Every trainer should have a lot of speed training exercises that they employ with their sportsman to serve develop specific constituent of speed development. These 'go to' drills and techniques are invaluable for one sincere reason: they work.

Though, like with your overall speed training program, you must make sure enough that these exercises are going to achieve the goals you have for that specific practice or training session, as well as fix whatever advancement technique issue that is holding athletes back. In this article, I will go over some of my fond speed training exercises and state why I use them.

The very first drill that I instruct athletes is an arm action drill. Several athletes have many problems with their arms.There are some tell-tale signs such as swinging the arms across the body, instead of driving the elbows down and back. Another is called 'doggy paddling' where athletes allow their hands turn outward on the back swing of the arms instead of keeping the palms facing in. One of the most usual issues is breaking at the elbow where athletes let the arm angle open up past the appropriate 90-120 degree angle in back and let it close up to less than 90 degrees during front swing. I consider that addressing arm action must make before implementing further complex drills and exercises since its tough to acquire proper lower body mechanics if the upper body is not under control.

In order to gain running speed, athletes must concentrate on applying more force to the ground. It's simple physics – every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Hence, the extra power athletes can apply to the ground, the more it will give back in return. The result is increased horizontal speed, or velocity. There are two methods to make this happen. First, athletes must learn the speed drills that teach and reteach absolute running mechanics so that they put themselves in a position to apply as much force to the ground as their current force levels allow. So from a drill point of view, I suggest teaching the following speed training exercises in this arrangement:

'A' March

'A' Run

'A' Skip

Fast Leg

The second thing athletes require to do in order to better their ability to employ force to the ground is improve their strength levels by committing to the weight room. All things being equal, you can't generate faster if you don't get stronger. If you work with or are an athlete over the age of 14 and you're not actively using the weight room as a method of improving athletic performance, then you are leaving out a critical element of your overall training program. So get in the weight room, lift heavy weights, keep the reps low (1-6 reps) and get complete recovery between sets (at least 2-3 minutes). For work in the weight room, I suggest you make the subsequent exercises the base of you program:

Hang clean

Squat

Deadlift

You may think you require more than that, but if you want to increase speed, you don't want any more than that. At the very least, make around those exercises.

There are a big deal of speed training exercises that can be helpful to you as long as you're inclined to put in the effort to learn how to instruct them with complete form.