The research over the past 20 years included a lot of studies on max velocity and vertical force demands -- which caused a lot of coaches to think:

"high-velocity running is the most important thing to increase speed."

However, one area we should have been looking at more is how an athlete reaches that velocity. This is very, very, very important for team sports because there's going to be more accelerations in a game than high-speed runs.

Our team started to look for more research on this topic and we found JB Morin, Mathieu Lacome, and Dr. Ken Clark.

After reviewing their great research and implementing it with our athletes, we focused on balancing the early acceleration with the peak capacity and having both present in a program.

We know that acceleration ability is very, very, very closely tied to force and horizontal force while velocity is velocity. Put those two together and you have power.

So an outcome for an athlete is to produce more horizontal power, which is going to come from both ends of the spectrum -- by balancing early acceleration and peak capacity, we don't isolate either one.

Now, the research that's happening is looking at the changes that can be made in an athlete's speed profile. For example, if I only did one side of the equation (work on acceleration), we would see velocity stay the same or dip. And if I only did velocity, we'd see acceleration stay the same or dip.

In the end, we combine enough of the two (acceleration and velocity) into one program intelligently and individualize the dosage for each athlete. By doing this, we know that if we give an acceleration athlete too much velocity, it might change that quality - so you want to keep a good balance between the two.

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