Most speed training programs spend hours on ladders, cones, and agility drills without ever building the engine that actually drives speed. Here's what makes athletes faster, and why most of what passes for speed work doesn't.
Speed is one of the most common training requests I get from athletes and parents. They want drills, plans, equipment, anything that promises to add a half-second to a 40 time or close the gap on someone they can't catch.
The honest answer is that most speed training does not actually make athletes faster. It looks like speed training. It sounds like speed training. But the underlying drivers of how fast an athlete moves are rarely what those programs are addressing.
This is one of the most consistent frustrations I see in the youth and high school athletes who come through Output Performance: years of agility drills, cone work, and conditioning, and barely any change in their actual speed on the field or court. The reason is structural.
Speed is a function of two physical qualities: how much force an athlete can produce, and how quickly they can produce it.
When you run, every stride is a brief, violent collision with the ground. Your foot strikes, your leg compresses, and then it has to push back into the ground hard enough and fast enough to drive your body forward. The faster the athlete, the more force they put into the ground in less time. That's it. The whole thing comes down to force production and rate of force development.
Both of those qualities are trainable. Neither of them develops through agility drills.
A high school sprinter who can squat 1.5 times their bodyweight is going to be faster than a high school sprinter who can squat their own bodyweight, all else being equal. Not because of the squat itself, but because squatting at meaningful loads is one of the most direct ways to increase how much force the hips, glutes, and quads can produce. More force into the ground, more speed out of each stride. This is the part most speed training programs skip entirely. They go straight to the expression of speed without building the engine that produces it.
I want to be clear here because this is one of the biggest misconceptions in youth athletics. Agility ladders teach footwork. They train coordination patterns and quick feet in tight, repetitive spaces. They can be fine for warm-ups or skill work.
They are not speed training. The research on this is consistent. Athletes who do dedicated ladder work do not get measurably faster in their sprint times or change of direction speed compared to athletes who don't.
The reason is that ladder work happens at very low ground forces. You're tapping your feet quickly across rungs, but you're not producing the kind of force that builds the qualities a sprinter actually needs. The forces and patterns in a ladder drill don't transfer to running fast on the field, partly because the body doesn't receive a strong enough stimulus to adapt, and partly because it's the wrong stimulus to begin with. This same problem applies to most "agility drills" you see in programs that don't take strength training seriously. Cone weaves, ladder taps, mirror drills, repeat. They keep athletes busy. They don't make them faster.
The honest place to start with any speed-focused program is the weight room.
Lower body force production is the single biggest predictor of how fast someone can run. The hip hinge pattern, trained through trap bar deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, and good morning variations, builds the posterior chain that drives sprint mechanics. The squat pattern, trained through back squats, front squats, and single-leg variations, builds the quad and glute strength that powers the initial drive out of a stance and the upright phase of a sprint.
Most young athletes are dramatically undertrained in these patterns. Their bodies are skilled. Their force production capacity is not. When I assess a new athlete, the squat and hip hinge numbers usually tell me everything I need to know about why they're not faster than they want to be.
Single-leg work matters too, and it matters more for speed than most programs treat it. Sprinting is alternating single-leg work. Every stride is one leg producing force into the ground, transferring through the hip, and propelling the body forward. Athletes with a noticeably weaker side carry a built-in speed limitation. Building strength asymmetrically through split squats, step-ups, and Bulgarian split squats addresses that directly, and exposes the imbalances that almost every athlete carries without realizing it.
Plyometrics and sprint drills come after the strength foundation is in place, not before.
Plyometric training is how an athlete learns to express their newly built strength quickly. Once force production capacity is there, plyometric variations teach the nervous system to access that force fast. Box jumps, broad jumps, bounding, and depth jump variations all serve this purpose, applied progressively over time.
Actual sprint work, structured short sprints with full recovery, is non-negotiable for any athlete who wants to get faster. You can't get faster at running without running fast. The mistake most team programs make is treating conditioning work as speed training. Long sets of repeated sprints with short rest develop conditioning. They do not develop maximum speed. Maximum speed work means 10 to 30 yard sprints at 100 percent effort, with two to three minutes of full recovery between reps. Most athletes never train this way in their team practices because it doesn't look hard enough. From the outside, it looks like an athlete is barely working. From the inside, they are producing the highest output their nervous system is capable of, and that requires real rest to repeat.
A serious speed development program for a youth or high school athlete usually includes two strength sessions per week focused on lower body force production, one to two short sprint sessions per week with full recovery between reps, and plyometric work either integrated into the strength sessions or built into a warm-up.
That structure, run over a six to twelve month off-season block, produces measurable improvements in 10-yard, 20-yard, and 40-yard sprint times. I've watched it happen with athletes here in the South County St. Louis area year after year. The ones who show up consistently, lift seriously, and run real sprint work get faster. The ones who chase the latest ladder drill or speed gimmick stay where they are.
For athletes who don't have access to a team strength program built this way, structured [online programming](/services/online-programming) can fill the gap, especially through the off-season when team practice volume drops and there's time to actually develop the underlying qualities.
If you're a parent watching your kid grind through team practice without gaining any real speed, the issue is almost never how much they're practicing. It's that nothing in their program is targeting the actual drivers of speed.
Speed development is straightforward in principle and demanding in practice. You build the engine in the weight room. You express it through sprint and plyometric work. You do both consistently over months and years. The athletes who get noticeably faster between freshman year and senior year are not the ones with the most natural talent. They're the ones who trained the right things long enough to see the adaptation.
If you want to learn more about how we develop speed and athletic performance here in Affton, take a look at our [team training program](/services/team-training). The kind of consistent, structured work that actually changes how fast your athlete runs starts there.
Our NSCA-CSCS certified coaches design evidence-based programs tailored to your goals. No guesswork, no gimmicks—just results.
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