“The best way to improve the team is to improve yourself.” -John Wooden

It may sound like a sports movie cliche, but it really is true that champions are made in the offseason.

If we want to get technical, champions are made through an amalgamation of habits and lifestyle design that generally all point in the right direction — and the offseason is a major incubation period for this concept. A time when athletes don’t have the same level of noise to distract them in the form of busy scholastic load, travel schedule, and the like which creates a nurturing environment for growth.

At the same time, less load on the athlete also means that it’s time to take advantage of pulling the levers we can to see meaningful development in durability, strength, power, speed, agility, and overall preparedness.

Speede is an innovative, research-informed sports performance technology built by coaches to help ensure your high school athletes are squeezing the most they can out of the results this coming off-season.

Strength Consolidation

An increasingly popular form of programming methodology is known as limiter bridge program design. The idea here is that when you’re looking at athletes in front of you, you’re able to identify areas of need they’ll need proficiency in for their sport as well as what current gaps in development are between where they are now and where they need to be next season.

As you put emphasis on filling the biggest gaps of need while still providing some appropriate dose of the others, you can gradually progress towards turning untrained limiters to strengths and moving on down the totem pole of priorities.

A more sophisticated approach to this acknowledges that this process is holistic and constitutes multiple factors like biomechanics & movement efficiency needs, functional strength deficits to fill, speed & agility demands, as well as nutrition, sleep and lifestyle modifications.

Even within the level of physical fitness, you’re looking at a variety of factors to implement, such as body control & sensory awareness, structural repositioning corrective exercises, developing elasticity, power, relevant strength, and more.

This can be a bit overwhelming for the average high school coaching staff who may be working with a limited amount of time and resources.

Enter Speede. The idea with including Speede in your team’s off-season is that you’ll be able to check off boxes on the strength deficit side of things in a way that saves time without compromising results.

More Off-Season Gains In Less Time

What does that look like?

Well, the isokinetic mode means that athletes will be stimulated through the entire range of motion versus simply receiving maximum stimulus at one portion of this R.O.M. and using momentum on the rest.

This same feature also gives the athletes back what they put into the machine in the form of adaptable resistance or smart resistance. This means that the machine provides the same maximal level force you put into it and gives it right back to you, ensuring that athletes are fully stimulated throughout the movement pattern.

The end result is that every rep provides way more max intent demand which means way more motor unit recruitment or max intent work as Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell would say. A few reps here will make you feel like you did multiple sets of higher volume repetitions with conventional reps.

This is to say, Speede helps us drastically turn up the intensity knob while turning down the volume knob. We’ve covered how in-season, this high-intensity, low-volume approach is ideal for load management and staying healthy, but this also paves the way for more holistic approaches to athlete off-season programming. We’ll get to that in a sec.

It’s also important to understand that Speede also helps develop multiple athletic qualities coaches want to see in time for next season.

Rate of Force Production, Durability, Elasticity & Kinetic Strength

A couple key areas we would be remiss not to mention are Speede’s effect on rate of force development (R.F.D.), elasticity, and kinetic strength building.

Speede also will have other features, such as eccentric-only mode for eccentric training. This can help your athletes learn how to absorb force on the negative portion of the movement, which is vital for appropriate energy conversion. If you can’t absorb force, you can’t maximally convert force in athletic movements. This drives athlete durability and injury rehabilitation considerably, too in the current youth athlete injury epidemic era.

A forthcoming isometric mode will also support this durability and injury resilience, too.

The above isokinetic mode as well as Speede’s isometric and isotonic modes collectively help with R.F.D. and power development. The aforementioned motor unit recruitment contributes to power production and helps potentiate the nervous system as seen in French Contrast Training or Power Clusters/Post Activation Potentiation concepts.

The ability of the machine to go fast in isokinetic mode (similar to pneumatic resistance cable machines and other types of flywheel training stimuli) also helps the athlete produce force in minimal time (the name of the game for power production) as well as work on full-body elasticity in the working fascia, muscle groups, and connective tissues.

 

An Off-Season Game Changer

We hope this overview has helped provide some insights into how you can program Speede into your team’s next off-season for athletic development and durability.

The above ability to provide a tangible solution for so many athletic holes to fill so that you can focus more on the rest of athletic development makes Speede a game changer for your off-season so that your athletes can be game changers in-season.