We named the business Acceleration for a reason. Watch any game of rugby union, NRL, football or AFL closely and you will notice something: the vast majority of winter sport athletes almost never get to their maximum velocity. The field is too congested, the ball moves too quickly, and the space closes before anyone has time to hit top gear. What separates the better players is not their top-end speed at all — it is how quickly they accelerate out of the first few steps, and how well they change direction and get going again.

The research backs this up. Reviews of team-sport match data show that players spend most of their high-intensity efforts in short, sharp accelerations rather than long runs at full pace, and rarely reach the speeds they record in testing.^1,2 In other words, if you want to help a winter sport athlete play better, the smartest place to invest their training time is acceleration – not top speed.

Why We Test the 20-Metre Sprint

This is exactly why the 20-metre sprint is our most common test at Acceleration. Most sprints in a winter season sport are over well inside 20 metres, so measuring how fast an athlete covers that distance tells us far more about their game than a longer distance. The sports-science literature agrees; because maximal velocity is rarely achieved in team sports, speed testing should concentrate on acceleration over the initial 20 metres, and when it is set up consistently the 20-metre sprint is a reliable, repeatable measure of real change.²

Improving speed has been our most popular goal for clients of every age since we opened our doors in the year 2000. And there is a predictable rhythm to it. Our busiest time of the year is immediately after the winter season finishes. This is when players and parents realise that a bit more speed is exactly what they need heading into the next pre-season. The good news is that speed is trainable. Here is how we build it.

Running Form Drills — Fixing the Engine

Before we load anything up, we work on how an athlete actually runs. Running form drills target the small but important details. We work on things like ankle stiffness or how much of an athlete’s effort actually makes it into the ground. A stiff, springy ankle lets the leg behave like a well-tuned spring, storing and returning energy through the stretch-shortening cycle instead of letting it leak away. Research links this kind of lower-limb and joint stiffness to better running performance and economy.⁶ Clean up the form first, and every other method we use works better.

Wall Drills — Teaching the Acceleration Lean

Acceleration has a signature shape: a strong forward lean, with the body driving out at an angle rather than running upright. We teach this position with wall drills, where the athlete leans into a wall and grooves the body angles and the piston-like leg action that fast acceleration demands. It is no accident that the same forward-lean position shows up in the research — one of the reasons heavy sleds work so well is that they let an athlete hold that inclined, driving body position for longer and keep applying force in the right direction.³ We call it the Acceleration lean, and wall drills are where athletes learn to own it.

Sled Drills — The Best-Supported Tool We Have

Resisted sled work is one of the most thoroughly researched speed-training methods there is, and it is a mainstay of what we do. Pulling a loaded sled forces an athlete to produce more horizontally-oriented force – the exact quality that drives the acceleration phase. In one well-known study, eight weeks of very-heavy sled training meaningfully increased soccer players’ horizontal-force output and improved their sprint times.³ Systematic reviews and meta-analyses that pool many studies together reach the same conclusion: resisted sled training is an effective way to improve sprint performance, particularly in that early acceleration phase where winter sport is won and lost.^4,5 Prescribed properly, it teaches the body to push harder into the ground and cover ground more efficiently with each stride.

The Bigger Picture

Getting faster is not guesswork, and it is not about chasing a top speed that a winter sport athlete will almost never use in a game. It is about training the first few steps with the same intent the sport demands like a clean running form, a strong Acceleration lean, and the right amount of resistance to build real horizontal power. That is the approach we have refined with athletes across every winter code since 2000, and it is grounded in the science.

If your son or daughter has finished their winter season and wants to come back faster next year, now is the perfect time to start. The players who make the biggest jumps are the ones who put in the work over the off-season – one focused block at a time, on the track, field or court.

Written by,

Stewart Briggs, BHMS, M.Ed., C.S.C.S., RSCC*E

Managing Director of Acceleration Australia

References

1. Sweeting, A.J., Cormack, S.J., Morgan, S., & Aughey, R.J. (2017). When Is a Sprint a Sprint? A Review of the Analysis of Team-Sport Athlete Activity Profile. Frontiers in Physiology, 8, 432. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2017.00432

2. Simperingham, K.D., Cronin, J.B., & Ross, A. (2016). Advances in Sprint Acceleration Profiling for Field-Based Team-Sport Athletes: Utility, Reliability, Validity and Limitations. Sports Medicine, 46(11), 1619–1645. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0508-y

3. Morin, J.-B., Petrakos, G., Jiménez-Reyes, P., Brown, S.R., Samozino, P., & Cross, M.R. (2017). Very-Heavy Sled Training for Improving Horizontal-Force Output in Soccer Players. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 12(6), 840–844. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2016-0444

4. Petrakos, G., Morin, J.-B., & Egan, B. (2016). Resisted Sled Sprint Training to Improve Sprint Performance: A Systematic Review. Sports Medicine, 46(3), 381–400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-015-0422-8

5. Alcaraz, P.E., Carlos-Vivas, J., Oponjuru, B.O., & Martínez-Rodríguez, A. (2018). The Effectiveness of Resisted Sled Training (RST) for Sprint Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 48(9), 2143–2165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-018-0947-8

6. Struzik, A., Karamanidis, K., Lorimer, A., Keogh, J.W.L., & Gajewski, J. (2021). Application of Leg, Vertical, and Joint Stiffness in Running Performance: A Literature Overview. Applied Bionics and Biomechanics, 2021, 9914278. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/9914278