ends up back in one place, The Brain & The Nervous System. In  reality, when we talk about sports performance from a physical and a technical/tactical perspective we can't get away from the fact that The Brain rules everything. This article should help shed some light on that!

Landing mechanics are exactly as they are implied, the mechanics of movement during the landing phase of a jump-landing movement. The importance of these are that nearly every sport (bar a select few) involve some sort of jumping-landing manoeuvre. The more prevalent these movements are, the more important correct landing mechanics become. These can also be extended to any movement which follows a land like changing direction or sprinting as your landing sets the foundation for the movement that follows. The following discussion will take you through exactly what you need to know both as a coach and as a players so you can better understand why they are significant.

In part 1 we spoke about what the core was. We gave a detailed outline of the muscles/actions involved in the core musculature to set the foundation for the following discussion. It is recommended that if you haven't read it, you get over and read it right now by clicking here.

With any luck you have been following the previous two parts to this series. (Read Part 1 & Part 2). We have covered the benefits of the warm up and outlined how to build your own  effective warm up. 

"But you said that younger players don't need to warm up before activity?"

No, we said they didn't need to perform specific stretching/activation exercises. In the third, and final part of this warm up series we are going to give you some examples of warm up games that you can implement with younger age groups. On the up side, these games also work with older age groups! The great thing about these games is that they are fun. They are not coached which provides the players much needed free play before training. But, there are several benefits hidden within them that make these games invaluable to any coaches tool box.

Hopefully the days of static stretching being utilised in a warm up are numbered. The proposed benefit of stretching reducing the risk of injury are unsubstantiated and unproven. Research has proven that the use of static stretching during a warm up has the potential to reduce power output and has no effect on reducing injury risk (Pope et al. 2000, Herbert and Gabriel 2002, Behm and Chaouachi 2011). On the other hand, dynamic stretching is crucial as the muscle is activated throughout its active range of motion. Thankfully, a helping hand is here. The UKSCA (United Kingdom Strength and Conditioning Association) introduced the ‘RAMP’ method of conducting a warm up (Jeffreys 2007), allowing coaches at all levels to build their own effective warm ups and removing the superfluous material.

RAMP is an acronym for:

• Raise
• Activate and Mobilise
• Potentiate

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With each phase having a clear objective.