Blake Leth

In-Season Speed for Multi-Sport Athletes Most of your athletes are multi-sport, right? They won't get a true 16-week off-seasons. They'll have games and practices year-round. Now, speed and agility, those are crucial. But how do we tackle that when our athletes are always in season? Here’s the game plan: 1. Speed in Small Doses: Speed is key, and it's also easy to train in-season: two maximal effort sprints at 15 to 20 yards right before practice. It’s the perfect touch to keep that speed stimulus alive and make our athletes faster. Do that once or twice per week at the end of your pre-practice warm up. 2. Agility in the Game: The agility bucket is going to be mostly filled if they're playing year-round. Multi-sport athletes are constantly reading defenders, shifting position, and reacting on the fly – that’s the A+ agility training right there already taken care of. 3. Sprint Starts (Optional): You can mix up your sprints with different starting positions if you want. Try different starts like kneeling starts, lateral starts, or get-up-off-the-ground starts can keep it interesting, just make sure they're going at max effort each rep. 4. Conditioning Covered: Conditioning is another bucket that will be pre-filled for you. As long as they actually see the field and the sport requires running at all, they'll always be in pretty good shape. More conditioning isn't necessary. Your focus can stay on strength, power, and speed. 5. Low-Volume Focus: For our multi-sport stars, keep it simple. Train strength, power, and speed, but keep it low volume. These athletes are getting their agility fix on the field, so you don’t need to overcomplicate things. Quality over quantity is the name of the game.