Today on The Ascent, what does it actually mean to make an athlete faster?

Today’s Featured Story looks at a new study published this week examining Speed, Agility and Quickness training in team-sport athletes. The research gives us a good reason to rethink what “speed training” really means. It isn’t just about running faster in a straight line. Athletes have to accelerate, decelerate, change direction, react and reaccelerate—and those qualities matter across nearly every sport.

In Performance Lab Wednesday, we focus on one of the most overlooked pieces of that equation: stopping. The faster an athlete moves, the more force they have to control before changing direction. Better brakes can mean more efficient cuts, quicker reacceleration and ultimately better movement at speed.

Coach’s Corner breaks down the difference between speed training and conditioning. Both matter, but they aren’t interchangeable. If the goal is speed, athletes need enough recovery to actually move fast. If the goal is conditioning, shorter recovery can challenge their ability to repeat efforts under fatigue. Good programming starts by knowing which quality you’re trying to develop.

And today’s Daily Edge is simple: don’t waste your recovery by trying to eliminate it. When training speed, rest is part of the workout. Sprint fast, recover and repeat the quality—not the fatigue.

Today’s theme is straightforward: Speed is more than running fast. It’s producing force quickly, controlling it and being ready to do it again.

When parents hear the words speed and agility training, the first thought is usually simple: make my athlete run faster.

That certainly matters. Whether it’s a baseball player trying to beat out a ground ball, a receiver creating separation, a soccer player attacking open space or a basketball player running in transition, speed can change a game.

But athletic speed is much bigger than a stopwatch.

A new systematic review and three-level meta-analysis published September 15 in Frontiers in Physiology examined the effects of speed, agility and quickness—or SAQ—training in team-sport athletes. The researchers analyzed 16 randomized controlled studies and found that, on average, SAQ training favored improvements in sprint performance, agility and power compared with the control conditions. The largest pooled estimate was for agility.  

That’s interesting. But what the researchers included under the umbrella of SAQ training may be even more useful for athletes and parents to understand.

SAQ wasn’t simply running sprints. The researchers described it as training that can incorporate short-distance sprinting, acceleration and deceleration, multidirectional movement, change of direction, rapid footwork, jumping and drills that require athletes to respond to a stimulus.  

In other words, speed isn’t just how fast you can run in a straight line.

Think about what actually happens during competition.

A shortstop takes two explosive steps to the ball, brakes, changes direction and accelerates into a throw. A basketball player closes out on a shooter, stops under control and immediately reacts to a drive. A football player accelerates off the line, changes direction through a route and then reacts to the defender. A volleyball player reads the play and rapidly moves into position to jump. A soccer player accelerates toward the ball, decelerates, cuts and explodes into a new direction.

Even a pitcher, who may never reach anything close to maximum running speed during a pitch, relies on many of the same athletic qualities: rapid force production, coordination, lower-body control and the ability to efficiently produce and transfer force.

That’s why we have to stop thinking about speed training as simply running faster.

Sometimes the problem is getting from Point A to Point B as fast as possible.

Sometimes it’s getting moving quickly from a dead stop.

Sometimes it’s stopping your body before changing direction.

Sometimes it’s absorbing force and immediately producing it again.

And sometimes it’s seeing something happen, making a decision and moving before your opponent does.

Those are different athletic problems.

The new analysis actually reinforces that distinction. The researchers found favorable effects for short 5–10-meter sprints, longer 20–30-meter sprints and pre-planned change-of-direction ability. But the pooled effect for reactive agility was not statistically significant.  

That distinction matters.

If we put cones on the ground and tell an athlete exactly where to run, we’re testing and training change of direction. The athlete already knows the solution.

Competition isn’t always like that.

A defensive back doesn’t know exactly where the receiver is going. A soccer player doesn’t know where the opponent will cut. A hitter doesn’t know exactly where the pitch will be. An infielder doesn’t know where the ball will be hit.

True reactive agility adds another layer:

PERCEIVE → DECIDE → MOVE.

That means an athlete can become better at running a predetermined agility drill without necessarily improving every aspect of agility they need in competition.

Everyone wants faster acceleration.

Very few young athletes walk into a training facility saying:

“I need to get better at decelerating.”

They probably should.

If you accelerate into a cut, something has to slow your body down before you can redirect it. The better an athlete can control that force, the more efficiently they can get into the next movement.

That’s why our speed and agility sessions include more than sprinting.

We teach athletes to accelerate, decelerate, control their body, redirect force and reaccelerate.

The goal isn’t just:

GO FAST.

It’s:

And those abilities cross sports.

Baseball. Softball. Football. Flag football. Soccer. Basketball. Volleyball. Lacrosse.

The exact movements change, but the underlying athletic qualities repeatedly appear.

TRAIN SMARTER. PLAY HARDER.

When athletes talk about getting faster, almost everything revolves around acceleration.

How quickly can you get off the line? How fast is your 10-yard split? How explosive is your first step?

Those things matter. But there’s another side of speed that gets far less attention:

How quickly can you stop?

That may sound backward. If the goal is getting faster, why would we spend valuable training time learning how to slow down?

Because in most sports, athletes rarely get to accelerate forever.

They accelerate to a ball. They accelerate toward an opponent. They sprint into a route. They close space defensively. Then something changes.

And before they can efficiently move somewhere else, they have to deal with the momentum they already created.

Think about driving a car.

Getting from 0 to 60 is an acceleration problem. But once you’re traveling 60 miles per hour, stopping the vehicle becomes a completely different physical problem.

Athletes aren’t any different.

The faster an athlete is moving, the more momentum they carry. To stop or change direction, the body has to produce forces that reduce that momentum—and often has to do it extremely quickly.

Research into horizontal deceleration has found that braking produces substantial impact forces and loading rates. One review reported peak forces during the early braking phase reaching as much as 2.7 times those observed during the first steps of maximal acceleration.  

So when an athlete sprints into a cut, we’re not simply asking them to move their feet differently.

We’re asking their body to absorb and control a significant amount of force.

And then, in many sports, immediately produce force again in another direction.

Watch a young athlete perform a hard 90-degree cut and you’ll often see the mistake well before the plant foot hits the ground.

They enter too fast for their braking ability.

Then they stand upright, take several short emergency steps, plant too far away from their body, lose balance or make a huge looping turn.

We might look at the final plant and say:

“They need to cut better.”

But the problem may have started several steps earlier.

They didn’t adequately reduce their momentum before trying to redirect it.

Research on change-of-direction biomechanics supports the importance of deceleration, particularly as cuts become sharper. Strength qualities—especially the ability to produce and tolerate eccentric forces—along with plyometric ability and sprint qualities can all contribute to change-of-direction performance.  

This is why good agility training can’t simply be:

Run to cone → touch cone → run to next cone.

We need to look at how the athlete got there.

At APEX, we’re interested in more than the final stopwatch number.

Imagine two athletes both complete the same change-of-direction test in 5.0 seconds.

Athlete A approaches the cut under control, lowers their center of mass, effectively applies braking force, redirects and accelerates out.

Athlete B takes multiple braking steps, collapses through the turn, loses their trunk position and then makes up the lost time because they’re exceptionally fast in a straight line.

Same final time.

Very different athletes.

That’s why testing needs context.

We can look at sprint and change-of-direction times. We can compare movement to the right and left. We can use high-speed video to examine how an athlete enters and exits a cut. We can look at jump and force-production characteristics. And we can compare those findings with strength, balance and mobility assessments.

We’re trying to answer a more useful question than:

“How fast were you?”

We want to know:

TEST. MEASURE. TRAIN. REPEAT.
Train Smarter. Play Harder.

There’s a common scene at practices everywhere. Athletes line up for sprints, the first few reps are fast, and then fatigue takes over. Times slow down, posture changes, ground contacts get longer and eventually everyone is bent over exhausted. The coach calls it speed training, but somewhere along the way, it stopped being speed training and became conditioning.

That doesn’t make the workout bad. Speed and conditioning are both important—they simply have different purposes. Speed training is about producing the highest-quality, highest-velocity movement possible. Whether we’re training acceleration, sprinting or change of direction, we want athletes moving near their maximum capability. That requires recovery. If every repetition becomes progressively slower because the athlete is tired, we’re no longer training their best speed.

Conditioning asks a different question: How well can the athlete repeat efforts and maintain performance as fatigue accumulates? That matters because athletes don’t perform one sprint and go home. They have to repeatedly accelerate, recover and perform throughout practices and games. Conditioning develops their ability to handle that workload.

Interestingly, the exact same drill can train either quality. Ten 20-yard sprints with enough recovery to maintain maximum speed can be a speed workout. Shorten the recovery significantly and those same sprints become repeated-effort conditioning. The distance didn’t change. The training stimulus did.

That’s why coaches should decide what they’re trying to develop before deciding how much rest athletes receive. If the goal is speed, perform it while athletes are relatively fresh, protect the quality of each repetition and give enough recovery to stay fast. If the goal is conditioning, deliberately manipulate work and recovery to challenge their ability to repeat efforts.

There is nothing wrong with athletes getting tired. The mistake is assuming that more tired automatically means more productive. A good coach should be able to answer one question before starting the drill:

What are we trying to improve?

Then build the work, intensity and recovery around that answer.

Train Smarter. Play Harder.

Coach Ryan
APEX Batting Cages & Performance Lab

Wednesday Nights | 7 PM - 8 PM | $40 Drop In or Sign Up for Monthly Pass

Athletic performance starts with movement. This session focuses on improving mobility, balance, stability, coordination, and body control. Athletes will learn how to move better, reduce injury risk, and build the foundation needed for speed, strength, and power development.

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Every Night | 7 PM - 8 PM | $40 Drop In or Sign Up for Monthly Pass

Athletic performance starts with movement. This session focuses on improving mobility, balance, stability, coordination, and body control. Athletes will learn how to move better, reduce injury risk, and build the foundation needed for speed, strength, and power development.

Find out more here

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Our summer flag football development program is designed to help athletes improve their football IQ, route running, quarterback play, defensive skills, speed, agility, and overall athletic development. Whether your athlete is new to the game or preparing for the upcoming season, this program provides a fun, competitive environment focused on long-term growth and confidence.

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If today’s goal is speed, your rest period is part of the training—not wasted time. After a hard sprint, give yourself enough recovery that the next repetition can actually be fast.

A simple rule for today: run 5–10 yards at maximum intent, then walk back and give yourself roughly 45–60 seconds before going again. Perform 4–6 quality repetitions and stop before your speed noticeably drops.

Don’t fill the recovery with burpees, jumping jacks or another exercise just because standing around feels unproductive. If the goal is speed, recovery allows you to produce speed.

Sprint fast. Recover. Repeat the quality—not the fatigue.

TRAIN SMARTER. PLAY HARDER.