Why you are NOT Getting Faster.
Reason # 2 of this series is your body composition is not up to par. One of the greatest speed coaches named Charlie Francis said that if one of his athletes had this issue, they did not work on speed or sprint drills, they worked on losing body fat and improving body composition. Think about it this way, if you run a 40yd sprint with a 20 lb weight vest on, and then run another 40 without the vest on, which one is faster? It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out. So if you have extra body fat that isn't helping you perform, let's get rid of it. It is only holding you back from optimal performance. This is most common in our younger developing athletes that don’t have the strength and power to move a body that big yet.
Now, if you are a lineman that plays D1 football, you better believe that they have extra body fat that allows them to be 300lbs and move other 300lb men around the field. This is a must. But, they have the strength and power to support that extra weight and the conditioning to do it for a whole game. This is what we call the Strength to Bodyweight ratio.
We see drastic speed and agility improvements in our athletes with this problem by simply losing weight, and guess what, we are very successful here at UAP with this! Bodyweight can be a hard subject to talk about, but our athletes are here to get better, and if we tell them they will get faster by losing weight, they put just as much effort into losing the weight as they would in a hard workout! When they see their number on the scale drop every week, it's just like seeing their 40 times drop a 10th of a second. It's rewarding. Our athletes have been very successful with our simple diet checklists. Once they lose the weight, their current strength and power can move their lighter frame much better through space. Then we can build muscle, strength, power, and most importantly technique for long term speed development. So if you are trying to get faster, and you know that you are holding onto some extra weight, crack down on your diet and watch your speed and power become an asset your coaches never saw coming!
-Kyle McCarty