Aaron King (00:03):
Welcome back to the modern old school training podcast. I'm Aaron King with coach Bob King as usual. And today's topic is something that came up on YouTube. And so keep bringing those questions. If you have questions, just put them in the comments below, make sure you click like and subscribe to this video. If you like, it there'll be more content coming. But today's topic is the difference between straightaway track sprinting and speed for the sport. So just not just the breakaway, cause there's still that element of breaking away on a, you know, 40, 50-yard play in football or whether it's rugby or soccer, but the difference between just pure best practices in track mechanics and what you look for in sports with, cause you have quickness, you have the agility and all the different things, defense and there, you know, you're always moving around. So it's a very different you know, the thing you're looking for when you're you're coaching it. So off the bat, I mean kind of how do you want to jump it off? Just
Coach Bob King (00:59):
Let me, that's a great way to segue is because we train everybody to be a sprinter that you pick a sport. Yes. We train you to be a sprinter. But what we also have to understand is that in track and field, you're, you're running from a to B. Now all you do, and I don't mean to disrespect. It just is that what you do is you come off the line and you get as fast as you can to the finish line. And then when you get to the finish line, you have all the room you need to slow down and decelerate sports. Don't let you do that, right? You, you have to when I was working with MLS Dallas burns soccer club, we to, you know, talk to our players that there are four speeds and soccer, you sprint jog, walk. And then when you get into the second half, you start doing a, a fast walk and less jogging because of the fatigue situation.
Coach Bob King (01:51):
And the point is this, you may be jogging down a field of competition, and the play changes. You gotta hit the gas right then. And it abruptly, you know, like in, you know, whether it's a fast break, a cat or whatever it is, you have to have the brakes and go back the other way and hit, hit the brakes hard and make a play. And so your body is in multiple positions and multiple planes. And you have to be able to do a lot of things at once as opposed to track and field where you have to, you know, be able to go a, to B as fast as
Aaron King (02:19):
You lose the best practices. I mean, it's, it's the irregular irregularity. So that was a good point about, you know, you get to slow down and all those things. So addressing something that you hear a lot, the drive phase and track, it says a hundred meters. Those are usually your fastest guys. They have the strive phase. You might see a guy out the blocks doing great, but then here comes you bolt or whoever it is, and that last 40 yards and just the afterburners turn on. So you lose that. You know, when I have to turn around on defense and get back, or I have to run down a ball, so what, where do you, why is there less w why don't we focus on certain things in, in track and field? You know we've got, let's talk about that a little bit. Cause I, you know, hear a lot about the dry phase and all those things.
Coach Bob King (03:06):
The thing about that is you'll take, let's stay with a hundred meters. And the reason for that is that's what everybody uses as a standard for their 60 in baseball, 40 and football and so forth. What you want to keep in mind is that when you said the last 40 yards or 40 meters, if you subtract that to a hundred at 60, that means football's done. Baseball is finishing and track and field, or a hundred meters are just getting going. And so that's, that's the difference. You have room in the other sports. You don't have a room now to tag along what I said a minute ago, about training everybody to be a sprinter. We, we tell them we're going to train you how to be a sprinter with the best bead mechanics possible. Then when you get back onto your court or field, your sports posture will take over. And so we don't blur the lines. We, we, we keep them very, very separated. We're teaching you how to be a sprinter. So that first step that acceleration that burst off the light or whatever it is is there. Then we also teach about sports posture. What you do in practice every day is gonna be in effect and take over when it's time to make a play on the opponent or respond to a reaction in the game.
Aaron King (04:13):
That's good stuff. I actually, I remember back in college, we had a couple of athletes that were really great. We had Johnny Lee Higgins was a football player, right? And then we had Churandy Martina, who was one of the fastest men in the world. At the time he was at UTEP. These are all UTEP athletes. We were loaded at the time. And [inaudible], I think he ran for nether out of Netherlands. And in the, I guess it was London, he finished, I believe in second place behind Usain Bolt in the 200 meters. But he was disqualified because he stepped on the line or something. Yeah. But that's fast. That's fast. That's fast. Johnny Lee was also, he was one of those, you know, he's all pro all NFL for the Raiders. Punt returner had like three in a row, three weeks in a row with a touchdown in the NFL or something like that. They ran track together at UTEP and Johnny did it, you know, some of the football guys would run track, you know, but then you have Olympic level guys like Churandy Martina, and he was winning at 40 yards. It was no competition after that. I mean, you know, don't get me wrong, Johnny was fast.
Aaron King (05:18):
It's crazy to see, you know, how, how that translates from sport to sport. W what are some other sports though? You know, that soccer. So what can I expect from speed? Like if I have the fastest soccer players in the world,
Coach Bob King (05:32):
Let me throw this out to people. Is that I think that there is a subconscious, I don't know what you call it. The subconscious mechanism in the athlete's brain, because we kind of did a little breakdown. In the study, we figured now basketball is a 94-foot court. We calculate it. I calculated that you have 55 feet of that to be able to sprint. If you inbound the ball, you have 55 feet where you can just take off and go and sprint. If you want to sprint before you have to get into sports posture, right. You know, that automatically, you know, you're not sprinting indefinitely tennis, you might have seven yards, a baseball. You, you have further, but the bases are, are 90 feet, but you're gonna make a turn. So, you know, you're going to slow down. Those things are built into an athlete's mentality.
Coach Bob King (06:16):
And I think that's a big difference between the track guy who knows from the beginning, I'm going from a to B and I'm going to build it up like this and run to the finish and run through the finish line. And if I run a hundred meters, I may slow down at the 175 meters Mark. Whereas that football player, even if he takes the ball out of the end zone, he's still illegal to run 107 yards max. Do you know what I mean? He's not going to run 200 or anything. So there are limitations. I think the athlete of field sport court sports already have built-in.
Aaron King (06:43):
So what does that, let's talk a little bit about the transition into the training side. So if I know I'm a tennis player that I'm never going to run more than, you know, however many yards you said it was, I'm never going to run that far. So why would I work on high-speed or if I'm an offensive lineman, I'm never going to work,
Coach Bob King (07:02):
Taste them. You are asking, you're asking me a question that I had objected to years ago. Somebody go, wow, I got to do this
Aaron King (07:08):
Just for the record. I'm playing Denville devil's advocate. And I'm trying to like, get the answers to the questions that we always hear here. So this is something that comes up a lot.
Coach Bob King (07:16):
Let me, I want to go to tennis because I was actually speaking at a tennis clinic of tennis pros. And I was starting to talk about our training will run out from zero to 30. And I had a tennis instructor go. We don't run 30 yards. And I say, okay, let's go back now, track and field cross over. You have the start and the dry phase. Then you have the acceleration. So if I want to, okay, here we go. If I'm in the weight room, I put weight on the bar because sprint strides are like weight-room reps and you rip the bar to get stronger. So you have to sprint to get faster. You're not faster until you get out there for, for some of these athletes, 15, 20 yards, and you're going, so if we just run 10 and 15 yards and that's, that's your cap, but if we can get you past 15 yards, we know you're up and running at a possible full speed for you. Now, your body knows how to go fast. And the other side of it, we do, we do limit the distances that the shorter athlete distances have to go. But we also know that there's a tremendous conditioning factor, like in our high-speed one 10 program, 110 yards or a hundred meters at high speed, you are turning it over and that's how you get faster. You have to get out to that speed zone. If you want to call it, that
Aaron King (08:28):
It kind of works as, almost as overspeed for that, that athlete, that doesn't go that far. And so I'm going to touch on that. The point you made about the weight room reps, we've talked about that before with over-training change direction, some of those things, you have to factor, a factor that into your training. And so one of the reasons in the previous podcast, we talked about why speed-wise challenging why we focus on it, but what w what does it do for just strength too? You know, so if I can run 30 yards to be fast in a shorter distance now, what does it doing for also just that, that strength, that the ability to stop and start again, you know, not just change, change direction, but high speed and changes.
Coach Bob King (09:08):
Now, the decelerating aspect is huge because as you run faster, it takes more strength to apply force to stop. And if you run faster, you're applying more ground force and tear away to get to those speed reps. As I call it on the, on the track, running sprint strides. And so strength is inseparable from the equation. And so, especially for the field, not necessarily field, but field court, any athlete who has a stop change direction, it takes a tremendous amount of strength to hit the brakes. When we say that phrase, the amount of strength it takes to, to hit the brakes and then to come back a different direction is, is even if it's just a slight turn, you still are applied tremendous force to the ground to be able to get your body in that momentum, to go in a different direction. Strength is just inseparable from the equation.
Aaron King (09:53):
No, there's one. This is kind of a tangent, but just remind me of the story that I remember when I was trained for us bobsled team, we would, I had the hardest time replicating what it was too, without a bobsled push track, to replicate actually running downhill Hill. Because when you're running downhill with a bobsled, you jump into the bobsleigh, that's your deceleration. But when you run downhill, it's really hard to stop. So that was one of them, probably the biggest challenges I ever had in like, saying, okay, I'm a rookie, how the heck am I going to assimilate running downhill without being able to do it? Yeah. And then what was so impressive, and it took me a while to catch on and not catch on, but adjust, right. We'd hit that bobsleds five, 600 pounds. Yes. When you hit that, that's a full max pink clean is basically what you're doing. We'd go straight to the weight room and do hang cleans, cleans. I was so weak compared to what I thought I was, I was strong, but when I went in the weight room and watched those guys through and wait after we just hit the sleds, I mean, it took me a while to adjust, but it's just funny. When you, when you think about training for your sport, it's hard to replicate certain things.
Coach Bob King (10:59):
Yes, it is. And what you have to do is you have to build in as much, and this is just now we're getting to Bob King's opinion, but you have to just built-in as much raw strength as you can, because you may lose part of that with the mechanics of your individual sport, but you have that to draw upon. And if you have a strong, strong base of strength or a big base of strength, then you can start channeling it and harness that, harness that into the direction it needs to be applied.
Aaron King (11:25):
So my favorite thing for just that helped me, it's the steep hill. I mean, probably a third, the hill I would run was about 35 yards, but it was very steep. Right. Is there a sport that, that doesn't work with or is it, is everyone better,
Coach Bob King (11:41):
Man? I don't think anybody doesn't benefit from that. And we discovered this there were some innovators in the I lost track of time, 88, 92. And in that four-year scheme where one of the brothers was trained by a guy who said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go out and run eight hundred. That's going to be about the length of a time of around boxers. Didn't do that at that time. Right. And so where I'm headed with this, the phrase cross-training, I don't know where it's really how, where it started, but what it means is I'm doing something that my sport really doesn't normally do. That's good for the body. That is good. We already mentioned the high speed. One ten across the board. It just makes your system, your body know how to be explosive and fast on the money, right on the Mark.
Coach Bob King (12:23):
And so it crossing over into other areas can be very beneficial. And there are some of the greatest athletes when I was back at the Dallas Mavericks and I'd be, I'd call colleges about draft prospects. We had a guy and I forget his name, excuse me for that. But he was up in the Northeast and Maine or Massachusetts or something. And I talked to them up there. He ran the 400 hurdles in high school. He played college. I mean, he played soccer. He, and he was a star basketball player. We were looking at it for the draft. I went to the front office, said, get this guy if he's available. Cause I know he can run period. And sure enough, I was right. We didn't get him. Cause everybody else knew what we knew. And man, he was a stud. So that crossing over it can be extremely beneficial.
Aaron King (13:06):
The NBA's got to have some of the best athletes in the world. Those guys are freaks. I mean, if I could be an athlete, I think I would love to say I'm an NBA basketball player just because you're going against probably the best athletes in the world.
Coach Bob King (13:21):
I've seen him in the offseason and they come in and they do whatever they want. I mean, we had two, our two starting guards play were tennis fanatics. I mean, they, they would go and play competitive tennis, not just hit around in the backyard, but they could, they could do anything.
Aaron King (13:35):
All right. That's all the time we have today. I, you know, we're going to talk more and more about the S speed for the sport. If you have questions, as I mentioned, put them in the comments below. Now, this is obviously if you're on our YouTube channel, hit us up on Twitter. I'm @DeepSnap. Coach Bob King is @CoachBobKing. Any questions you have, we'll answer them. I think next time, a good topic because you kind of touched on it about fighting. Cause we have a lot of fighters, UFC fighters movie tie, just a lot of different fighters that are doing our training around the world. And you know, especially with mixed martial arts coming up, there's a lot of application that you can get. Absolutely. And don't get me wrong. I mean, there's no replacement for that type of training that they do cause that's a whole nother world, but you can benefit from just speed and agility training, you know, footwork. And then that endurance that you can do with the longer stuff like we talked about. So I think that's all we got for today. If you got anything, hit us up below, look forward to talking next time.
